The Amateur Emigrant, by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Amateur Emigrant, an autobiographical account of Stevenson’s voyage from Scotland to California in 1879, is a rich and provocative work of late-Victorian travel writing and cultural criticism. It describes vividly how Stevenson mixed with ‘steerage’ passengers aboard an Atlantic steamship and experienced the indignities of a transcontinental emigrant train. The Amateur Emigrant engages critically with Victorian ideas about class, race, and gender, and makes an important contribution to the literature of emigration. Stevenson’s middle-class family and friends found the work so transgressive that it was withdrawn from publication at proof stage. It was published in bowdlerized form in 1895 and since then has rarely been available in the form in which Stevenson composed it.

• Uses the original manuscript as copy text, making available the work as Stevenson originally composed it
• Scholarly introduction situates The Amateur Emigrant in relation to important biographical, critical, historical, social, and generic contexts, and offers a summary of key critical responses
• Provides full textual apparatus including variant readings from hitherto unavailable 1880 proofs, textual essay, explanatory notes, and chronology
• Exciting new visual material including scans of the manuscript and proofs and a map of Stevenson’s journey