Robert Louis Stevenson: class and ‘race’ in The Amateur Emigrant

In 1879, an impoverished Stevenson travelled from Scotland to California in conditions almost identical to those of working-class and poverty-stricken emigrants. His account, The Amateur Emigrant, shocked the class sensitivities of his family and friends, and was not published in full in his lifetime. The experience had a profound effect on Stevenson’s personal sensibilities; his consciousness of his ambivalent position as a middle-class writer in the midst of his working-class contemporaries renders The Amateur Emigrant a remarkable revelation of the intermingled complexities of class, race and gender in late Victorian England.