“We are about ten minutes’ walk distant from the village and beautifully situated upon the river upon which we look down.” That is how Margaret Stevenson started describing her new surroundings from Baker’s, in Saranac Lake, to her sister Jane Balfour in Scotland.
The renowned pioneer Baker family, of Baker Mountain fame, had just rented most of their house, on very short notice, to the traveling Stevensons, who could show up unexpectedly, anytime, anywhere, and this time it was Saranac Lake for the winter of 1887-88. Their leader, Robert Louis Stevenson, the newly famous author of “Treasure Island” and the “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde,” was chronically ill and had been persuaded by a New York City doctor to go to the Adirondacks instead of Colorado to seek relief for his presumed case of tuberculosis. Less than a week later, they were here looking for a place to stay when they happened to meet Andrew Baker on Main Street, and the rest is history.
So altogether, the Bakers had five new tenants paying them rent — $50 monthly — to live in their home and use their furniture, too. Until spring, the Baker family, five in all, were just a few feet away in a separate wing of the house but “entirely shut off by double doors. Into our part you enter by the kitchen,” said Margaret, or “Maggie,” the author’s mother. Maggie was a new member of the Stevenson expedition, which had spent the last seven years migrating around Europe between health spas. She was a widow now, and this whole journey to the New World was just a reflex to the recent death of her husband Thomas Stevenson in May 1887. “Thomas Stevenson — Civil Engineer” is an essay RLS completed shortly before sailing for America with his wife Fanny, her son Lloyd Osbourne, their traveling Swiss servant Valentine Roch and now Margaret, who soon discovered that traveling with her celebrity son would be something new, like she wrote to Jane: “To be interviewed from morning to night as the mother of Robert Louis Stevenson is no joke, I assure you, however great an honour it may be!”
By Oct. 3, all had arrived safely at their new mountain home in Saranac Lake just when the annual bright colors of autumn were at their peak. Margaret had a preview on the way north, coming up the Hudson by riverboat, telling her sister that “The river scenery constantly reminded me of Scotland, but of course the autumn foliage is something wholly new to us both. Louis and I had always longed to see it and at last we are fully satisfied.” Two days later from Baker’s, Maggie is at it again: “The chief glory just now lies in the autumn colourings, which Louis declared are exactly like the Skelts’ theatre scenes, the ‘two pence coloured’ ones that we used to think so impossible!”
What are Skelts’ theater scenes? Nineteenth-century child’s play, that’s what they are. Said Graham Balfour in his book, a “Life of Robert Louis Stevenson,” “He had never made any affectation of abandoning a pursuit he was supposed to have outgrown. He clung to the colouring of prints and childish paintings long after most boys of his age have given up the diversions of the nursery.” When Louis was 6, he started hanging out with 9-year-old cousin Bob, a time when toy theaters were popular throughout Queen Victoria’s realm. A toy theater is a tabletop version of a real theater without the seats, just the stage. You could perform any play you wanted to with scripts, characters and scenery bought at certain shops. If you bought the pieces uncolored or “plain,” it was cheaper than the factory-made color versions that were “two-pence.” Louis and Bob liked to color their own pieces, and Skelts’ plays were their favorite brand name, hence Skelts’ theater scenes. Characters were cutouts attached to wands, by which they are moved around the stage according to their behavior in the script, which is spoken by the players, each with his particular character role.
Louis and cousin Bob had mastered the art of toy theater as boys. As a married man, age 30, in 1881, RLS was doing it again in Switzerland, after his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, age 11, had come into possession of a toy theater — “a superb affair costing upwards of 20 pounds that had been given me on the death of the poor lad who had whiled away his dying hours with it at the Belvedere,” a hotel in the health resort town of Davos. Lloyd continues: “He painted scenery for my toy theatre and helped me to give performances and slide the actors in and out of their tin stands, as well as imitating galloping horses, or screaming screams for the heroine in distress. My mother, usually the sole audience, would laugh till she had to be patted on the back, while I held up the play with much impatience for her recovery.”
Robert Louis Stevenson held onto his fascination with toy theater. When he went to London, he discovered the shops of Webb and Pollock, who made and pedaled the goods, and became a regular at B. Pollock’s Juvenile Theatrical Print Publishers, 73 Haxton St. RLS befriended the proprietor, Ben Pollock, with whom he talked toy theaters by the hour. Ben Pollock got to live a lot longer than his skinny customer Louis, of whom Pollock said, “His hands were so thin you could almost see through them.” By 1924, Ben was a member of the Stevenson Society of America in Saranac Lake and wrote them a letter along with other items from his shop. He said, “His visits to my shop seemed interesting to him as he had a good look around at all the plays etc. which I keep in boxes.”
Stevenson wasn’t Pollock’s only interesting customer. G.K. Chesterton’s passion for the hobby rivalled Stevenson’s. Chesterton saw the toy theater as a microcosm of the cosmos, where everything can be examined under the spotlight of a miniature stage, where good and evil are starkly contrasted in bright colors and dramatic scripts. Winston Churchill was a big fan of the little stage, too. He bought his stuff at H.J. Webb, an offshoot of Pollock’s. One of Winston’s favorite plays was “The Miller and His Men,” and in the final scene, Grindoff is cornered by Count Fribourg and his soldiers. Fribourg tells him to surrender. “Surrender?” says Grindoff. “Never! I have sworn never to descend from this spot alive!” Winston Churchill would say, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and the streets, we shall fight in the hills — we shall never surrender!”
Toy theaters are still around. Thanks to Gary LeFebvre of Onchiota, an example is on display in Maggie’s old room at Baker’s, also known as the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Cottage. Mr. LeFebvre was intrigued by a kit he saw on the market, a “penny plain” kit. He bought it, colored it and built it before he came across Stevenson’s essay on the subject, called “A Penny Plain and Two Pence Coloured.” So when Gary was done playing with his theater, he suggested giving it a home in the Stevenson Cottage. So far, there have been no objections.
From September 3, 2020 edition of the...
