Titles are tricky things, and I sympathize with Ann C. Colley in the difficulty of titling this work. One feels that the word “missionary” should be in there somewhere, as the book frames Stevenson within missionary culture. Yet presumably the word “colonial” in an academic book title attracts more readers than the word “missionary.” “Stevenson, the Missionaries, and the Colonial Imagination” is starting to sound like a shopping list but better conveys the book's triple focus, in which nineteenth-century missionary culture is treated as an object of study in its own right, the main vector of colonialism in the Pacific, and an important and pervasive influence on Stevenson and his writing.

In analyzing this influence, Colley challenges the coherence of the anti-imperialist Stevenson championed by literary critics (myself included) over the past fifteen years. Appealing as this figure is to postcolonial minds it does not, Colley claims, tell the whole story. If we trace Stevenson's varying, ambivalent, and often self-contradictory responses to different missionaries, missionary practices, colonial agents, and imperial acts, we see that he is both critic and son of empire, as he is both critic and son of the missionary faith, and that he often found strategic value and emotional solace in ideas of which he was, on occasion, a trenchant critic. If there is an underlying belief to this book, it is that nothing is ever one thing, and neither imperialism, nor missionary culture, nor Stevenson's imaginative response to them, can be reduced to a monolithic entity. “One must not look for a system or a universal, but, instead, for the shifting tones of the particular experiences, as one voice or circumstance replaces another” (7). Colley argues that we should not impose general ideological structures on multivalent experiences and texts, but rather attend to particularity, shift, and nuance, and this approach produces a book that is a series of essays, not a sustained thesis. Colley looks at various interfaces of the missionary world with Stevenson's life and writings, giving full rein to the play of mind—Stevenson's and her own—over such subjects as “remembrance, alienation, images, language, and power” (2).

The standout chapters are, for me, “Stevenson's Pyjamas” and “Lighting Up the Darkness.” Each takes an aspect of material culture and explores its meanings for Stevenson within the complex engagements of islanders, missionaries, travelers, and colonialists in the nineteenth-century Pacific. In “Stevenson's Pyjamas,” Colley discusses the significance of various forms of “undress” in which Stevenson and his family engaged (such as wearing pajamas and walking barefoot), and which were regarded by contemporaries as evidence of “going native.” Against this, she notes the function of clothes as boundary markers, signifiers of salvation, and symbols of colonial authority, a function regularly invoked by missionaries and, often, by Stevenson himself. A third mode of engaging with clothes, “dressing up,” is perhaps the most interesting of all. Colley looks at a number of ways in which the Stevensons indulged in the play and performance of dressing up, including the tartan “livery” Stevenson designed for his household staff in Samoa, cross-cultural dressing, and dressing themselves and others for the camera. In “Lighting Up the Darkness,” which takes the camera as its explicit subject, Colley relates the photography in which the Stevenson party were so keenly involved to the magic lantern shows used by missionaries as a tool for religious education and, at the same time, to project an imperial worldview. More broadly, she compares the interplay of light and shadow in the making of photographic images to other technologies over which Stevenson's imagination played: the searchlights with which European warships raked the Samoan coast in a commanding display of the power of the imperial gaze and the “intermittent light” on which Stevenson wrote a prizewinning essay when he was pursuing the family profession of lighthouse engineer. Here, as in “Stevenson's Pyjamas,” the inclusion of photographs from the Stevenson family's collection adds considerably to the interest of the discussion. The publication of more images from the Stevenson photographic archive is extremely welcome, although many riches remain unpublished. Perhaps one day someone will complete the project Stevenson abandoned and bring out a fully illustrated In the South Seas, which allows us to experience some version of the interplay between image and text that Stevenson originally planned.

Another essay, “Colonies of Memory” is an elegant, rather elegiac meditation upon the relations among object, memory, alienation, and desire. It begins with the paradox that the missionaries, who assembled important collections of island artifacts, were both destroyers and preservers of the Pacific cultural memory. The chapter moves through a consideration of the emotional and cultural resonances of objects out of place in Stevenson's Pacific writings to a general questioning of what happens when our memories are “held in the custody of others’ desires and perceptions” (73). The essay is characteristic of Colley's method: it presents no thesis about Stevenson; the approach is unsystematic and free-ranging and, from time to time, unashamedly personal. Less successful, in my opinion, are the final two chapters. “Stevenson's Political Imagination” offers a largely narrative, biographical account of Stevenson's involvement in the complicated indigenous, colonial, and municipal politics of Apia in the early 1890s, and particularly in the Claxton libel affair, which brought him for a time into very close and uncomfortable relations with the London Missionary Society. The narrative shows how inconsistent and irascible Stevenson's “political imagination” could be but offers little analysis of his engagement with the larger intellectual and ethical problems posed by the quasi-colonialist regime in Samoa. The final chapter identifies the juvenile missionary magazines Stevenson knew from his childhood as an important context for interpreting A Child's Garden of Verses. There are some wonderful readings of individual poems from that collection, but a lack of sustained, detailed reference to particular texts in the missionary magazines, which tend to feature collectively as a single-voiced discourse. Colley argues that in his poems for children Stevenson “defies the restrictions of the missionary imagination” (now labeled a “monoculture”); “the missionary mandate” and “the missionary agenda” are presented as monolithic entities, enemies of play, dialogue, and complexity (189). These generalizations seems at odds with Colley's earlier plea for attention to the particularities of different voices, circumstances, and encounters.

Yet, at its best, this book is very good indeed and should be read by all who are interested in the wider cultural contexts of Stevenson's Pacific work. It is a pity to have to end by lamenting Ashgate's inadequate editorial practices, which allow such howlers as the punctuational nonsense on pages 16–17 and 103 to mar this important contribution to Stevenson criticism.