Читать книгу Kidnapped - Роберт Льюис Стивенсон - Страница 5

Louise Welsh

There is a photograph of Robert Louis Stevenson taken in 1889, which shows him balanced barefoot on the bowsprit of the schooner Equator, beside a crew of “tarry sailors” on his way to the Gilbert Islands, 1500 miles southwest of Hawaii. He is long-haired, whip-thin and smiling. Despite his frequent illnesses, Stevenson did not merely write about adventures and travel on the high seas, he experienced them. Stevenson’s occasionally feverish energy, zest for life and humour infuse the adventures of Kidnapped’s narrator, David Balfour, and his unlikely comrade-in-arms, the Jacobite Alan Breck. As a contemporary review noted, these adventures are,

of a stirring kind, and include a voyage, a shipwreck, and a good deal of wandering through the Highlands, together with a reasonable mixture of bloodshed.1

These elements of plotting must have delighted the readers of Young Folks Paper which serialised the first publication of Kidnapped in 1886, but the novel goes beyond what is required of a mere adventure story. It is a highly personal book, drawing on Stevenson’s own travels and experiences of Scotland, his interest in the history of the country and his fascination with dualism, forged partly through his experiences of Presbyterianism. Kidnapped is never parochial, but it is a very Scottish novel. And although Stevenson was never able to capture the voice of a Highlander, part of this Scottish identity comes from his use of vernacular Scots. Stevenson believed that,

The day draws near when this illustrious and malleable tongue shall be quite forgotten; and Burns’s Ayrshire, and MacDonald’s Aberdeen awa’, and Scott’s brave metropolitan utterances will all be the ghosts of speech. Till then I would love to have my hour as a native Maker, and be read by my own countryfolk in our own dying language.2

Kidnapped is in part an expression of this ambition. Stevenson wrote to Charles Baxter, to whom the book is dedicated,

it’s Scōtch: no strong, for the sake o’ they pock-puddens, but jist a kitchen o’t, to leeven the wersh, sapless, fushionless, stotty, stytering South Scotch they think sae muckle o’.3

Kidnapped is also, at least in the beginning, part fairytale. Our narrator, the recently orphaned David Balfour, sets off for the House of Shaws in search of his inheritance. The circumstances are sad, but as David leaves his father’s tied cottage for the last time the weather, always a significant factor in this novel, suggests hope and new beginnings.

The blackbirds were whistling in the garden lilacs, and the mist that hung around the valley in the time of the dawn was beginning to rise and die away.4

This sense of optimism fades as David nears Cramond and begins asking directions from locals. “Well, mannie,” says a carter, “… ye seem a decent-spoken lad; and if ye’ll take a word from me, ye’ll keep clear of the Shaws.”5 “Hoot, hoot, hoot,” said the Barber, when asked what kind of a man was Mr Balfour of the Shaws, “nae kind of a man, nae kind of a man at all.”6 But it is the “eldritch” Jennet Clouston who, like an evil witch at a highborn christening, foretells the trials that David will face before the book’s end.

“That is the House of Shaws!” she cried. “Blood built it; blood stopped the building of it; blood shall bring it down. See here!” she cried again, “I spit upon the ground, and crack my thumb at it. Black be its fall! If ye see the laird, tell him what ye hear; tell him that Jennet Clouston has called down the curse on him and his – house, byre and stable, man, guest and master, wife, miss or bairn – black, black be their fall!”7

When we do meet the laird it is from the wrong end of a blunderbuss. Ebenezer Balfour greets David through the sights of the gun with the welcoming words, “It’s loaded.”

Henry James considered Stevenson a “bright particular genius”8 and Kidnapped his “best book” at the point of writing, but he was impatient with David’s long lost uncle, describing Ebenezer as one of Kidnapped’s “two flaws” and “the tricks he plays on his ingenious nephew … a little like those of country conjurers”.9

There is indeed something of the pantomime villain about David’s uncle and his energetic miserliness. Though the night is “pit murk” Ebenezer swears that the moon is out, for the sake of saving a candle. When David shames his uncle into offering him a drink, the old man halves his own portion, pouring it from his own glass rather than take more than the day’s allotted allowance. But the comic elements in the old man’s character do more than simply make us smile, they incline the reader towards Ebenezer, casting him as “Steptoe” to David’s “Son”. His sprightly meanness and spirited turn of phrase add to the horror of his first act of wickedness. David is sent by his uncle up the old stair tower at the end of the unfinished wing. Once again Ebenezer insists that David does without a candle – “Nae lights in my house” – reassuring him that the stairs are good. But when David enters the tower he finds it,

… so dark inside, it seemed a body could scarce breathe; but I pushed out with foot and hand, and presently struck the wall with the one, and the lowermost round of the stair with the other. The wall, by the touch, was of fine hewn stone; the steps too, though somewhat steep and narrow, were of polished masonwork, and regular and solid underfoot. Minding my uncle’s word about the bannisters, I kept close to the tower side, and felt my way in the pitch darkness with a beating heart.

