In the late 1870s Webb's theatrical print shop in Old Street, London, was in the habit of receiving visits from a tall, thin, tubercular Scotsman. The shop, run by father and son, was cramped, and from the lintel of the entrance hung play sheets, engraved by the proprietors, costing a penny if black and white, and twopence if coloured. The customer, Robert Louis Stevenson, appreciated both kinds. Years afterwards H. J. Webb, the son of the shop's founder, recalled one of those visits: ‘as he [Stevenson] came in he noticed some of the coloured sheets hanging in the doorway, and at once struck a theatrical attitude …He used to talk Toy Theatres by the hour with my father.’1 Another recipient of these visits was Benjamin Pollock, who maintained a similar establishment near Shoreditch. Pollock noticed how tall Stevenson's slender body appeared, since he constantly bumped his head on the ceiling when entering the premises. He noted too the contrast between his customer's consumptive appearance – ‘his hands were so thin,’ he once observed, ‘you could almost see through them’ – and the obvious relish that he displayed for the activities of highwaymen and pirates.

Stevenson's fascination with the juvenile drama went back to his childhood home at 17, Heriot Row, Edinburgh, where he received a Skelt 's model theatre for his sixth birthday. From a shop in Leith Walk he had purchased play sheets to act out in this gift with carefully cut-out and glued-together figures. At the rear of its miniature stage he had suspended backdrops, often depicting the sea. In ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’, an article which appeared in the Magazine of Art in April 1884, he left an unforgettable account of the impact of ‘this cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive and infantile art’ on an impressionable, sickly child. For Stevenson, toy theatres held a double attraction. First, they were intensely practical playthings, which the child was obliged to construct, following detailed instructions, and then to operate sometimes single-handed, turning himself into director, stage manager, lighting technician and actor in one. Secondly, their sets, like Keats's casement from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, gave onto ‘fairy lands forlorn’.