Mr Stevenson and Dr Hyde

What has the Sydney Morning Herald got against Robert Louis Stevenson? First it refused to publish his most famous open letter, written in Sydney when the author was incandescent with rage about a smear campaign. More than a century later, the Herald has wronged the Scot again.

The Herald’s latest slight appeared in an obituary published in January. Journalist Damien Murphy paid warm tribute to Richard Marks, a prominent Hawaiian victim of Hansen’s disease and advocate, who died late last year on the island of Molokai. In his obit Murphy recalled Molokai’s most famous son, the Belgian missionary Fr Damien de Veuster (famously depicted by David Wenham in Paul Cox’s film Molokai). According to Murphy, Fr Damien “inspired Mahatma Gandhi and annoyed the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson but the Catholic Church remained staunchly proud of its missionary and is now considering canonising him a saint”.

Annoyed Robert Louis Stevenson? What a bizarrely wrong statement. It is like saying that Mother Teresa annoyed Malcolm Muggeridge, or that Dietrich Bonhoeffer annoyed Kevin Rudd. Stevenson, as I wrote to the Herald, was Fr Damien’s most fervent defender. He risked his entire livelihood in penning a defence of Damien, whom he regarded as “one of the world’s heroes and exemplars”.

Murphy’s assertion is so palpably wrong that I was certain the Herald would be anxious to correct it when the error was pointed out, especially as the true story of Stevenson and Damien is a fascinating tale involving self-sacrifice and malicious gossip. Moreover, it’s a story based in Sydney and not widely known in Australia.

I penned my own cranky letter, in which I briefly set out the facts. Sadly, despite several approaches, the erstwhile journal of record refused to acknowledge the error or publish a correction.

This is the story the Herald failed to tell.

It all began in 1889 when the Reverend Dr Charles Hyde of Honolulu wrote to his clerical colleague in Sydney, Rev. H.B. Gage, venting his spleen about Fr Damien and his work among the lepers in Hawaii. Feeling that his own church did unrecognised good works among lepers while the Catholic missionary got all the glory, he painted an unsavoury picture of the priest, garnished with some titillating gossip. Damien was “a coarse, dirty man, headstrong and bigoted”. He “had no hand in the reforms and improvements inaugurated, which were the work of our Board of Health”. And, juiciest of all, he “was not a pure man in his relations with women, and the leprosy of which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness”.

Hyde’s comments were intended to be private, but rather indiscreetly, Gage published them in the Sydney Presbyterian. It so happened that early in 1890 Stevenson, in the midst of a long Pacific journey as he fought the ravages of tuberculosis, was having a few weeks in Sydney. Reading the comments of Dr Hyde, whom he had encountered on friendly terms in Honolulu, he exploded with rage.

Just a few months earlier, during his Pacific traverse, Stevenson spent eight days in Molokai, making extensive notes of his observations and impressions. He never met Damien, who had died a month before aged forty-nine, but jotted down many first-hand reports of the priest’s work among the lepers and was deeply moved at what he heard.

In addition to his pastoral work in Molokai over sixteen years, Damien had built houses, established vegetable gardens, piped in fresh water and had lobbied unceasingly for more government and church funds to provide medicine and clothes to alleviate the primitive conditions in the quarantined colony.

Whether Stevenson had planned to write about Damien we don’t know, but Hyde’s snide comments certainly whipped him into a frenzy. Seated at a table in the foyer of the Union Club in Bligh Street, he penned a 5500-word “open letter” to Dr Hyde. The letter pulled no punches. “If I have at all learned the trade of using words to convey truth and to arouse emotion, you have at last furnished me with a subject,” wrote Stevenson.

Dissecting Hyde’s criticisms of Damien word by word, Stevenson pounded Hyde with fact and vitriol. He compared Hyde’s luxurious Honolulu mansion with the base living conditions in the leper colony, where Damien “toiled and rotted in that pigsty of his under the cliffs of Kalawao”.

He accused Hyde of envy in defaming Damien, and of having missed the chance to do something useful himself for the lepers:

“when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a plain, uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and succours the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself afflicted in his turn, and dies upon the field of honour—the battle cannot be retrieved as your unhappy irritation has suggested.”

On the sexual allegations, Stevenson said he’d heard this allegation only once before—by a drunk in a pub in Apia, Samoa, who provoked uproar and a threatened thrashing from the locals. Stevenson fulminated: “you chose to communicate the sickening story; and the blue ribbon which adorns your portly bosom forbids me to allow you the extenuating plea that you were drunk when it was done”. The letter concluded:

“Well, the man who tried to do what Damien did, is my father, and the father of the man in the Apia bar, and the father of all who love goodness; and he was your father too, if God had given you grace to see it.”

Stevenson had the letter hand-delivered to the Sydney Morning Herald, which refused to publish it, fearing legal action from Hyde. Determined to have the letter widely read, Stevenson had it privately run off by a Sydney printery. His wife and step-daughter helped fold and post copies to such luminaries as Queen Victoria, the Pope and the president of the United States.

The letter was picked up and run in the Sydney afternoon newspaper the Australian Star, and by the Scots Observer. It caused a great stir in Hawaii, with huge print runs in English and Hawaiian. (The work is readily available on the internet—“Father Damien, an Open Letter to the Reverend Dr Hyde of Honolulu”—for example, at www.gutenberg.org.)

Stevenson expected Hyde to sue. As he said later, “When I wrote the letter I believed he would bring an action, in which case I knew I could be beggared.” As it turned out Hyde did not pursue legal action, calling Stevenson a “bohemian crank, a negligible person whose opinion is of no value to anyone”. Stevenson later regretted the extent of his vitriol against Hyde, and felt he could have defended Damien equally well without damaging the cleric.

According to the literary biographer Richard Boyle:

“The episode had a profound effect on Stevenson and his work on the South Seas. He continued to champion the oppressed even when it seemed to threaten his safety and security.”

The letter to a large extent introduced Fr Damien and the plight of the Hawaiian lepers to the wider world. Stevenson refused to profit from the work. He said of publisher Andrew Chatto, to whom he gave the right to reprint the letter free of charge, “I gave it to him as a present, explaining I could receive no emolument for a personal attack.” He was impressed when Chatto donated royalties to the Molokai leper fund.

As a postscript, some have assumed that Stevenson had his final revenge on Dr Hyde by giving his name to his most famous literary villain. It would be a nice story if true (similar to that of the father of taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, naming a noxious weed after his botanist enemy, Johann Siegesbeck). But in fact The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published several years earlier, in 1886.

John Henningham is director of Brisbane journalism college Jschool. He is a former research fellow at the East-West Center, Hawaii.