Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Father Damien: an open letter to the Reverend Doctor Hyde of Honolulu …, 1890

Father Damien: an open letter to the Reverend Doctor Hyde of Honolulu …, 1890

DSM/C 456
Publication: Sydney

During his stay of five months in the then Kingdom of Hawaii from late January until late June 1889, Stevenson visited the Hawaiian Board of Health Leper Settlement at Kalawao on the island of Molokai six weeks after the death there of Father Damien. Father Damien’s courageous life had been celebrated, even in the Australian secular press, in his lifetime. When Stevenson read Hyde’s comments in a denominational paper in Sydney in February 1890 he apparently leapt to his feet in anger. He declared that he must reply at once – must smash the traducer of a dead man for whom he had conceived an ardent admiration. Stevenson printed the book in March 1890 at this own expense with no publisher being identified as Stevenson feared legal action for libel. The printing was done under WM Maclardy at the Ben Franklin Printing Office.

Footnotes

Roger G Swearingen, 'Robert Louis Stevenson in Australia: Treasures in the State Library of New South Wales', 2013


Father Damien is the only work by Stevenson that was entirely written in Australia – except for some interviews and talks in March 1893.

Stevenson stayed on Molokai for eight days and recorded his experiences in a diary.

Rev Hyde dismissed Robert Louis Stevenson as ‘a bohemian crank, a negligible person whose opinion is of no value to anyone’.

Stevenson first offered Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Rev Dr Hyde to the Sydney Morning Herald. The newspaper refused to publish on legal advice. In response, the pamphlet was then printed for private circulation only.

Stevenson and his wife Fanny arrived for their first visit to Sydney on the morning of 13 February 1890. They had just completed a pleasant 10-day voyage from Samoa aboard the Norddeutscher Lloyd steamer Lübeck on its regular run to and from Sydney, Tonga and Samoa.

In 1999 Paul Cox directed the film Molokai: the Story of Father Damien with David Wenham in the leading role.

Stevenson’s Father Damien was soon published in British and American papers and raised the priest’s profile internationally. 

Rev Hyde’s comments to Rev Gage included his opinion that Fr Damien was ‘no saintly philanthropist’; rather he was ‘a coarse, dirty, headstrong bigot … not a pure man in his relations with women’, whose leprosy was ‘due to his vices and carelessness’.

Father Damien was canonized on 11 October 2009 by Pope Benedict XVI. His feast Day is celebrated on 10 May, although in Hawaii it is celebrated on the day of his death – 15 April.

Father Damien was first published in Hawaii in the newspaper Nupepe Elele on 10 May 1890.

When asked what he was working on by an acquaintance in Sydney in February 1890, Stevenson replied ‘Well, I propose to devote myself to writing a libel, but it will be a justified and a righteous one’. 

Father Damien was first published in Australia in The Australian Star, Sydney on 24 May 1890.

The famous defence was written in Stevenson’s room at the Union Club in Sydney – it was the work of a single morning.

Robert Louis Stevenson believed that Father Damien was a saint and predicted that one day the Church would canonize him.