Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson
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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_1376afa9-c1b4-5014-a8ed-7cf89a4a8bb3">29 This it does admirably. David and Alan are the main suspects for the murder and know that to be caught in Campbell country is to face certain hanging. They have no choice but to go on the run, pursued by Campbells and redcoats, short of food and money, the price on their heads making them wary of even their allies. But it is their chief persecutor, the Scottish weather, that brings young David to the point of exhaustion and ultimately threatens their survival.
Stevenson had a direct grudge against the climate of his homeland; particularly in the city of his birth, Edinburgh, which,
… pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with snow as it comes flying southward from the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and downright meteorological purgatory in the spring. The delicate die early and I, as a survivor, among the bleak winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate.30
This meteorological purgatory was to force the adult Stevenson further and further south until he became a virtual exile from Scotland. He was exceedingly ill between 1884 and 1887, spending much of the time confined to bed, living “like a weevil in a biscuit” but continuing to write even when “bound and gagged” by illness.
Forbidden to speak, with his right arm bound close to his body because of lung haemorrhaging, he was being kept in a darkened room on account of an attack of ophthalmia … In this tormenting time he asked for paper to be pinned to a board.31
It was a remarkably productive period, yielding Treasure Island, Jekyll and Hyde, A Child’s Garden of Verses and Kidnapped. Perhaps the long confinements reminded Stevenson of his childhood, when it seemed he was more in than out of bed, for in his poem “The Land of Counterpane”, he evokes the site of childhood illness.
I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.32
Stevenson was still a giant moving his characters around his invented world, countering the pain of illness with the play of his imagination. The contrast between the activity of Alan and David careering through the Highlands with a price on their heads and the regularly enforced imprisonment of their author is poignant. It also helps to explain the abrupt ending of the novel, only resolved years later with the publication of a sequel, Catriona. Stevenson himself was frank about the book’s unsatisfactory conclusion.
Kidnapped was all written at Bournemouth inside of a year: probably five months actual writing, and one of these months entirely over the last chapters, which had to be put together without interest or inspiration, almost word for word, for I was entirely worked out: Kidnapped you might like to know, appears to me infinitely my best, and indeed my only good, story.33
We may not agree that Kidnapped is Stevenson’s “only good story”, but it is a masterpiece, not simply of Scottish, but of world literature, combining complexities of characterisation with a highly developed style and a plot that makes it a page-turner.
Other “Scottish books” followed Kidnapped, notably The Master of Ballantrae in 1889 and Catriona in 1893. Indeed it sometimes seems that Stevenson’s thoughts turned more to home the longer that he was away. His dedication to Fanny Stevenson in the Edinburgh Edition of his works began,
I see rain falling and the rainbow drawn
On Lammermuir; hearkening, I hear again
In my precipitous city beaten bells.
Winnow the keen sea wind; and looking back
Upon so much already endured and done
From then to now – reverent, I bow the head34
On 4 December 1894 Stevenson’s stepdaughter, Belle Strong, wrote in her journal of the previous day,
He had been very well for a long time, and every morning I hurried through my household work to write for him in Hermiston … we worked steadily till nearly twelve, and then he walked up and down the room talking to me of his work, of future chapters, of bits of his past life that bore on what he had been writing – as only he could talk.35
Stevenson died from a cerebal haemorrhage later that afternoon, struck down not in his sickbed, but in the middle of what had appeared for once to be robust health. He was helping Fanny to prepare a salad, “dropping the oil for her with a perfectly steady hand”36 when he suddenly asked, “Do I look strange?” and collapsed. These were to be the strangely apposite last words of the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He died later that day, his unfinished novel, Weir of Hermiston, abandoned on his desk, stopped mid-sentence, “It seemed unprovoked, a wilful convulsion of brute nature …”37
The final photograph taken of Robert Louis Stevenson shows the author lying in state in the hall in Valima. Stevenson was buried as he had wished on top of MountVaea. He had died far from Edinburgh in a country that he had made his home, but Scotland, the land of his birth, had continued to inspire him to the end.
Robert Louis Stevenson on the Equator. Reproduced by permission of the Writers’ Museum, Edinburgh.
1. R. H. Hutton, an unsigned review in the Spectator , 24 July 1886, reproduced in Paul Maixner, Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage , (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p.237.
2. Claire Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, (London, Harper Collins, 2005) p.316.
3. Ernest Mehew (ed.), Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997) p.305.
4. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, ed. Barry Menikoff, (New York, Random House Inc., 2001) p.11.
5. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.18.
6. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.18.
7. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.20.
8. Henry James, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson 1887’, in The House of Fiction, (Connecticut, Greenwood Press Publishers, 1976) p.114.
9. James, p. 136.
10. Stevenson,