Kidnapped was published in the same year as Jekyll and Hyde, 1886. It is funny to think that these two stirring tales, one set in smoky London, one in the Scottish Highlands, were both written in a comfortable suburban house in Bournemouth.
Plot
It is 1751, Scotland, in the years after the failed Jacobite rebellion. Young David Balfour, his parents recently dead, sets out to see his only blood relative, Uncle Ebenezer. Who sells him into slavery on a boat bound for the West Indies. Which collides with a rowing boat off the Isles, carrying the notorious Jacobite fugitive, Alan Breck Stewart. Who along with David, fights off the entire ship’s crew. The ship is then shipwrecked and David and Alan make it ashore, to spend weeks on the run from English troops, hiding in the heather and among poor Jacobite sympathisers. The plot is gripping, fast-moving and creates a continuously exciting sense of jeopardy.
Style
Over and above the story, though, what gives bottomless pleasure is the easiness of Stevenson’s prose, its accuracy, its crisp vividness, its pace in moving from one telling detail to the next.
“Country folk went by from the fields as I sat there on the side of the ditch, but I lacked the spirit to give them a good-e’en. At last the sun went down, and then, right up against the yellow sky, I saw a scroll of smoke go mounting, not much thicker, as it seemed to me, than the smoke of a candle; but still there it was, and meant a fire, and warmth, and cookery, and some living inhabitant that must have lit it; and this comforted my heart.”
18th century
Setting it in the 18th century liberates Stevenson, liberates his prose from the fussy, upper class English and melodramatic straitjacket it was trapped in for the New Arabian Nights. It runs lithe and free. The description of Alan Breck is a compact, typical example.
He was smallish in stature, but well set and as nimble as a goat; his face was of a good open expression, but sunburnt very dark, and heavily freckled and pitted with the small-pox; his eyes were unusually light and had a kind of dancing madness in them, that was both engaging and alarming; and when he took off his great-coat, he laid a pair of fine silver-mounted pistols on the table, and I saw that he was belted with a great sword.
The cabin boy is murdered by a drunk crewman. Note the detail:
As he spoke, two seamen appeared in the scuttle, carrying Ransome in their arms; and the ship at that moment giving a great sheer into the sea, and the lantern swinging, the light fell direct on the boy’s face. It was as white as wax, and had a look upon it like a dreadful smile. The blood in me ran cold, and I drew in my breath as if I had been struck.
Psychological descriptions like that follow immediately and directly from the physical action and from Stevenson’s genius for the telling detail. His imagination is fully engaged by the characters and the scenarios with the result that everything is described with a wonderful immediacy. As Davey and Alan are about to be attacked in the roundhouse:
I do not know if I was what you call afraid; but my heart beat like a bird’s, both quick and little; and there was a dimness came before my eyes which I continually rubbed away, and which continually returned. As for hope, I had none; but only a darkness of despair and a sort of anger against all the world that made me long to sell my life as dear as I was able. I tried to pray, I remember, but that same hurry of my mind, like a man running, would not suffer me to think upon the words; and my chief wish was to have the thing begin and be done with it.
Scots
‘Like a man running.’ Strange and wonderful phrasing. Imagining an 18th century voice allows Stevenson to experiment with diction, wandering far from Standard English, creating wonderful phrasings. The text is given extra saltiness, tang and savour by Stevenson’s obvious enjoyment of the Highland Scots dialect used by so many of the characters:
‘Captain,’ says Alan, ‘I doubt your word is a breakable. Last night ye haggled and argle-bargled like an apple-wife; and then passed me your word, and gave me your hand to back it; and ye ken very well what was the upshot. Be damned to your word!’ says he.
Manliness
The virility, the energy of Stevenson’s style perfectly matches the manliness of the tale. Unencumbered by feminine concerns the novel explores and depicts a wide variety of male types, all revolving round the sometimes ludicrous but always winning masculinity of its hero, Alan Breck.
‘Do ye see me?’ said Alan. ‘I am come of kings; I bear a king’s name. My badge is the oak. Do ye see my sword? It has slashed the heads off mair Whigamores than you have toes upon your feet. Call up your vermin to your back, sir, and fall on! The sooner the clash begins, the sooner ye’ll taste this steel throughout your vitals.’
“I saw him pass his sword through the mate’s body” by Howard Pyle (1895)
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