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
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
