Kidnapped, Being the Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751 (1886)

Kidnapped, Being the Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751 was written by Robert Louis Stevenson and first appeared as “Kidnapped; or, The Lad with the Silver Button” (Young Folks, May-July 1886). Stevenson wrote a sequel to Kidnapped, Catriona (1893). Although posterity, snobbery, and ignorance have relegated Stevenson (1850-1894) to the role of children’s author, for Kidnapped and Treasure Island, in the second half of the nineteenth century Stevenson was a major writer, close friends with Henry James and H. Rider Haggard, producer of bestsellers and critically-acclaimed works, a writer who wrote for all age groups and whose work was read by both low- and high-brow audiences. Discerning critics have (justifiably) called Stevenson the initiator of the “Age of Storytellers,” the great flowering of high-quality popular fiction from the 1880s until 1914.

Kidnapped is about David Balfour, a teenaged Scotsman. David’s father dies and leaves David only a letter which will introduce David to his Uncle Ebenezer. David happily travels to the house of Shaw, his ancestral home. But Uncle Ebenezer does not welcome David’s presence, and after a short, uneasy stay Ebenezer arranges for David to be kidnapped, taken on board the Covenant by its captain, Hoseason, and its crew, and held there. The Covenant is bound for the Carolinas, where David is to be sold into indentured slavery. David initially has a hard time on the Covenant, but the longer he is on board the ship the kinder the crew is to him. But one day, off the coast of England, the Covenant runs down a small boat and cuts it in two. Only one of the boat’s crew, Alan Breck Stewart, a Scottish Jacobite and soldier of fortune, is saved. Captain Hoseason pretends to agree to put Alan ashore, but this is a ruse–Hoseason and the crew plan to rob Alan and kill him–and David, on hearing the Captain plan Alan’s death, reveals the plot to Alan. Alan and David fight off the Captain and crew, killing several, and when the Covenant runs ashore (the crew, decimated by Alan and David, is not sufficient to pilot the ship) Alan and David are cast ashore. Unfortunately an enemy of Alan’s is murdered in front of David, and Alan and David are blamed for the murder. Through the course of the novel Alan and David are hunted across Scotland, usually through areas controlled by the enemies of David’s clan. The pair suffer privation and misery before reaching safety. They manage to contact Mr. Rankeillor, a lawyer friendly to David’s family friend, the Reverend Campbell, and with Rankeillor’s help they confront Ebenezer and force him (through a neat trick) to give David the share of his inheritance he is rightly due. In Catriona Stevenson returned to the murder case, resolving it, seeing Alan to France, and marrying off Alan to Catriona Drummond, the grand-daughter of Rob Roy.

It is highly regrettable that the vagaries of librarianship and publishing have put Kidnapped in the category of Young Adult fiction and thus convinced generations of readers that Kidnapped is therefore not to be considered as seriously as, for example, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This is in part the result of Stevenson’s dedication, that he

has in this new avatar no more desperate purpose than 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.¹

Stevenson certainly considered the novel seriously, and the modern reader can only conclude, after reading it, that Kidnapped is a novel for adults as well as, or perhaps rather than, children. There are, certainly, fine novels for children and young adults, such as Harry W. French’s The Lance of Kanana. But Kidnapped addresses more serious matters, in a more serious manner, than most nineteenth century novels for children and young adults did. Kidnapped has a high level of realism, of characterization, description, and action which young adult novels often lack, and there is a real harshness, even brutality, to Kidnapped which Victorian authors of novels for young adults usually refrain from describing or including in their novels.

The realism of Kidnapped is so well done. All of the characters, from David and Alan to more minor ones, are recognizable and human, neither unrealistically perfect nor cartoonishly vile. David has his pettiness, Alan his vanity, while the villainous Captain Hoseason is good to his men and the avaricious Uncle Ebenezer is as generous a host as his neuroses about money allows him to be. The dialogue is conversational and recognizable, and while Stevenson, a vigorous Scottish patriot, puts in a large amount of Scottish dialect and slang, in almost every case the meaning of the Scottish word is understandable from its context. Similarly, while Scottish history is important to the story, modern readers do not need to know any of it to enjoy Kidnapped; Stevenson does a good job of providing context for the novel’s backdrop and characters. However, a good set of annotations will substantially add to the modern reader’s enjoyment of the novel.

