Mehew was passionately committed to accuracy (sometimes earning himself an undeserved reputation for irascibility). A striking example was his meticulous, detailed riposte to Frank McLynn’s biography of Stevenson in an article and subsequent correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement in 1993. Like Stevenson himself, Mehew had an unlimited respect and thirst for knowledge — and no patience at all with prejudice, errors or with what RLS called “Bummkopfery”, whether in the form of laboured pedantry or its flourishing modern counterpart, academic ingenuity.
Ernest James Mehew was born on September 23 1923 at Bluntisham, Huntingdon, and educated at Huntingdon Grammar School, where he first discovered a delight in Stevenson’s work. In June 1942, aged 18, he joined the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and served in Britain, France, Belgium and India.
In 1947 Mehew joined the Civil Service and worked in the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Food, and — for most of his 30-year career — the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food. He retired in 1983 at the level of Principal.
He took advantage of his hour-long Underground commute on the Bakerloo Line to and from his home in Stanmore to read not only everything that Stevenson had written but also practically everything that Stevenson had read — and everything that had been written about him, his family and his friends .
Mehew’s knowledge was, as a result, encyclopedic, and, besides frequent visits to second-hand bookshops in Charing Cross Road, he and his wife Joyce (herself a keen student of the period, and of the English author Maurice Baring) spent many a weekend searching bookshops for still more about Stevenson — notably in Peter Eaton’s sprawling establishment at Lilies near Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire, and, later, in the many bookshops at Hay-on-Wye.
Their collection of books, periodical versions, reminiscences and much else soon filled every corner of the house and attic.
From the early 1950s Mehew became recognised not only for his knowledge of Stevenson but also of the late 19th-century literary scene generally. Forming lifelong friendships in the process, he helped with Janet Adam Smith’s editions of Stevenson’s Collected Poems (1950, 1971); with the British edition of JC Furnas’s biography of Stevenson, Voyage to Windward (1952); and with Rupert Hart-Davis’s major edition of Oscar Wilde’s letters (1962).
“Mr Mehew has unearthed several dozen letters unknown to me,” Hart-Davis wrote in his introduction, “besides doing the most acute detective work on behalf of the footnotes: any of them that seem particularly ingenious, amusing or recondite can safely be attributed to him, while Mrs Joyce Mehew’s extensive knowledge of the Bible has proved invaluable.”
Mehew was a mentor, too, to a younger generation of scholars, notably the Stevenson bibliographer Roger G Swearingen, whom he first met in 1969 when Swearingen was in graduate school and with whom he maintained an active friendship and correspondence for more than 40 years.
In 1966 Mehew was asked by Yale University Press to comment on an edition of Stevenson’s letters then in preparation by Professor Bradford A Booth. Mehew submitted a commentary so lengthy, authoritative and detailed that he was invited to become assistant editor of the Yale letters — a task which became his alone when Professor Booth died in December 1968.
The eight volumes of The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, published 25 years later in 1994 and 1995, included more than 2,800 letters, almost two-thirds of them never before published. Mehew’s careful transcriptions, dating, and incisive annotations, together with his introduction and linking commentaries, not only placed the study of Stevenson on a completely new foundation of fact, but also set a standard for the scholarly editing and accessible presentation of such material that is unlikely to be surpassed.
It is a testimony to the thoroughness of Mehew’s work that, in the 15 years since the publication of the Yale Letters, fewer than a dozen new letters have come to light, none of them of any great importance, and that the physical locations of only a dozen or so other letters, then untraced, have now become known.
Mehew’s Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (1997) is an engaging and balanced selection illuminated throughout by Mehew’s introduction, annotations and linking commentary. The result, in effect, is an authoritative and highly readable short biography. Another masterpiece of compression and detail is Mehew’s entry on Stevenson in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).
Somehow Mehew also found time to respond positively and in detail in the TLS (November 13 1970) to Graham Greene’s observation that Stevenson’s comic novel written in collaboration with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, The Wrong Box (1889), had never been published correctly. This was indeed the case, and the book was a special favourite of Mehew.
He was an enthusiastic contributing member of The Wrong Box Club that dined annually in London for some years in the 1960s — and his definitive edition of The Wrong Box appeared in 1989.
In recognition of his life’s work, in July 1997 the University of Edinburgh awarded Mehew an honorary Doctorate of Letters, noting in the citation that with no academic affiliation Mehew “has achieved ... a contribution to literary studies which would be the envy of many a university-based academic, and has done so with a generosity to others and a self-effacing modesty which are the marks of a true scholar”.
In 1999 Mehew was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
For about a year Mayhew had lived with his wife in a nursing home at Edgware to provide her with support and companionship in her progressive struggle with dementia. She survives him .
Ernest Mehew, born September 23 1923, died October 24 2011