The house of Shaws stood some five full storeys high, not counting lofts. Well, as I advanced, it seemed to me the stair grew airier and a thought more lightsome; and I was wondering what might be the cause of this change, when a second blink of the summer lightning came and went. If I did not cry out, it was because fear had me by the throat; and if I did not fall, it was more by Heaven’s mercy than my own strength. It was not only that the flash shone in on every side through breaches in the wall, so that I seemed to be clambering aloft upon an open scaffold, but the same passing brightness showed me the steps were of unequal length, and that one of my feet rested that moment within two inches of the well.10

This is a gothic moment worthy of the author of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson has set the scene with an unscrupulous uncle, a stormy night and a threatened bloodline, we expect some 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. The ensuing battle between the crew and the new allies is a mixture of adventure-story bravado and heightened realism that rivals the tower scene. David acquits himself remarkably well for a boy who has never seen action before, killing two men and wounding another, but his fear of the fray and hesitation to take a life carries the fighting beyond the cartoon brutality of video games and action movies. This is violence with consequences against protagonists whose weaknesses and qualities have already been identified; indeed, like young Jim in Treasure Island, David has grown quite fond of his jailors.

Rough they were, sure enough; and bad, I suppose; but they had many virtues, they were kind when it occurred to them, simple even beyond the simplicity of a country lad like me, and had some glimmerings of honesty.19

But it is more than his acquaintance with the crew that initially stays David’s trigger finger. When he grabs a sailor, who has dropped through the roof of the round-house he finds that,

At the touch of him (and him alive) my whole flesh mis-gave me, and I could no more pull the trigger than I could have flown.20

This hesitation puts the reader momentarily in David’s boots. We can imagine ourselves into the midst of the action, but we know what the touch of another human being feels like. The gap between imagining and knowing which Stevenson bridges enables the reader to be in the moment with David. Though we might not acquit ourselves so well in battle most of us would hesitate before shooting a person we were embracing. The realism of the moment heightens the gore of the round-house and makes David’s post-action tears all the more understandable and effective.

Alan Breck has of course killed many men. His reaction to the victory is straightforwardly triumphant.

“I love you like a brother. And O, man,” he cried in a kind of ecstasy, “am I no a bonny fighter?”21

The generosity, vanity and reckless joie de vivre of this sentence encapsulate Alan Breck’s character. He is willing to lay down his life for his cause and will shelter a brother in arms from the law, but he is also a dandy whose fine French clothes are a source of pride and constant anxiety as he traverses wild seas, inclement weather and rough terrain. Alan Breck is his own best audience. If he lived in the modern age he might have ambitions towards a bio-pic, but in the mid-eighteenth century he has to be content with writing a ballad extolling his own bravery in the battle, a ballad from which David, despite his daring, is absent.

The Covenant is eventually wrecked on the Torran reef near the Ross of Mull. Had the crew been sailing by a hundred years later, they would have been saved this fate by a light on Dhu Heartach from the lighthouse that Thomas Stevenson was engaged in constructing during Louis’s apprenticeship. But as things are, the wreck leaves David alone and stranded on the islet of Earraid, which the Stevenson lighthouse company had used as a base during the building. Recounting the awfulness of his situation David makes an almost direct reference to Robinson Crusoe.

In all the books I have read of people cast away, they had either their pockets full of tools, or a chest of things would be thrown upon the beach along with them, as if on purpose. My case was very different.22

Of course David is a character in a book cast away on an island, but once again a sense of realism elevates the novel beyond mere adventure yarn. David’s brief and miserable shipwreck on Earraid, a prison that he could have escaped quickly and easily had he only known how, is also a prelude to the next portion of the book and a signal that David is now entering a world that is unfamiliar to him, of whose rules, history and language he is dangerously ignorant – the Highlands.

