Globetrotting (literally): The Donkey Diaries
The author of Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde muses on the benefits of travel -- and on the importance of a trusty sidekick for the journey
R.L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879)
From the dedication to Stevenson’s friend, ‘My Dear Sidney Colvin’.
The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.
[…]
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?
About the Author
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was a Scottish writer best known for works such as Treasure Island (1882), Kidnapped (1886), and that classic of Gothic literature, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). During his time at Edinburgh University, where he studied first engineering and then law, Stevenson’s eccentric behaviour and appearance gained him the nickname ‘Velvet Jacket’.
As an adult, Stevenson travelled extensively – for his health, and for love, and just ‘to go…for travel’s sake’, as he so memorably puts it here. He especially loved the sea, where his health and spirits rallied. He eventually settled with his family on Samoa and became immersed in the local culture and deeply involved anti-colonialist activism. He wrote about his experiences there in South Sea Letters (appearing in magazines in 1891 and in book form, as In the South Seas, posthumously in 1896).
What we love about these excerpts…
Our guest curator for this week writes: ‘I read this after reading Tim Moore’s very funny, modern travelogue, Spanish Steps: Travels with my Donkey (2004), which takes its inspiration from Stevenson’s work, written 125 years earlier.
I love these extracts from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes – while his treatment of his long-suffering donkey often don’t sit too well with modern readers, I think his description of travel makes you want to grab a backpack and go!’
You can read the full text of this work here.
To Read Alongside…
In Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605), the would-be knight’s faithful and clever squire, Sancho Panza, rides a donkey (not given a name in the original, but often called ‘Dapple’ in English translations).
DH Lawrence’s poem ‘The Ass’ pays tribute to the often underestimated beast of burden, with:
His big, furry head.
His big, regretful eyes,
His diminished, drooping hindquarters,
His small toes.
(Fun fact: donkeys and asses are the same, but a mule is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse.)
The film EO (2022) centres on a donkey and his struggles, showing the world through his eyes.
And last but not least, there’s…Eeyore.
Curator’s Corner
Emma Serle completed her undergraduate degree in English at the University of Oxford in 2023. She is doing her teacher training at the University of Cambridge, and now reads a lot of children’s literature!
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