Robert Louis Stevenson continued in the vein of writing adventure stories for boys when he published Kidnapped, first as a serial in a boy’s magazine. However, adults had taken notice of his accomplished style in earlier novels, such as Treasure Island (1883), which seemed to elevate his work beyond children’s literature. In Kidnapped, Stevenson supplies a psychological study of his protagonist and adds realistic detail appreciated by discriminating readers of his own and later eras. In addition, he approached the subject matter of the Jacobite rebellion undertaken by partisans of the Stuart claimant to the British throne with the enthusiasm that only Scottish writers, beginning with Sir Walter Scott, seemed singularly to supply. The resultant enthusiastic tone caught and held his readers’ attention, and they hardly noticed they were reading historical fiction.
Stevenson’s main character, David Balfour, is orphaned by his father’s death and forced to approach his irascible Uncle Ebenezer for help, unaware that Ebenezer had swindled him out of his rightful inheritance. When a plot to murder David fails, Ebenezer hires kidnappers, reflecting the novel’s title, to smuggle David aboard the brig Covenant bound for America. On the way to the Carolinas, the crewmen rescue Alan Breck from his damaged boat. David learns that Alan is a Jacobite rebel who longs to return to Scotland. While David is a fictional creation, Alan Breck Stewart was a supporter of the Stuart monarchy, an admirer of “the Pretender,” Prince Charles (Bonnie Prince Charlie).
Their own ship wrecks, and the young men strike out together on the coast of Mull in Scotland. Unintentional witnesses to the murder of the king’s favorite and a man Alan hates, Colin Campbell, known as the Red Fox, the young men become suspects and must flee, climbing into the hills. In the Highlands, they find escape and eventually unmask Uncle Ebenezer’s fraud, allowing David to regain his fortune. Stevenson provides a typical quest tale, complete with a sea voyage, loss on the part of the hero, monsters in human form, a guide, and a victorious return home.
Stevenson later wrote a sequel titled Catriona (1893), in which David falls in love with the title character and finds himself again embroiled in false accusation for the murder of Campbell, this time against a man named James Stewart. While both novels proved popular, Kidnapped endures into the 21st century and has been converted into various movie and television versions. It translates beautifully to film, primarily due to Stevenson’s talent in detailing the terrain through which his characters pass, so that it helps to determine the real characters’ actions. He accomplishes that not with painstaking descriptions but with acute, well-placed details. Such details give the Stevenson novel a physicality of setting that not only frames but echoes the physically exacting journeys followed by his protagonists.
That Stevenson’s popularity has barely diminished is evident not only in the continued publication of his body of work, including Kidnapped, but also in the continued reaction to his novel. As an example, a group that calls itself “The Stevenson Way” today seeks to establish a special walk across Scotland that would follow the apparent path taken by David and Alan. Its representatives have traced the Covenant’s wreck to rocks near Erraid Island, which sits off the western edge of Mull. The direction of the walk would be west to east, determined by Stevenson’s description, which happily, as the group’s website notes, “places your back to the prevailing weather.” If walkers begin at the more inhabitable point of Iona, an isle close to the tidal Erraid Island, the walk should stretch some 230 miles, its endpoint still undecided.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Livesey, Margot. Introduction to Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Modern Library, 2001. xiii–xxvi.
“The Stevenson Way.” Undiscovered Scotland. Available online. URL: http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/. Downloaded on September 1, 2024.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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