Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson
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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_10d7bf83-eb63-57a7-8397-9649d342bef7">11. Bella Bathurst, The Lighthouse Stevensons, (London, Harper Perennial, 1999) p.xiii.
12. Harman, p.62.
13. Mehew.
14. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on Romance’ in Jeremy Treglown (ed.), The Lantern Bearers And Other Essays (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988) p.174.
15. RLS writing to T. Watts-Dunton (September 1886) in response to his review of Kidnapped in the Athenaeum, in Mehew, p.246.
16. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.53.
17. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.63.
18. W. W. Robson, ‘On Kidnapped’, in Jenni Calder (ed.), Stevenson and Victorian Scotland (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1981), p.106.
19. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.62.
20. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.87.
21. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.90.
22. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.118.
23. Harman, Kidnapped, p.49.
24. Harman, Kidnapped, p.67.
25. Harman, Kidnapped, p.223.
26. Harman, Kidnapped, p.63.
27. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.137.
28. David Daiches, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Revaluation (Glasgow, William Maclellan, 1947), p.59.
29. Daiches, p.62.
30. Treglown, p.88.
31. Harman, p.243.
32. Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses, (London, Everyman’s Library, 1992), p.38.
33. Mehew, p.349.
34. Ernest Mehew (Ed) Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Yale University Press (1997) p.582.
35. Ernest Mehew (Ed) Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Yale University Press (1997) p.609.
36. Ibid.2.
37. Robert Louis Stevenson, Master of Ballantrae and Weir of Herminston, Everyman’s Library (1992) p.303.
I
Why Kidnapped? In the first decade of the twenty-first century when the displacement of Gutenberg’s culture by that of the flashing pixel seems assured, why produce a new edition of one of the most familiar novels in English? The simple answer is that a book remains our most compact cultural artefact, portable like a mobile phone, and (in the form of a master novel) reflective of a period’s social and intellectual history Kidnapped is a ready transport to a distant past, joining the reader with a sixteen-year-old ‘boy’ who, in the aftermath of a small war, finds himself wandering the remote islands and highlands of Scotland with a renegade soldier. This may sound like the stuff of romance, but in truth it has the potency of myth. There is no other explanation for the lasting appeal of a book that has been translated into a host of world languages. Like its author, who continues to fascinate biographers, Kidnapped quickens the imagination of contemporary readers: they are none of them bored, and many read the book with avidity. It may be simple enough to say this, but the point should not be underestimated. Virtually every college reader in this age of the speeding image needs to be coaxed, at times even coerced, into paying attention to static images. That a late-nineteenth-century text, of a story set almost 150 years earlier, could entice a reader raised on television and film is no small achievement. Although Stevenson obviously could not foresee his late-twentieth-century readers, his imagination was modern enough to accommodate them. The economy and rapidity of his action, the vividness and limpidity of expression, and the entire story sustained by suspense—all these qualities are precisely suited to a contemporary reader’s visual experience. This is not to say that Stevenson was a screenwriter ahead of his time (although the cinematic qualities of his fiction have always been exploited) but that he intuitively understood what readers required—he once remarked that an author must be willing to spend five hours to save a reader five minutes—and what, a century after his death, they came to demand. For if sober critics droned on about the complexity and density and greatness of the Victorian triple-decker, Stevenson instinctively knew that fundamentally those tomes were beyond reason: “To be clear and to be expressive and always to be brief—those were his primary aims.”1
If Stevenson was writing at the dawn of the new style, of the break with Victorian decoration and ornament, he was himself the originator of that style. It was a style that modeled itself on the best of English prose, past and present, from the well known (“Shakespeare and Thomas Browne, and Jeremy Taylor and Dryden’s prose, and Samuel Johnson”) to the esoteric (“it is very well worth while to read Napier. His ‘History of the Peninsular War’ seems to me a fine solid piece of work”), and it was itself the model for the new style in English prose.2 Stevenson’s writing was everywhere admired and often adulated. From George Meredith to Viola Paget to Henry James, from Andrew Lang to Marcel Schwob to Natsume Sōseki (“Among the writings of the West, I like Stevenson’s style the best. It has strength and conciseness, and it is never tedious or effeminate”),3 from autograph hunters to book collectors, writers and readers all saw Stevenson as someone who was leading English prose, and basically English fiction, into new territory. Kipling learned to write short stories from him. Jack London thought he and Kipling were the dominant models