Stevenson himself was a Lowlander. He was unable to understand the accents of his father’s Highland workmen and wrote to his mother with a rueful vanity reminiscent of Alan Breck,

What is still worse, I find the people hereabout – that is to say the Highlanders … don’t understand me.23

Despite his lack of Gaelic he had been planning a History of the Highlands (destined never to be written) since the end of 1880. This interest (and the prospect of a stipend for a position he mistakenly thought would take up little time) led him to apply for the post of chair of Constitutional History at Edinburgh University in 1881. It was a position for which he was sublimely unqualified. For all his intelligence and reading Stevenson was no academic. He had been forced to study engineering and law, subjects that he had little aptitude for or interest in, and as a consequence had been an exceedingly recalcitrant student. On receiving an application for a certificate of attendance for Stevenson’s first year at Edinburgh University, Professor Fleeming Jenkin had replied,

It is quite useless for you to come to me, Mr Stevenson. There may be doubtful cases; there is no doubt about yours. You have simply not attended my class.24

His poor academic record, combined with “the difficulty of my never having done anything in history, strictly speaking”,25 makes it no surprise that Stevenson’s suit was rejected. But though he might not have had the makings of a chair of history, his historical approach is perfect for a novelist. He relates history in terms of narratives, a dangerous thing for academic historians, whose priority must be facts, proof and provenance, but a gift for a writer of fiction. Stevenson makes history serve the tale, and is willing to change the facts to suit the story. He was also able to catch glimpses of the past in the events of his own time. The poet Edmund Gosse sailed on the Clansman around the Hebrides in 1870, the year of Stevenson’s third engineering placement.

As I leaned over the bulwarks, Stevenson was at my side, and he explained to me that we had come up this loch to take away to Glasgow a large party of emigrants driven from their homes in the interests of deer-forest. As he spoke, a black mass became visible entering the vessel. Then, as we slipped off shore, the fact of their hopeless exile came home to these poor fugitives, and suddenly, through the absolute silence, there rose from them a wild keening and wailing, reverberated by the cliffs of the loch, and at that strange place and hour infinitely poignant.26

The event appears in Kidnapped in the form of a group of Highlanders forcibly cleared onto an emigrant ship bound for America:

the chief singer in our boat struck into a melancholy air, which was presently taken up both by the emigrants and their friends upon the beach, so that it sounded from all sides like a lament for the dying. I saw the tears run down the cheeks of the men and women in the boat, even as they bent their oars; and the circumstances, and the music of the song (which is one called “Lochaber no more”) were highly affecting even to myself.27

The clearing of the Highlanders from their homelands was a subject that clearly captured Stevenson’s imagination. In 1881 he wrote to his father, “It occurred to me last night … that I could write The Murder of Red Colin, A Story of the Forfeited Estates.”28 Colin Campbell of Glenure was the factor of several estates confiscated from pro-Jacobite clans, from whom he was also charged with collecting taxes. Unlike the Stewarts, the Campbells were loyal to the crown and bad feeling between the two clans was high. Colin Campbell was allegedly on his way to Ardsheal to evict Stewart families from their homes when he was cut down by sniper fire. Stevenson makes young David a witness to the killing; indeed he has stopped Colin Campbell to ask for directions, unwittingly making him an easier target for the gunman.

As David Daiches points out, whatever Stevenson’s personal fascination with the event, the Appin murder is not at the centre of Kidnapped, it is there to “keep the plot moving”.29 This it does admirably. David and Alan are the main suspects for the murder and know that to be caught in Campbell country is to face certain hanging. They have no choice but to go on the run, pursued by Campbells and redcoats, short of food and money, the price on their heads making them wary of even their allies. But it is their chief persecutor, the Scottish weather, that brings young David to the point of exhaustion and ultimately threatens their survival.

Stevenson had a direct grudge against the climate of his homeland; particularly in the city of his birth, Edinburgh, which,

… pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with snow as it comes flying southward from the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and downright meteorological purgatory in the spring. The delicate die early and I, as a survivor, among the bleak winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate.30

This meteorological purgatory was to force the adult Stevenson further and further south until he became a virtual exile from Scotland. He was exceedingly ill between 1884 and 1887, spending much of the time confined to bed, living “like a weevil in a biscuit” but continuing to write even when “bound and gagged” by illness.

Forbidden to speak, with his right arm bound close to his body because of lung haemorrhaging, he was being kept in a darkened room on account of an attack of ophthalmia … In this tormenting time he asked for paper to be pinned to a board.31

It was a remarkably productive period, yielding Treasure Island, Jekyll and Hyde, A Child’s Garden of Verses and Kidnapped. Perhaps the long confinements reminded Stevenson of his childhood, when it seemed he was more in than out of bed, for in his poem “The Land of Counterpane”, he evokes the site of childhood illness.

