When the Presbyterian minister Charles Hyde wrote privately that Father Damien, the Belgian priest who died of leprosy among the outcasts of Molokai, had been coarse, dirty and immoral, Stevenson answered him in public. Writing from Sydney in February 1890, after his own visit to Kalawao and Kalaupapa, he takes Hyde’s charges one by one and turns them back on his comfortable accuser.
One of the most famous pieces of controversial prose in English, short enough to read in a sitting. Download the free EPUB.