There have arisen, over the years, dynasties of finance, politics, racketeering, music, maquillage, fireworks, the flying trapeze, and even jiujitsu, but few family businesses have proven quite so prodigious or beneficial to the commonweal as that of the Stevenson clan, four generations of whom built, between 1790 and 1940, ninety-seven lighthouses around the fearsome Scottish coast. As their most famous scion, Robert Louis, panegyrically put it, “Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive;/ The sea bombards their founded towers.” Just how they managed to leave such a briny vertical legacy is the subject of Bella Bathurst’s absorbing chronicle.

The background to Bathurst’s story is grim: “In the 1790s an average of 550 ships were wrecked every year on British shores,” she relates. Caledonian waters were especially treacherous; so often did boats fetch up on certain Scottish rocks that entire villages grew fat from scavenging them. Something needed to be done, and into the breach stepped, not yet a Stevenson per se, but rather one Thomas Smith, first engineer of the Northern Lighthouse Trust, who took on as apprentice his stepson, Robert Stevenson. He it was who launched the family enterprise in earnest by erecting the formidable Bell Rock lighthouse, a feat that captured the public imagination and catapulted Robert into local celebrity; soon he found himself accompanied on an inspection tour by no less a personage than Sir Walter Scott.

Of the four sons begat by Robert, three (Alan, David, and Thomas) followed him into the trade. Not altogether willingly, however—each was chivvied, shamed, indeed all but dragooned by their relentless sire. Despite having been coerced into engineering, the trio flourished at it. Alan in particular eclipsed even his father’s achievement with Skerryvore, which, according to Bathurst, “has been described as the most beautiful lighthouse in the world.” David, meanwhile, reared his own luminous masterpiece—the northernmost lighthouse in Britain—on a brutal spike of reef delightfully known as Muckle Flugga, and Thomas perched his chef d’oeuvre atop the forbidding offshore rock of Dhu Heartach.

But then, in the third generation, the lineage wavered, with only two of the grandsons (David A. and Charles) consenting to carry the maritime torch. (It was borne into the fourth by D. Alan.) Among the shirkers was Thomas’s sickly son Robert Louis, who had been subjected, in his turn, to the now standard barrage of paternal threats and blandishments, and who had miserably knuckled under to three summers of apprenticeship before finally slipping the yoke in 1871. Engineering’s loss was literature’s gain. The original Robert had dreaded composition, but with Alan, a closet poetaster and correspondent of Wordsworth, an inchoate knack for writing first glimmered in the family; and with Robert Louis it blazed forth like, well, a lighthouse beacon. Possessed of his full quotient of Stevensonian stick-to-itiveness, R.L.S. cranked out one of the period’s great —and most undervalued—bodies of work.

Aficionados of that corpus will be disappointed to learn that Bathurst barely touches on it. R.L.S., admittedly, is not the subject of her book. Still, she might have made more use of him. Although Bathurst quotes liberally from Records of a Family of Engineers and nods towards Treasure Island and Kidnapped—which, she observes, “both contain salvaged traces of his early career”— she declines to embellish her yarn, as she easily might have done, with, for instance, the above-quoted verses. Also passed over are these lines from “The Light-Keeper,” written at the age of nineteen or twenty:  

The clear bell chimes: the clockworks strain,
The turning lenses flash and pass,
Frame turning within glittering frame
With frosty gleam of moving glass.

As these evocative lines testify, lighthouses pierced deep into R.L.S.’s imagination; small wonder he developed such an obsession with lamps and lanterns.

Whatever The Lighthouse Stevensons lacks in literary sidelights it more than makes up for in bravura technical narrative. The book’s centerpieces are a series of chapters describing, in thorough yet far from dull detail, the construction of Bell Rock, Skerryvore, Muckle Flugga, and Dhu Heartach, each more daunting than the last. These are labors such as would have taxed Hercules. Work proceeded under appallingly hazardous conditions: Lacerating reefs, waves cresting above an incredible two-hundred feet, and hurricane-force storms that could last for days—all counted among the routine impediments. And as if the elements weren’t enough, the Stevensons’ endeavors often were hindered by human mischief too. Not everyone viewed the lighthouses as a boon. In building their pharoi, the family disrupted a thriving parasite economy, coming awkwardly between the wreckers and their carrion. Yet another frequent menace was that of the press gangs, always eager to poach crewmen for the navy. (That the Stevensons virtually shanghaied their own children is an irony which seems not to have occurred to them.) Against these massed obstacles the family pitted their courage, cleverness, and almost maniacal assiduity; by hook and despite crooks, they founded their towers.

Bathurst is to be commended for conveying potentially arid information with engaging verve and, still more, for imparting to us a keen sense of the Stevensons’ accomplishments. Alas, the same kudos cannot be extended to her publishers. For The Lighthouse Stevensons is disgracefully riddled with more typos, and those of a greater egregiousness, than any book I have ever read, period. We’re talking sentences that begin in lower-case, “mots” for “most, “tot he” for “to the,” and so on: the kind of glitches that wouldn’t have gotten by the dimmest chimpanzee. It’s as if the Scottish surf wreaked its havoc on the text, washing letters out to sea or else into gruesome collision with each other. How sadly ironic that a book written in homage to heroic perfectionism should be so negligently treated. The inescapable conclusion is that HarperCollins simply never bothered to proofread—a grave insult to both Bathurst and her readers. Fie, HarperCollins! Whoever botched The Lighthouse Stevensons should be sent for a long winter to ponder the mickle error of his ways high up in Muckle Flugga.

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