Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson
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the reference and the translation.
4. Tinsley Pratt, “A Chapter in the Life of R. L. Stevenson”, Manchester Quarterly 25 (1906), pp. 502–03.
5. The Century Magazine, vol. 35, no. 6 (April 1888), p. 871.
6. Literary Landscapes of the British Isles: A Narrative Atlas (London: Bell & Hyman, 1979), p. 205.
7. February 1912. Silverado Museum, Saint Helena, California.
8. See the first entry in the Notes, “the Appin murder … printed trial.”
9. New York Times, 1 August 1886, p. 9.
10. Henry James, marking the famous quarrel chapter between David and Alan, noted on his page, “do psychological truth of this.”
11. In “the little Fishing Towns … such numbers of half-naked Children, but fresh coloured, strong and healthy, I think are not to be met with in the In-land Towns. Some will have their Numbers and Strength to be the Effects of Shell-fish”; [Edmund Burt], Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, 2 vols. (London: S. Birt, 1754), 1:33–34.
12. “On Groundless Fears,” Seneca and Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard M. Gum- mere (London: William Heinemann, 1925), vol. 1, p. 79.
13. The first printed letter to Young Folks called attention to the “fine leaven of humour” running all through the story-in-progress: “It is Scotch humour, keen flavoured, gripping the palate” (May 29, 1886). Christopher Morley in an introduction to Kidnapped for the Limited Editions Club, wrote that Stevenson was never given “due acclaim” for his humor, although Morley found it limited in the novel to chapters 25 and 26 (New York, 1938, p. ix).
14. Publishers’ Circular reviewed an American magazine’s list of the 150 most popular novels in America and commented on the absence from the list of Kidnapped, Prince Otto, The Master of Ballantrae, and The Wrecker: “This is likely to astonish Mr. Stevenson’s admirers in Great Britain” (30 December 1893, p. 749). Just over a year later, the New York Times quoted figures from the Westminster Gazette on the sale of Stevenson’s books in their English editions. Setting aside Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a relatively “cheap book” that easily topped the list at 80,000 copies, Treasure Island was next at 52,000, with Kidnapped a distant third at 39,000. New Arabian Nights, published in 1882, was only at 12,000. Now compare King Solomon’s Mines, published in the same year and at the same price as Treasure Island, then at 94,000 (5 January 1895).
15. George Stronach, newspaper clipping pasted in rear of The Merry Men, n.d. [December 1894], Huntington Library.
16. New York Daily Tribune, 30 December 1894, p. 16.
17. 10 June 1879. Beinecke Library, Yale University (B5501).
18. Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994–1995), 4:200.
19. “Mr. R. L. Stevenson on the Cultivation of Style,” Publishers’ Circular, 17 June 1893, p. 668.
20. Letters, 5:206.
21. All the examples in the Scottish National Dictionary (SND) support Stevenson. Edmund Burt says that all over Scotland his countrymen are “dignified with the title” which “signifies a glutton” (ca. 1730). Scott uses it pejoratively (“The Englishers … the pock-puddings ken nae better”) and Stevenson himself is cited, having compacted all his countrymen’s animosity for the English into the expression.
22. Letters, 3:188.
23. Letters, 8:38.
24. Letters, 7:70.
Stevenson was a writer whose precise attention to minute detail was recognized long before he became an international star. Yet despite the prodigious Stevenson archives in the United States and Scotland, there is surprisingly little hard evidence on how his manuscripts became printed books. We know from anecdotal remarks that he was intensely conscious of the process and extremely vigilant in demanding that the compositors and proofreaders follow his copy. A candid obituary in the Aberdeen Journal provides a telling example of his attitude:
Stevenson’s handwriting was a horror to typewriters and compositors, yet he was a most particular man about his proofs, and grew very irate and sarcastic on the subject of typographical errors. His readers must have noticed that he was most accurate and systematic in his punctuation. In spite of the fact that it was often impossible for the unhappy compositor to distinguish between a comma and a period, a capital and a small letter, on the MS., nothing annoyed the author so much as a mistake of the kind. (18 December 1894)
That so pointed an observation could be made in a remote Scottish newspaper strongly suggests that the complexities of working with Stevenson’s autographs were common knowledge to the wider Grub Street world, as indeed they were to his closer connections. E. L. Burlingame, Stevenson’s longstanding editor at Scribner’s, illustrated the writer’s combative- ness during the composing process: “I have tried in vain to find a corrected proof-sheet, for these were very characteristic. Occasionally he would put sportive addresses on the side to the proof-reader, now and then extremely caustic ones—one especially that I think the reader cut off and kept to nurse animosity upon, for I have never seen it since” (untitled address, November 13, 1900; Anson Burlingame Papers, Library of Congress).
This edition of Kidnapped is based on the autograph manuscript in the Huntington Library (HM 2410). It reproduces for the first time Stevenson’s text as he wrote it. The extant holograph, constituting chapters 1 through 27, is in places heavily revised, in others clear and fluent. Given the heavy use of the holograph during the production of the book—editorial queries in the margins that sent the pages back to Stevenson for response—the document itself is in relatively good condition. Not the pristine condition of his later holographs, to be sure, but then Kidnapped was written before every scrap from Stevenson’s hand was saved as if it were holy writ or precious metal. For me, working with the manuscript was a privilege as much as a labor. Stevenson’s