nearly
complete epistolary autobiography. It contained not less than a hundred
and fifty of Stevenson's letters hitherto unpublished. They dated from
all periods of his life, those written in the brilliant and troubled
days of his youth predominating, and giving a picture, perhaps unique in
its kind, of a character and talent in the making. The present edition
is a reprint of the edition of 1911, with a few errors of transcription
and one or two of date corrected, and with a very few new letters added.

Much, of course, remains and ought to remain unprinted. Some of the
outpourings of the early time are too sacred and intimate for publicity.
Many of the letters of his maturer years are dry business letters of no
general interest: many others are mere scraps tossed in jest to his
familiars and full of catchwords and code-words current in their talk
but meaningless to outsiders. Above all, many have to be omitted because
they deal with the intimate affairs of private persons. Stevenson has
been sometimes called an egoist, as though he had been one in the
practical sense as well as in the sense of taking a lively interest in
his own moods and doings. Nothing can be more untrue. The letters
printed in these volumes are indeed for the most part about himself: but
it was of himself that his correspondents of all things most cared to
hear. If the letters concerned with the private affairs of other people
could be printed, as of course they cannot, the balance would come more
than even. We should see him throwing himself with sympathetic ardour
and without thought of self into the cares and interests of his
correspondents, and should learn to recognise him as having been truly
the helper in many a relation where he might naturally have been taken
for the person helped.

As to the form in which the Letters are now presented, they fill three
volumes instead of the four of the 1911 edition, the division into
fourteen sections according to date being retained. As to the text, it
is faithful to the original except in so far as I have freely used the
editorial privilege of omission when I thought it desirable, and as I
have not felt myself bound to reproduce slips and oddities, however
characteristic, of spelling. In formal matters like the use of
quote-marks, italics, and so forth, I have adopted a more uniform
practice than his, which was very casual and variable.

To some readers, perhaps--(from this point I again resume my
In