Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island

PENGUIN CLASSICS

TREASURE ISLAND

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON was born in Edinburgh in 1850. The son of a prosperous civil engineer, he was expected to follow the family profession but finally was allowed to study law at Edinburgh University. Stevenson reacted violently against the Presbyterian respectability of the citys professional classes and this led to painful clashes with his parents. In his early twenties he became afflicted with a severe respiratory illness from which he was to suffer for the rest of his life. In 1879 he nearly killed himself traveling to California to marry Fanny Osbourne, an American ten years his senior. Together they continued his search for a climate kind to his fragile health, eventually settling in Samoa, where he died on 3 December 1894.

Stevensons Calvinistic upbringing gave him a preoccupation with predestination and a fascination with the presence of evil. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde he explores the darker side of the human psyche, and the character of the Master in The Master of Ballantrae (1889) was intended to be all I know of the Devil. Stevenson began his literary career as an essayist and travel writer, but the success of Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886) established his reputation for tales of action and adventure. Kidnapped and its sequel Catriona (1893), The Master of Ballantrae, and stories such as Thrawn Janet and The Merry Men also reveal his knowledge and feeling for the Scottish cultural past. During the last years of his life Stevensons creative range developed considerably, and The Beach of Fales brought to fiction the kind of scene now associated with Conrad and Maugham. At the time of his death Robert Louis Stevenson was working on The Weir of Hermiston, at once a romantic historical novel and a reworking of one of Stevensons own most distressing experiences, the conflict between father and son.

JOHN SEELYE is graduate research professor of American literature at the University of Florida. He is the author of The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain in the Movies: A Meditation, and Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Literature.

Edited with an Introduction by

JOHN SEELYE

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First published in the United States of America by

Charles Scribner & Sons 1894

This edition with an introduction by John Seelye

published in Penguin Books 1999

Introduction copyright John Seelye, 1999

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 18501894.

Treasure Island/Robert Louis Stevenson;

edited with an introduction by John Seelye.

p. cm.(Penguin classics)

Includes bibliographical references.

EISBN: 9781101554944

1. Treasure-troveFiction. 2. PiratesFiction.

I. Seelye, John D. II. Title. III. Series.

PR5486.A2S44 1999

823.8dc21 99-29994

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Stempel Garamond

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INTRODUCTION

I

Robert Louis Stevensons Treasure Island is the quintessential British adventure story, and like so many such is aimed at a young and chiefly male readership. It belongs in part to the castaway tradition, commencing with Robinson Crusoe and continuing with The Swiss Family Robinson and Marryats Masterman Ready, all of which Stevenson read as a boy. But like other Stevenson tales, it was also inspired by the example and form of Sir Walter Scotts historical romances, and contains as well characters obviously indebted to Charles Dickens, who had by midcentury replaced Scott as the popular author of the day.

But as for the specifics of influence, Stevenson sums up his own sense of the tradition of adventure and individual talent in his poem To the Hesitating Purchaser, with which Treasure Island opens, citing three predecessors in the genre: Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave, / Or Cooper of the wood and wave. W. H. G. Kingston, author of Peter the Whaler and other nautical adventure stories written for boys, has been pretty much forgotten save by scholars of childrens literature, while R. M. Ballantynes The Coral Island still has resonance, if only because it was parodied in William Goldings Lord of the Flies.

But James Fenimore Cooper, the American Scott as he was called in his day, continues to be an author of considerable stature, celebrated for having created in the Leatherstocking Tales an epic of the frontier that inspired many imitators but no real competition. So famous are the historical romances in which his buckskin-clad hunter figures that most modern readers are unaware that Cooper wrote more stories of the wave than of the wood, anticipating the far greater romances of Herman Melville by drawing upon his own early career as a merchant sailor and officer in the U.S. Navy.

Of these The Pilot, written to correct errors of seamanship in Scotts The Pirate and featuring John Paul Jones as the titular character; The Red Rover, a tale of pirate adventures with a captain who closely resembles Lord Byron; and The Sea Lions, about the hazards of hunting fur seals in the Antarctic, are perhaps the best, and certainly were read and admired in Stevensons own day. Indeed, as I hope to show, Stevenson adapted elements from The Sea Lions for Treasure Island, much as he admitted in a preface written in 1894 (and included here) to having borrowed, among other items, a palisade from Captain Marryats Masterman Ready, a skeleton from Edgar Allan Poes The Gold-Bug, and, most important, his opening episode from Washington Irvings