Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson
event, but the previous comedy does not suggest it will be the attempted assassination of David by his only remaining relative. Gothic is a genre of sensation, and the close description of David’s climb up the tower makes us feel the moment, the seeming solidness of the structure the “fine hewn stone” and “polished masonwork”, the air on our face. But this is more than mere sensationalism, it is a moment of realism in a previously enjoyable but unreal tale. The step David almost takes into nothingness is all the more shocking for this contrast of style and tone. The description of “the open scaffold” anticipates later jeopardy and reinforces the knowledge that had David fallen, his fate would have been death. Ebenezer’s subsequent cowed attitude is unconvincing, it’s clear that he will make a second attempt to rid himself of the boy, and this anticipation adds another ring of tension to the tale.
The image of the lightning bolt suddenly flashing into the high and ruined tower, revealing the danger ahead and thereby saving young Davie recalls the Stevenson family profession – lighthouse engineering. This is the first of many instances where Stevenson’s experiences formed during an abortive apprenticeship to the family firm shine out from Kidnapped.
Robert Louis (pronounced Lewis) Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh to Thomas and Margaret Stevenson. Thomas was the head of the family firm and intended Louis to take his place. It was no mean objective. The writer was eventually to become,
… the most famous of the Stevensons, but he was not the most productive. Between 1790 and 1940, eight members of the Stevenson family planned, designed and constructed the ninety-seven manned lighthouses that still speckle the Scottish coast, working in conditions and places that would be daunting even for modern engineers.11
In retrospect, Thomas’s desire for his son to become a key part of the family firm seems a strangely unrealistic ambition for such a practical man. Louis was plagued by ill-health throughout his life, and even had his inclinations lain in that direction it is doubtful whether his constitution could have withstood the travails of the North Sea. He did, however, begin an apprenticeship, making several excursions on his own and accompanying his father on his 1869 annual tour of inspection, calling at Orkney, Lewis and Skye. The trip provided,
… plenty to fascinate Louis, but of a romantic, not a technical, nature. At Lerwick he heard all about tobacco and brandy smuggling, and at Fair Isle he saw the inlet in which the flagship of the Armada had been wrecked … the impressions that his engineering experiences (or rather the long observations of the sea and the Scottish coasts they afforded) made on him fuelled his lifetime’s writing.12
Robert Louis Stevenson may have managed to avoid the rigours of lighthouse engineering, escaping into literature via a law degree (intended to appease his father), but he was as entranced by the sea as any of the Stevenson clan. Although his crossing to America a year after the publication of Kidnapped was in conditions that would have appalled most travellers, Louis proclaimed himself delighted:
The voyage was a huge success. We all enjoyed it (bar my wife) to the ground; sixteen days at sea with a cargo of hay, matches, stallions and monkeys in a ship that rolled like God Almighty, and with no style on, and plenty of sailors to talk to, and the endless pleasures of the sea – the romance of it, the sport of the scratch dinner and the smashing crockery, the pleasure – an endless pleasure – of balancing to the swell.13
Stevenson’s own experiences and travels were a consistent source of inspiration. His first published book, An Inland Voyage (1878) was an account of a canoe trip in northwest France, followed in 1879 by a second travelogue, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévannes. Stevenson was to continue writing about his travels throughout his life, notably in The Silverado Squatters (1883) and The Amateur Immigrant (1895), so perhaps it is inevitable that actual locations feed his fiction.
Ebenezer’s second stab at ridding himself of the boy takes place at Hawes Inn at the Queen’s Ferry, still a popular pub in South Queensferry, near Edinburgh. It was a setting that Stevenson had long intended to put to use.
Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set aside for shipwreck … the old Hawes Inn at Queen’s Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half marine … someday I think, a boat shall pull off from the Queen’s Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo.14
It is here that the eponymous kidnap takes place. Young David is effectively press-ganged on board a trading brig, the ironically named Covenant. As he embarks on an unexpected voyage, the book embarks onto a new stage: a tour round Scotland that justifies Stevenson’s insistence that the printing of the first bound copy be delayed until a suitable map could be found to help the reader follow the action.
Stevenson was as beguiled by Kidnapped as any reader. He claimed to have begun the book lightly but, like Dr Jekyll in reverse, was charmed by the good in his creation.
I began it partly as a lark, partly as a pot-boiler; and suddenly it moved, David and Alan stepped out from the canvas, and I found I was in another world.15
As the Covenant pushes out to sea, leaving Ebenezer girning evilly at his departing nephew, Stevenson abandons the enjoyable pot-boiler on the South Queensferry shore and embarks on a darker, more complex stage in the novel.
Kidnapped now becomes peopled with the dualism that also drives Jekyll and Hyde. David Balfour records that Captain Hoseason of the Covenant was, “two men and left the better one behind as soon as he set foot on board his vessel”.16 Hoseason fires a salute whenever he sails past his mother’s house, is a regular churchgoer and loves his ship as another might love a child. Yet he tolerates the abuse unto death of the cabin boy Ransome and is instrumental in the kidnapping of David Balfour, whom he intends to sell into slavery once they reach the colonies. Duplicity stalks the ship. Of the two mates, “Mr Riach was sullen, unkind and harsh when he was sober, and Mr Shuan would not hurt a fly except when he was drinking.”17
Alan Breck Stewart has been compared to D’Artagnan from Dumas’ The Three Musketeers18 and our first sight of him, the sole survivor of a ship accidentally run down by the Covenant, who managed to escape by a mammoth leap from the stern of one boat to the bowsprit of another, supports the association.
The complexities of conjoined opposites are realised in the twinning of Alan Breck and David Balfour. Highland with Lowland, Gaelic with Lowland Scots, Catholic with Protestant, Jacobite with Whig, experience with youth. It is an unlikely, yet strong alliance and the contrasts between the two add a tension that as much as any other aspect of Kidnapped now propels the book.
David Balfour’s occasionally fussy morality can make the youth seem priggish in comparison to Alan Breck, but perhaps this is an inevitable stance for someone paired with a more reckless spirit. For while David is a country lad Alan is an outlaw, one of survivors of the 1745 Rebellion, which sided with Bonnie Prince Charlie in an attempt to regain the Scottish crown from England (the two countries had united in 1603 under King James VI of Scotland and I of England). Kidnapped is set six years later, in 1751, and Alan Breck is attempting to return to France after his annual clandestine trip to Scotland, where he risks life and liberty to collect rents from his exiled laird’s tenants. His belt is full of guineas and it is this gold that effectively brings Alan and David together. When the youth overhears the crew planning to rob Alan he throws his lot in with the Jacobite and the two begin a short siege in the round-house of the ship.