Kidnapped. Robert Louis Stevenson. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Robert Louis Stevenson
Издательство: Ingram
Серия: Canons
Жанр произведения: Контркультура
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781847674432
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      ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

      KIDNAPPED

       Preface by Louise Welsh

       Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Barry Menikoff

      CONTENTS

      BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

      PREFACE BY LOUISE WELSH

      EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

      A NOTE ON THE TEXT

      MAP

       KIDNAPPED

      NOTES

      GLOSSARY

       PREFACE

      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,

      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,

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

      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.

      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.”

      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.

      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