The fights and escapes have a realistic feel, so that they seem like events that might actually rather than the fun but essentially unrealistic exploits of The Three Musketeers. Even more authentic are the hardships which David and Alan endure. There is little of the picaresque in Kidnapped, and the novel might well be read as a rebuke to it. David and Alan suffer from starvation, are usually cold and wet, fall sick, and endure the many other anti-romantic but realistic things that men hunted across the Scottish highlands during the winter would have to endure. Their lives are hard, not easy, which is as it should be.

The tone and pace of the novel are perfect. There is a near-constant pressure on David and Alan, and Stevenson never lets up nor gives the characters or the reader much time to pause and reflect on the situation. The reader feels the danger threatening David and Alan. Likewise, Stevenson’s use of emotion is understated, rather than overblown, with the result that its appearance is more keenly felt. The argument between David and Alan, which almost breaks their friendship, is painful to read.

Stevenson’s use of language is precise; there is a sparseness to it which suits the story. In a novel in which most of the text is spent on characters being hunted, over-done descriptions of the environment or prolix dialogues would not only be out of place but would hurt the tone of the novel. Instead, the language is stripped-down, to better service the story. People often come away from Kidnapped with vivid memories of the Scottish landscape, but the truth is that Stevenson spends relatively little time actually describing the landscape, instead relying on impressionistic descriptions which convey the meaning he intended. And the humor of the novel is witty and ironic rather than awkward jokes or slapstick scenes. In a novel like Kidnapped, this is a wise and welcome choice, for it enhances the tone of the novel rather than spoiling it.

The novel does have its share of brutality, and appropriately so. We see the very real and sad effects of violence and drunkenness. Stevenson does not understate the effects of either or downplay their consequences. And with certain characters, like the ship’s boy Ransome, the brutality leads to a sad end.

Kidnapped was not Stevenson’s first published novel; The Black Arrow, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde and Treasure Island had preceded it. Treasure Island had made Stevenson’s name, and Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde had substantially added to Stevenson’s fame as well as created a landmark of nineteenth-century horror fiction, but it was Kidnapped that produced the first extended influence for Stevenson: in Kidnapped “he transforms his literary model, the historical romance of Walter Scott, into the modern thriller or adventure story.”² Stevenson was influenced by Scott, especially in the Appin murder, of Colin Roy Campbell in 1752, an event which drives Kidnapped and appears in Scott’s introduction to Rob Roy. Stevenson may have dedicated Kidnapped to the figurative “young gentleman” reader, and certainly his reputation, when Kidnapped was published and after his death, was that of a writer for boys, but the impact and influence of Kidnapped was on adult fiction, specifically the historical romance.

By writing a Scottish historical romance Stevenson was “venturing into territory colonized by Scott,”³ and certainly there are influences (some obvious) and allusions to Scott in Kidnapped, but Stevenson did what Scott could not or would not do, which was to make adventure rather than history the focus of Kidnapped:

It is not arrival or homecoming but the flight itself that matters–the pure rush of sensation, the intimacy of the moment, released from before and after. As though to be kidnapped, snatched out of everyday life, and then a fugitive from justice is to find oneself, mysteriously, set free. Thus Stevenson refines the philosophical ore of Scott’s historical novels into the currency of adventure fiction.⁴

This altering of the focus from traditional historical novelists’ concerns to the immediacy of adventure and thrills would be enormously influential on later historical romance and action/adventure and thriller writers in the 1890s and in the twentieth century.

Stevenson had predecessors in this, of course–the historical romance of the 1880s was only the inheritor of a decades-long tradition of historical adventures (see: The Historical Romance). And Stevenson was also thinking of Dumas in the writing of Kidnapped, when he described Dumas’ style as “light as a whipped trifle, strong as silk; wordy like a village tale; pat like a general’s despatch; with every fault, yet never tedious; with no merit, yet inimitably right.”⁵ As Ian Duncan says, “this might almost be a description of the style of Kidnapped, except...that Stevenson’s writing is far finer-grained.”⁶

Kidnapped is splendid entertainment for adults and for children (although its lack of female characters–a regrettable trend in the historical romances following Stevenson–make it more likely appealing to boys than to girls).

Print: Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2014.

¹ Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped: Being the Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), vi.

² Ian Duncan, “Introduction,” in Kidnapped (Oxford: Oxford World’‘s Classics, 2014), ix.

³ Duncan, “Introduction,” xvii.

⁴ Duncan, “Introduction,” xxii.

⁵ Qtd in Duncan, “Introduction,” xxiv.

⁶ Duncan, “Introduction,” xxiv.