A Moment’s Reprieve: Reading Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Left to Themselves Geographically

Abstract

Earlier treatments of Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Left to Themselves (1891) have performed the crucial tasks of arguing for its importance in literary history as well as examining some of its formal innovations. This article advances scholarship by attending to its treatment of places. In the novel, the young protagonists Philip Touchtone and Gerald Saxton embark on an eventful journey from New York to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Along the way, they encounter all sorts of perils from attempted kidnapping to actual shipwrecks. Philip’s and Gerald’s perceptions, and their engagements with space, we suggest, inform our understandings of them and of Stevenson’s social commentary. By analysing his project geographically, and with particular attention to a central episode that takes place in the fictional Chantico Island, this essay reveals how Stevenson turns to places to expose, to unsettle, and ultimately to (re)imagine social realities.