J.B. PRIESTLEY, “the Last Great Man of English Letters” – the author of The Good Companions and Angel Pavement, and the stage play, An Inspector Calls – arrived in Edinburgh in November 1950 to attend a dinner commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Priestley, who is seen here on the left, told his fellow diners that a great thing to remember about Stevenson was that, perhaps more than any other author in the last 100 years, he had given delight. As this delight was one of the essential qualities of literature, those who read Stevenson were deeply in his debt.

As an Englishman, Priestley said he felt that after Burns and Sir Walter Scott, Stevenson was not only the greatest but also the most representative Scot in letters.

He saw the particular relation between Stevenson and his country in three aspects of his work – his style, his romance, and his sense of good and evil.

Stevenson was, above all, a romantic Scot. It had been suggested that the romance in him was merely a series of rather picturesque attitudes, but in fact no author in the last 100 years had actually led such a romantic life as Stevenson did.

He brought to that life enormous stores of natural courage and – what was often overlooked – an extremely powerful will.

There was also something profoundly Scottish in Stevenson’s sense of good and evil. “One of the differences between England and Scotland”, Priestley remarked, “is that in England the devil does not exist, whereas in Scotland he is a very familiar public figure”.

A sense of the eternal conflict between good and evil could be found not only in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the most famous fable of the dual nature of man ever written, but also in a great deal of Stevenson’s later work, he added.

Priestley died in 1984, aged 89. His Glasgow Herald obituary noted his many successes as author, playwright and social commentator.

Read more: Herald Diary