I was the giant great and still

That sits upon the pillow-hill

And sees before him, dale and plain,

The pleasant land of counterpane.32

Stevenson was still a giant moving his characters around his invented world, countering the pain of illness with the play of his imagination. The contrast between the activity of Alan and David careering through the Highlands with a price on their heads and the regularly enforced imprisonment of their author is poignant. It also helps to explain the abrupt ending of the novel, only resolved years later with the publication of a sequel, Catriona. Stevenson himself was frank about the book’s unsatisfactory conclusion.

Kidnapped was all written at Bournemouth inside of a year: probably five months actual writing, and one of these months entirely over the last chapters, which had to be put together without interest or inspiration, almost word for word, for I was entirely worked out: Kidnapped you might like to know, appears to me infinitely my best, and indeed my only good, story.33

We may not agree that Kidnapped is Stevenson’s “only good story”, but it is a masterpiece, not simply of Scottish, but of world literature, combining complexities of characterisation with a highly developed style and a plot that makes it a page-turner.

Other “Scottish books” followed Kidnapped, notably The Master of Ballantrae in 1889 and Catriona in 1893. Indeed it sometimes seems that Stevenson’s thoughts turned more to home the longer that he was away. His dedication to Fanny Stevenson in the Edinburgh Edition of his works began,

I see rain falling and the rainbow drawn

On Lammermuir; hearkening, I hear again

In my precipitous city beaten bells.

Winnow the keen sea wind; and looking back

Upon so much already endured and done

From then to now – reverent, I bow the head34

On 4 December 1894 Stevenson’s stepdaughter, Belle Strong, wrote in her journal of the previous day,

He had been very well for a long time, and every morning I hurried through my household work to write for him in Hermiston … we worked steadily till nearly twelve, and then he walked up and down the room talking to me of his work, of future chapters, of bits of his past life that bore on what he had been writing – as only he could talk.35

Stevenson died from a cerebal haemorrhage later that afternoon, struck down not in his sickbed, but in the middle of what had appeared for once to be robust health. He was helping Fanny to prepare a salad, “dropping the oil for her with a perfectly steady hand”36 when he suddenly asked, “Do I look strange?” and collapsed. These were to be the strangely apposite last words of the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He died later that day, his unfinished novel, Weir of Hermiston, abandoned on his desk, stopped mid-sentence, “It seemed unprovoked, a wilful convulsion of brute nature …”37

The final photograph taken of Robert Louis Stevenson shows the author lying in state in the hall in Valima. Stevenson was buried as he had wished on top of MountVaea. He had died far from Edinburgh in a country that he had made his home, but Scotland, the land of his birth, had continued to inspire him to the end.

Robert Louis Stevenson on the Equator. Reproduced by permission of the Writers’ Museum, Edinburgh.

1. R. H. Hutton, an unsigned review in the Spectator , 24 July 1886, reproduced in Paul Maixner, Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage , (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p.237.

2. Claire Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, (London, Harper Collins, 2005) p.316.

3. Ernest Mehew (ed.), Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997) p.305.

4. Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, ed. Barry Menikoff, (New York, Random House Inc., 2001) p.11.

5. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.18.

6. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.18.

7. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.20.

8. Henry James, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson 1887’, in The House of Fiction, (Connecticut, Greenwood Press Publishers, 1976) p.114.

9. James, p. 136.

10. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.38.

11. Bella Bathurst, The Lighthouse Stevensons, (London, Harper Perennial, 1999) p.xiii.

12. Harman, p.62.

13. Mehew.

14. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on Romance’ in Jeremy Treglown (ed.), The Lantern Bearers And Other Essays (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988) p.174.

15. RLS writing to T. Watts-Dunton (September 1886) in response to his review of Kidnapped in the Athenaeum, in Mehew, p.246.

16. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.53.

17. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.63.

18. W. W. Robson, ‘On Kidnapped’, in Jenni Calder (ed.), Stevenson and Victorian Scotland (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1981), p.106.

19. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.62.

20. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.87.

21. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.90.

22. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.118.

23. Harman, Kidnapped, p.49.

24. Harman, Kidnapped, p.67.

25. Harman, Kidnapped, p.223.

26. Harman, Kidnapped, p.63.

27. Stevenson, Kidnapped, p.137.

28. David Daiches, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Revaluation (Glasgow, William Maclellan, 1947), p.59.

29. Daiches, p.62.

30. Treglown, p.88.

31. Harman, p.243.

32. Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses, (London, Everyman’s Library, 1992), p.38.

33. Mehew, p.349.

34. Ernest Mehew (Ed) Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Yale University Press (1997) p.582.

35. Ernest Mehew (Ed) Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Yale University Press (1997) p.609.

36. Ibid.2.

37. Robert Louis Stevenson, Master of Ballantrae and Weir of Herminston, Everyman’s Library (1992) p.303.