Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson
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as the first two writers that his “lost” generation read on their own.
But if these writers are themselves now old, it is instructive to identify their positions in literary and cultural studies. With the legitimation of popular culture, Kipling and London, who immediately followed Stevenson, have suddenly become more attractive and serious. And the modern novel, which for the majority of the twentieth century was defined as the novel of James and Conrad and Joyce, of Woolf and Faulkner and Lawrence, has now been redefined, or at least expanded, to include a tributary that runs from Stevenson to Kipling to London to Hemingway and on through Graham Greene. This parallel tradition contains the elements that contemporary readers find most compelling: stories that engage their attention because they take place in the real world, are narrated fluently, and hold a great capacity for visualization as they are read. These are the stories that become the films, and indeed are themselves the films within the stories. Kidnapped is a prototype of this form.
On 29 May 1886, Young Folks Paper, the weekly that was serializing Kidnapped; or the Lad with the Silver Button, published a letter from a reader named Edwin Hope: “I have never read anything of Mr. Stevenson’s before, and his intensely powerful style strikes me with the added force of novelty. There is a vivid directness and simplicity in the style, with the true quaint flavour of the period in it, which seems to me the perfection of storytelling. It is the same merit which is so strong in the ever-fresh ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘Gulliver’s Travels’” (vol. 28, no. 809). The novel, which had been running since the start of the month, had “already won very high encomiums from a number of readers” (according to the editor in this same issue), but Edwin Hope has the distinction of offering the first printed commentary on the text. Both by the substance and tone of his letter, the writer is considerably more mature than the title of the weekly publication would lead one to expect. Indeed, judging solely by the letters and the editorial commentary in “Our Letter-Box,” the readership of James Henderson’s magazine was older than its name implied. At one point the editor addressed this issue directly: “The title of Young Folks cannot certainly be limited to children. The title was selected because it embraced a much wider circle. ‘Young folks’ can be applied with as much propriety to young men and young women as to children. … Our readers [include] all classes, ages, sizes, and sects. We have no specially privileged class” (3 July 1886, vol. 29, no. 814). Twenty years later the Manchester literary club published an appraisal of the journal that James Henderson had founded after he moved from Manchester to London: “‘Young Folks’ Paper’ was … a high-class weekly journal for family reading, and in its day it stood without rival. A very considerable portion of its space was devoted to poetry and to essays dealing with literary subjects.”4
The conviction that Kidnapped is a children’s book derives from two major sources: its initial publication in Young Folks and Stevenson’s own dedication-preface to the first edition, identifying the purpose of the novel: “to steal some young gentleman’s attention from his Ovid, carry him awhile into the Highlands and the last century, and pack him to bed with some engaging images to mingle with his dreams.” Apart from the obvious pose of the declaration, a manner that has a long tradition behind it in the field of the “romance,” any reader may wonder at the choice of Ovid as the classical author whom the young gentleman was being seduced away from. After all, Ovid presents a relatively simple Latin for reading purposes, but more importantly he represents a racy and even titillating writing, one that the young gentleman might be reading under the covers, and the thought of drawing the boy’s attention away from libidinous delights and directing it toward a realistic exploration of Scottish history can hardly be viewed as a treat, and certainly not as a favor. In brief, Stevenson is doing precisely the opposite of what he claims: rather than turning his reader away from study and enticing him into the world of pleasure, he is closing the classical pages of pleasure and opening a book with a potentially powerful instructional value.
There is no question that Stevenson’s Dedication, together with the publication of Treasure Island and A Child’s Garden of Verses, and the periodic references in his letters to the composition of a “boys’ book,” have been the principal reasons for the classification of Kidnapped as a children’s book, and this despite the fact that from the time of its publication and throughout Stevenson’s life the novel was consistently treated as an adult text. The New York Tribune addressed this issue directly in its review: “While avowedly intended for boys, [it] is as certain as any of Mr. Stevenson’s previous books to find the majority of its readers among grown-up people” (18 July 1886, p. 6). The New York Times was a bit more oblique: “‘Kidnapped’ may have a little touch of ‘Treasure Island’ in it, but for a man to have written ‘Treasure Island’ and to have then produced as dramatic a story as ‘Kidnapped’ is to have done a good deal” (1 August 1886, p. 9). Henry James jotted elliptically on a back page of the copy inscribed to him a note on the “coquetry of his pretending he writes ‘for boys’” (see illustration, page lxii). In his published essay on Stevenson, James dropped both the informality and the implication that the novelist might be dissembling: “the execution is so serious that the idea (the idea of a boy’s romantic adventures) becomes a matter of universal relations.”5
Yet for more than a century Kidnapped has been marketed and cataloged as a children’s classic, a notable example being the Scribner’s edition illustrated by N. C. Wyeth, regularly displayed in bookstores at Christmas when parents are eagerly in search of anything that will raise the cultural level of their children. With the book institutionalized as a children’s classic, it is an intractable job to alter, let alone eradicate, that perception. In other words, Kidnapped becomes the book that it has been received as, and for a substantial portion of the population, including the public that has never read it, the book is what its cultural reception reads it as. Yet there is an adult audience that occupies another space and reads the text with a more open attitude, one that displaces or discounts the years of received or ossified criticism. Perhaps Stevenson’s own readers were closer to the book’s impulses than later generations; perhaps it is important to return to that earlier period, not to recover their experience, which would be futile, but to comprehend their wonder before a wholly original form of writing.
For some the story of David Balfour is so well known that its very familiarity works against it. For those reading it for the first time it may have the excitement attendant upon the new, but at the end one must wonder at the distance between the suspense here and that manifested in a thriller by Alfred Hitchcock or Michael Powell, not to mention someone like Brian De Palma. Perhaps it is unfair to contrast a book with a film, but we read every text in the context of our whole experience, and Stevenson’s book must surely seem tame by comparison. Indeed, it would be strange if an innocent reader were not querulous about the fuss over Kidnapped when the title-word has such frightening meanings for a contemporary audience. But if the gap between the late-Victorian reader’s expectations of dramatized terror and our own seems unbridgeable, we should remember that there are still significant differences even between what Stevenson was doing and what his audience expected. For one thing, the kind of terror that Stevenson provided in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, his greatest commercial success, was viscerally distinct from that in Kidnapped. There Stevenson was working in a genre—almost a subgenre—that focused on horror, whether we call it “Gothic” or the “shilling shocker,” an early version of the “nightmare” films of today, or the horror films of Hollywood in the 1930s. Certainly Stevenson was more artistic, and certainly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is more than Hollywood kitsch, but the continuous remakes of the story suggest that the essential nature of the market was never revised or questioned: it was a film sold as a product to frighten if not terrorize its audience, whatever the intentions of the filmmakers with respect to the moral or allegorical implications of the story. That Stevenson was capable of writing stories that elicited such responses is hardly surprising, given his nurturance on tales of witchcraft and possession that his nurse, Alison Cunningham (whose name is appropriated in Kidnapped), read and told him as a child. And stories of possession and the supernatural like “Thrawn Janet” and the “Tale of Tod