would undertake, and few could manage as artfully. It is a small irony that a number of Stevenson’s forms of speech that may be considered Scots or idiosyncratic or both were altered by editors and compositors in the setting of the novel, since it hardly needs saying that it was an English publishing apparatus that put the book in print. But through it all there is more than mere gamesmanship on the writer’s part, for Stevenson addresses the central questions of how we use our language and what it means to us. David was quick enough to guess that Ransome’s speech was a bastardization that derived from a variety of social experiences, and he was not prepared to accept it as definitive. If this passage means anything, it is a sly shedding of the sense of inferiority that the Scots speaker has to the English.
Kidnapped is a text constitutive of and informed by three major languages—Scots, English, and Gaelic—with a fourth, Latin, thrown in for good measure. Obviously not all are given equal status; Stevenson was unfamiliar with Gaelic, and the proverbial Latin phrases were designed more for gentle satire than to make a case for another language’s place in the province of the book. Yet even here Stevenson was insinuating an important point: for as he said repeatedly, we are but the ruins of an ancient culture, and those familiar tags from Virgil and Horace and Martial, tossed off so casually by Rankeillor, remind us of who we are and where we come from. They remind us, too, of an older book and another wandering, timeless hero: David’s odyssey, after all, has a long and glorious history behind it.
Autograph title page.
1. New York Daily Tribune, 10 December 1894, p. 16.
2. “Mr. R. L. Stevenson on the Cultivation of Style”, Publishers’ Circular, 17 June 1893, p. 668.
3. Chūō Kōron, January 1906. I am indebted to my colleague Nobuko Ochner for the reference and the translation.
4. Tinsley Pratt, “A Chapter in the Life of R. L. Stevenson”, Manchester Quarterly 25 (1906), pp. 502–03.
5. The Century Magazine, vol. 35, no. 6 (April 1888), p. 871.
6. Literary Landscapes of the British Isles: A Narrative Atlas (London: Bell & Hyman, 1979), p. 205.
7. February 1912. Silverado Museum, Saint Helena, California.
8. See the first entry in the Notes, “the Appin murder … printed trial.”
9. New York Times, 1 August 1886, p. 9.
10. Henry James, marking the famous quarrel chapter between David and Alan, noted on his page, “do psychological truth of this.”
11. In “the little Fishing Towns … such numbers of half-naked Children, but fresh coloured, strong and healthy, I think are not to be met with in the In-land Towns. Some will have their Numbers and Strength to be the Effects of Shell-fish”; [Edmund Burt], Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, 2 vols. (London: S. Birt, 1754), 1:33–34.
12. “On Groundless Fears,” Seneca and Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard M. Gum- mere (London: William Heinemann, 1925), vol. 1, p. 79.
13. The first printed letter to Young Folks called attention to the “fine leaven of humour” running all through the story-in-progress: “It is Scotch humour, keen flavoured, gripping the palate” (May 29, 1886). Christopher Morley in an introduction to Kidnapped for the Limited Editions Club, wrote that Stevenson was never given “due acclaim” for his humor, although Morley found it limited in the novel to chapters 25 and 26 (New York, 1938, p. ix).
14. Publishers’ Circular reviewed an American magazine’s list of the 150 most popular novels in America and commented on the absence from the list of Kidnapped, Prince Otto, The Master of Ballantrae, and The Wrecker: “This is likely to astonish Mr. Stevenson’s admirers in Great Britain” (30 December 1893, p. 749). Just over a year later, the New York Times quoted figures from the Westminster Gazette on the sale of Stevenson’s books in their English editions. Setting aside Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a relatively “cheap book” that easily topped the list at 80,000 copies, Treasure Island was next at 52,000, with Kidnapped a distant third at 39,000. New Arabian Nights, published in 1882, was only at 12,000. Now compare King Solomon’s Mines, published in the same year and at the same price as Treasure Island, then at 94,000 (5 January 1895).
15. George Stronach, newspaper clipping pasted in rear of The Merry Men, n.d. [December 1894], Huntington Library.
16. New York Daily Tribune, 30 December 1894, p. 16.
17. 10 June 1879. Beinecke Library, Yale University (B5501).
18. Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994–1995), 4:200.
19. “Mr. R. L. Stevenson on the Cultivation of Style,” Publishers’ Circular, 17 June 1893, p. 668.
20. Letters, 5:206.
21. All the examples in the Scottish National Dictionary (SND) support Stevenson. Edmund Burt says that all over Scotland his countrymen are “dignified with the title” which “signifies a glutton” (ca. 1730). Scott uses it pejoratively (“The Englishers … the pock-puddings ken nae better”) and Stevenson himself is cited, having compacted all his countrymen’s animosity for the English into the expression.
22. Letters, 3:188.
23. Letters, 8:38.
24. Letters, 7:70.
Stevenson was a writer whose precise attention to minute detail was recognized
