Kidnapped (Annotated)

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He was born on 13 November, 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is best known for works such as Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped and A Child's Garden of Verses.

Stevenson suffered from serious bronchial trouble for much of his life. However, despite his poor health, he continued writing prolifically and travelled widely. 

Stevenson’s maternal grandfather father Lewis Balfour (1777 – 1860) was a minister of the Church of Scotland at nearby Colinton. Stevenson spent the greater part of his boyhood holidays in his maternal grandfather's house.

His father Robert Stevenson, a leading lighthouse engineer, and his mother Margaret Isabella were both devout Presbyterians.

Stevenson was the only child of his parents. He was both strange-looking and eccentric, and found it hard to fit in when he was sent to a nearby school at age 6. The problem repeated at age 11 when he went on to the Edinburgh Academy. His frequent illnesses often kept him away from his first school, so he was taught for long stretches by private tutors. 

His first published book The Pentland Rising: A Page of History, 1666, was an account of the Covenanters' rebellion which was published in 1866, the 200th anniversary of the event.

In November 1867, Stevenson entered the University of Edinburgh to study engineering. But he hardly found any interest in his studies and used to avoid lectures. However, this proved to be a crucial time in Stevenson’s life as he made friendships with other students in The Speculative Society (an exclusive debating club), particularly with Charles Baxter, who would become Stevenson's financial agent, and with a professor, Fleeming Jenkin, whose house staged amateur drama in which Stevenson took part, and whose biography he would later write.

In late 1873 in England Stevenson met two people who became very important to him  – Sidney Colvin and Fanny (Frances Jane) Sitwell. Colvin was Stevenson's literary adviser and the first editor of his letters after his death. He placed Stevenson's first paid contribution in The Portfolio, an essay titled Roads.

Stevenson was soon active in London literary life, becoming acquainted with many of the writers of the time, including Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse and Leslie Stephen, the editor of The Cornhill Magazine, who took an interest in Stevenson's work.

Stevenson was sent to Menton on the French Riviera in November 1873 when his health deteriorated, and he returned in better health in April 1874. In July 1875, he qualified for the Scottish bar at the age of 24, and his father added a brass plate to the Heriot Row house reading ‘R.L. Stevenson, Advocate.’ His law studies did influence his books, but he never practised law; all his energies were spent in travel and writing. One of his journeys was a canoe voyage in Belgium and France with Sir Walter Simpson, a friend from the Speculative Society, a frequent travel companion, and the author of The Art of Golf (1887). This trip was the basis of his first travel book An Inland Voyage (1878).

From April 1885, 34-year-old Stevenson had the company of the novelist Henry James. They had met previously in London and had recently exchanged views in journal articles on the ‘art of fiction’ and thereafter in a correspondence in which they expressed their admiration for each other’s work. After James had moved to Bournemouth to help support his invalid sister, Alice, he took up the invitation to pay daily visits to Skerryvore for conversation at the Stevenson’s dinner table.

Largely bedridden, Stevenson described himself as living ‘like a weevil in a biscuit.’ Yet, despite ill health, during his three years in Westbourne, Stevenson wrote the bulk of his most popular works: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (which established his wider reputation), A Child's Garden of Verses and Underwoods.

Stevenson's critical essays on literature contain ‘few sustained analyses of style or content’. He very much saw himself in the mould of Sir Walter Scott, a storyteller with an ability to transport his readers away from themselves and their circumstances.

In January 1888, in response to American press coverage of the Land War in Ireland, Stevenson penned a political essay (rejected by Scribner's magazine and never published in his lifetime) that advanced a broadly conservative theme: the necessity of staying internal violence by rigid law.

Stevenson wrote an estimated 700,000 words during his years on Samoa. Some of his notable works during that time are   –  The Beach of Falesá, the first-person tale of a Scottish copra trader on a South Sea island, The Ebb-Tide, Catriona (1893), a sequel to his earlier novel Kidnapped, and Weir of Hermiston, which, according to Him, was his best work.

On 3 December, 1894, he passed away at the age of 44 due to stroke, and the life of a prolific writer prematurely came to an end.

Half of Stevenson's original manuscripts are lost, including those of Treasure Island, The Black Arrow and The Master of Ballantrae.

Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, being admired by many other writers, including Marcel Proust, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Emilio Salgari, and later by the likes of Cesare Pavese, Bertolt Brecht, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Vladimir Nabokov, and G. K. Chesterton. In 2018, he was ranked, just behind Charles Dickens, as the 26th-most-translated author in the world.