It should I think retain the sharp clean smell of new sawdust.' 'The one should be the plain tale of an adventurous romantic's progress through life in the 19th century and the other should be a kind of log book, kept by the clerk of a workshop, retaining perhaps a little of the hurried character of notes made in the whistle and hum of machinery. 'The book as I see it now, should be really two books,' Ransome begins. It is scrappy, incomplete and unrevised, but the shape of the work outlined on the opening page is clearly recognisable. In the upheavals of war, and the subsequent break-up of Ransome's marriage to Ivy, the Stevenson book seems to have been quite simply forgotten, or perhaps believed lost - until last September, when it was deposited in the Ransome archive in Leeds University's Brotherton Collection.Īt almost 400 pages, it is far more substantial that anybody had imagined.
But in July 1914 Russia mobilised, and the outbreak of war led to an abrupt transformation in Ransome from would-be romancer to foreign correspondent. It must have been then that the Stevenson manuscript was placed in the bank for safe-keeping, quite possibly by Ransome's wife, Ivy. Ransome had returned to England from a stay in Russia in the winter of 1913, but in May 1914 (probably fleeing his unhappy marriage) he returned there once again with a quick commission for a guide book on St Petersburg in his pocket.
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