The Lighthouse Stevensons. Bella Bathurst
Читать онлайн.| Название | The Lighthouse Stevensons |
|---|---|
| Автор произведения | Bella Bathurst |
| Жанр | Биографии и Мемуары |
| Серия | |
| Издательство | Биографии и Мемуары |
| Год выпуска | 0 |
| isbn | 9780007358977 |
The Lighthouse Stevensons
The extraordinary story ofthe building of the Scottish lighthousesby the ancestors ofRobert Louis Stevenson
Bella Bathurst
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020
Copyright © Bella Bathurst 1999; 2020
Cover photograph © Northern Lighthouse Board
Bella Bathust asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Information on previously published material appears here
ll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780007204434
Ebook Edition © November 2009 ISBN: 9780007358977
Version: 2020-07-29
To my mother, and to Lucy and Flora.
There are spaces still to be filled before the map is completed – though these days it’s only in the explored territories that men write, sadly, Here live monsters.
NORMAN MCCAIG, Old Maps and New
Table of Contents
This is not – nor was it ever intended to be – a definitive biography of the Lighthouse Stevensons. When I began research in January 1996, I realised that any attempt to write a comprehensive biography of all four generations of the Stevensons would be both futile and, given the range and technicality of their work, probably quite wearing as well. And yet to write the history of just one of their lives would be to leave an incomplete picture. The Stevensons were, in the best and worst of senses, a family business and are perhaps most easily understood in that context. The solution I came to was to concentrate on the time between 1786 and 1890 when the first four Lighthouse Stevensons were working around the Scottish coastline, and to focus in detail on those four lights that were most closely associated with their respective engineers. The result of this selection is not quite biography and not quite history. If my selections at times seem arbitrary or incomplete, I can only apologise. The life and works of Robert Louis Stevenson have been the subject of innumerable biographies, studies, critiques and analyses, not to mention his own autobiographical writings. The story of his ancestors, by comparison, remains a relatively unworn path. I would hope therefore that this book would be seen as a kind of taster for the subject, and that anyone wanting to search further would be able to do so. There is more, much more, in the lives and works of the Lighthouse Stevensons than any one book could ever hope to encompass.