Kidnapped
#19thcentury #novel #unitedkingdom
Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped. (1886, United Kingdom)
I read this book three or four times starting in sixth grade. I liked it enough to find out that there was a sequel. A young boy is cast out on his own, finding himself as he confronts the world. Bildungsroman.
Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped. (1886, United Kingdom)
I read this book three or four times starting in sixth grade. I liked it enough to find out that there was a sequel. A young boy is cast out on his own, finding himself as he confronts the world. Bildungsroman.
Place on List:
II. Literary Genre: The
Novel
1. What
is the novel?
Robert
Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped.
(1886, United Kingdom)
Supporting References:
- Birch, Dinah. "Kidnapped." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 26 Aug. 2013
“Kidnapped
and Catriona [Gaelic for Catherine and pronounced Catreena]. A novel
and its sequel by Robert
Louis *Stevenson, published 1886 and 1893. The
central incident in the story is the murder of Colin Campbell, the
‘Red Fox’ of Glenure, the king's factor on the forfeited estate
of Ardshiel: this is a historical event. Young David Balfour,
impoverished on the death of his father, goes for assistance to his
uncle Ebenezer, a miserly villain who has illegally taken control of
the Balfour estate. Having failed to murder David, Ebenezer has him
kidnapped on a ship to be carried off to the Carolinas. On the voyage
Alan
*Breck is picked up from a sinking boat. He is
‘one of those honest gentlemen that were in trouble about the years
forty‐five and six’, a Jacobite
who ‘wearies for the heather and the deer’. The ship is wrecked
on the coast of Mull, and David and Alan travel together. They
witness the murder of Colin Campbell, and suspicion falls on them.
After a perilous journey across the Highlands they escape across the
Forth, and the novel ends with the defeat of Ebenezer and David's
recovery of his inheritance. Kidnapped was a popular
success, but its sequel, Catriona, was less well received.
It is concerned with the unsuccessful attempt of David Balfour to
secure the acquittal of James Stewart of the Glens, who is falsely
accused, from political motives, of the murder of Colin Campbell;
with the escape of Alan Breck to the Continent; and with David's love
affair with Catriona Drummond, daughter of the renegade James More.”
- Birch, Dinah. "Stevenson, Robert Louis." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 15 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of Stevenson and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“Stevenson, Robert Louis
(originally Lewis) (1850–94). Scottish novelist,
essayist, and poet, born in Edinburgh and educated at Edinburgh
University. Poor health and a distaste for office work led Stevenson
to spurn the profession of lighthouse engineer in which his father
and grandfather had won distinction. He qualified as a lawyer, but
had already begun publishing essays in the Cornhill
Magazine and elsewhere when admitted advocate
in 1875. In the same year he became friends with W.
E. *Henley, with whom he collaborated on four
plays, performed with little success 1880–5. Stevenson suffered
from a chronic bronchial condition (possibly bronchiectasis), and
much of life was spent going from country to country in search of
health; travelling in due course emerged as a defining trope of his
writing. In France in 1876 he met Mrs Fanny Osbourne, ten years his
senior, recording his feelings for her in the essay ‘On Falling in
Love’ (1877). An Inland Voyage, an account of a canoe
expedition in Belgium and France, appeared in 1878. The following
year, after the publication of Travels with a Donkey in the
Cevennes, he set off for California by emigrant ship and train
in response to a telegram from Fanny, whom he married in March 1880,
four months after her divorce. The couple stayed at an abandoned mine
in Calistoga, as described in The Silverado Squatters
(1883), before returning to Europe and settling for three years in
Bournemouth, where Stevenson consolidated a friendship with Henry
*James. By this time many of his
miscellaneously published stories, essays, and travel pieces had been
collected in volume form (Virginibus Puerisque, 1881;
Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 1882; New Arabian
Nights, 1882). His first full‐length work of fiction, Treasure
Island, begun on holiday in Braemar in Scotland
and issued in book form in 1883, brought him fame, which increased
with the publication of The
Strange Case of *Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
This was followed by two novels with Scottish settings, Kidnapped
(1886), a bravura recasting of the historical novel as coming‐of‐age
romance, and The
*Master of Ballantrae (1889), at once a tale of
high adventure and an acute analysis of sibling rivalry.
“In 1888 Stevenson set out from San
Francisco with his family entourage for the South Seas, where he was
greeted as a celebrity. His visit to the leper colony at Molokai
inspired Father Damien: An Open Letter (1890), his indignant
defence of the Catholic ‘Apostle of the Lepers’ against the
criticisms of C. M. Hyde, a Presbyterian clergyman based in Honolulu.
He settled in Samoa at Vailima, where he temporarily regained his
health, and became known as ‘Tusitala’ or ‘The Story Teller’.
He died there from a brain haemorrhage while working on Weir
of Hermiston (1896), even in its fragmentary,
unfinished state the most richly orchestrated of his four Scottish
novels. (Catriona, a sequel to Kidnapped, had
appeared in 1893.)
“Other books by Stevenson include
The Merry Men (1887, which collected the supernatural Scots
tale ‘Thrawn Janet’, the Gothic
pastiche ‘Olalla’, and four other stories); The Black Arrow
(1888), a historical romance; Island Nights' Entertainments
(1893); and St Ives (1897, unfinished, completed by Sir
Arthur *Quiller‐Couch), an episodic novel of
the Napoleonic Wars. With his stepson Lloyd Osbourne he wrote the
mischievous comedy The Wrong Box (1889) and The Wrecker
(1892). The Ebb‐Tide (1894), first drafted with Osbourne
but comprehensively rewritten by Stevenson, vividly exposes European
imperial corruption in the South Pacific, a concern also of ‘The
Beach of Falesá’ (1893). He published three volumes of poetry, A
Child's Garden of Verses (1885), a classic of children's
literature; Underwoods (1887), a collection of lyrics
in English and Scots and of ballads
in English; and Songs of Travel (1896), which celebrates the
Pacific and pines for Scotland with equal plangency. The poetry
shares the combination of surface delicacy with subterranean
disturbance that characterizes Stevenson's fiction. The theme of
dualism recurs in his work, as does a fascination with morally
ambiguous heroes or anti‐heroes. The concern with patrimony
implicit in Treasure Island and Kidnapped emerges
with full thematic force in the fierce father–son conflict of Weir
of Hermiston. Stevenson's wide popularity has occluded the slow
but inexorable growth of his critical reputation; his heavyweight
admirers have included not only his friend James, but G.
M. *Hopkins, *Nabokov,
*Borges,
and Graham
*Greene (a distant relative). There are lives
by Jenni Calder (1980) and Ian Bell (1993). See The Letters of
Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. B. A. Booth and E. Mehew, 8 vols
(1994–5).”
Comments