Robert W. Service

British poet and novelist

• Born: January 16, 1874
• Birthplace: Preston, Lancashire, England
• Died: September 11, 1958
• Place of death: Lancieux, France

Service was a popular poet who was best known for his early works depicting the stories of the late nineteenth century Yukon gold rush of the Canadian north. He also had numerous collections of verse, six novels, and two volumes of autobiography in a career spanning more than fifty years.

Early Life

Robert W. Service was born in Preston, Lancashire, England. He was the oldest of ten children born to Robert Service, a Scotsman, and Emily Parker Service, who was English. In 1878 his parents, along with three younger children, moved to Glasgow, Scotland, and Service and his brother, John, were sent to live with their paternal grandfather in Kilwinning, a town in north Ayrshire, Scotland. He spent the next four years there before rejoining his family in Glasgow in 1883. He briefly attended Church Street Primary School in Glasgow and then completed his formal education at Hillhead Public School, which he attended from 1885 until 1888.

Although a mediocre and uninspired student, Service nevertheless was a voracious reader, making heavy use of both the local circulating and public libraries, where he read the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rider Haggard, and other writers of the popular adventure genre. He also read a wider range of English, American, and continental European authors in later years. In 1889, at the age of fifteen, he began an apprenticeship in a local bank, and thus embarked on a career that would serve him well.

In the spring of 1896, at twenty-two years old, Service resigned his bank position in Glasgow after completing his apprenticeship and boarded a tramp steamer bound for Canada. He had been lured by the dream of becoming a cowboy in the Canadian west. He spent the next several years traveling and working at a variety of jobs in British Columbia and the western United States before again taking a bank position this time with the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Victoria, British Columbia in 1903. After working briefly at the bank’s branch in Kamloops, British Columbia, he was transferred to the bank’s Whitehorse branch in the Yukon Territory in November of 1904. It was there that his literary career was to find both a rich subject matter and its first great success.

Life’s Work

From his youth Service had displayed skill in composing verse, and the interest he had displayed earlier in literature and reading continued, as time permitted, throughout his years of work and travel in the west. These early interests came together with his exposure to the saga of the great Yukon gold rush that had begun in 1897. Although he arrived in the Yukon several years after the peak years of the event, Whitehorse continued to reverberate with the memories and the spirit of those times.

It is likely that he wrote the first drafts of what were to become his best-known works, the poems “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” almost immediately after arriving in Whitehorse. “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” depicted a gunfight in a local saloon, and “The Cremation of Sam McGee” told the story of the strange and eerie death of a northern gold seeker from the southern U.S. state of Tennessee. Written in a style of Victorian verse reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling and embodying the tone and subject matter of Bret Harte and Jack London, Service’s poems possessed their own unique charm and flavor. Although he initially set these first two works aside while he adjusted to his work at the bank, he returned to his literary efforts during the spring and summer of 1905, producing “The Spell of the Yukon” and “The Law of the Yukon.” These, too, he set aside while pursuing other things.

In the latter part of 1906, Service sent a collection of his poems, via his father (who had now settled in Alberta), to the Methodist Book and Publishing House in Toronto. The book, Songs of a Sourdough , was published in the spring of 1907. By the end of the year the book had gone into a fifteenth printing, and British and American editions had come out as well. The American edition was published as The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses. Service’s career as a popular author had been launched.

In April of 1908, after spending the previous winter on a three-month leave in Vancouver, Service was transferred to the bank’s Dawson branch. It was while residing in Dawson, another town closely connected with the earlier gold rush, that he completed Ballads of a Cheechako (1909), a sequel to his earlier verse collection, and began work on the novel The Trail of ’98, eventually published in 1910. In November of 1909 he resigned his bank position to devote his efforts to writing full time and took up residence in a log cabin in Dawson, where he would live and work off and on until 1912. His log cabin became a Canadian historic site in 1971, although it had been preserved and maintained by the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, a Canadian women’s charitable organization, from the time he left for Europe.

In the years that followed, Service combined travel to various parts of the United States, the far reaches of the Canadian north, and Europe with literary composition, bringing out another volume of verse, Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912), and a second novel, The Pretender: A Story of the Latin Quarter (1914), loosely based on his experiences with the literary culture of New York, London, and Paris. In 1913, while living in Paris, he married Germaine Bourgoin. They had twin daughters (one of whom died in infancy). Service would maintain his primary residence in France for the rest of his life (except for a five-year period during World War II).

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Service first covered the war as a correspondent for the Toronto Star, and then, in the fall of 1915, he enlisted in the ambulance corps. The Rhymes of a Red Cross Man , published in 1916, draws upon his wartime experiences, as does Ballads of a Bohemian , published in 1921. During the early 1920s, Service spent time traveling in the South Pacific and then went to Hollywood, where the first of several films based on his works The Shooting of Dan McGrew (1924) was being filmed. He also produced a series of popular thrillers: Poisoned Paradise (1922), also made into a successful film; The Roughneck (1923), utilizing material from his visit to Tahiti; The Master of the Microbe (1926); and The House of Fear (1927). For the remainder of his writing career, he returned to verse, publishing twelve additional volumes, including The Collected Verse of Robert Service (1930) and The Complete Poems (1933). He also produced Ploughman of the Moon: An Adventure into Memory in 1945 and Harper of Heaven: A Record of Radiant Living in 1948, two works of autobiography.

Service died on September 11, 1958, in Lancieux, France, at the home that he had named Dream Haven when he had purchased it forty-five years before. One final collection, Later Collected Verse, was published posthumously in 1965.

Significance

Service’s reputation as the Canadian Kipling or the Bard of the Yukon was established by the popular verse namely his two best-remembered poems, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” which he wrote while residing in the Canadian north in the early years of the twentieth century. Although he moved to Paris and became at least tangentially a part of its literary culture, traveled widely to enlarge his experience, and wrote several modestly successful novels, he remained at heart a writer of popular verse. While by no means one of the major literary figures of his age, he was nonetheless greatly beloved by a generation of primarily male readers who found in his verse something of the same masculine romance found in the works of such other popular writers of the period as Jack London and Zane Grey. A collection of Service's work, entitled Special Service, was published in 2009.

Bibliography

Klink, Carl F. Robert Service: A Biography. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1976. Provides a short, easy-to-read overview of the author’s life and career. Relies heavily on Service’s own autobiographical works, however, which, according to James Mackay, are not always fully dependable.

Lockhart, G. W. On the Trail of Robert Service. Rev. ed. Edinburgh, Scotland: Luath Press, 1999. A brief, rather superficial biography. On a positive note, contains numerous passages drawn from Service’s verse and autobiographical writings.

Mackay, James. Vagabond of Verse: Robert Service A Biography. North Pomfret, Vt.: Mainstream, 1995. A biography of Service that attempts to correct the lapses in memory and the inaccuracies found in the author’s autobiographical works.

Mallory, Enid. Robert Service: Under the Spell of the Yukon. Victoria, B.C.: Heritage House, 2006. An updated biography that examines how the human and natural environments of the Yukon inspired Service’s literary work. Includes maps.

Newman, Neville F. “Service’s ’The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ and ’The Cremation of Sam McGee.’” Explicator 62, no. 2 (Winter, 2004): 100-103. A scholarly comparison of the narrative techniques used in Service’s two best-known poems.

Service, Robert. Songs of a Sourdough: Originally Published in 1907. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2009.

Service, Robert. Special Service: The Best Poems of Robert W. Service. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2009.

Service, Robert. The Best of Robert Service. New York: Penguin, 1989.