Disjecta Membra: Collaboration and the Body of the Text in The Wrong Box and The Master of Ballantrae

Abstract

Stevenson’s most extensive and lengthy literary collaboration was with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne. Stevenson wrote the comic novel The Wrong Box with Osbourne in 1889. The Wrong Box is the only work for which we have extensive manuscript material showing the creative process that the partners used. While Stevenson and Osbourne were at work together on the The Wrong Box, Stevenson was simultaneously working alone on the much better received The Master of Ballantrae (1889). Thematically similar to The Wrong Box but tonally opposite, The Master of Ballantrae revisits the questions of family and morality posed by The Wrong Box and demonstrates the extent to which Stevenson’s collaborations, and his thoughts about those collaborations, inform even work purportedly not collaborative.