Extract from Louise Welsh's Preface to 'Kidnapped'
Kidnapped
Robert Louis (pronounced Lewis) Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh to Thomas and Margaret Stevenson. Thomas was the head of the family firm and intended Louis to take his place. It was no mean objective. The writer was eventually to become,
...the most famous of the Stevensons, but he was not the most productive. Between 1790 and 1940, eight members of the Stevenson family planned, designed and constructed the ninety-seven manned lighthouses that still speckle the Scottish coast, working in conditions and places that would be daunting even for modern engineers.
In retrospect Thomas's desire for his son to become a key part of the family firm seems a strangely unrealistic ambition for such a practical man. Louis was plagued by ill-health throughout his life, and even had his inclinations lain in that direction it is doubtful whether his constitution could have withstood the travails of the North Sea. He did, however, begin an apprenticeship, making several excursions on his own and accompanying his father on his 1869 annual tour of inspection, calling at Orkney, Lewis and Skye. The trip provided,
...plenty to fascinate Louis, but of a romantic, not a technical, nature. At Lerwick he heard all about tobacco and brandy smuggling, and at Fair Isle he saw the inlet in which the flagship of the Armada had been wrecked . . . the impressions that his engineering experiences (or rather the long observations of the sea and the Scottish coasts they afforded) made on him fuelled his lifetime's writing.
Robert Louis Stevenson may have managed to avoid the rigours of lighthouse engineering, escaping into literature via a law degree (intended to appease his father), but he was as entranced by the sea as any of the Stevenson clan. Although his crossing to America a year after the publication of Kidnapped was in conditions that would have appalled most travellers, Louis proclaimed himself delighted.
The voyage was a huge success. We all enjoyed it (bar my wife) to the ground; sixteen days at sea with a cargo of hay, matches, stallions and monkeys in a ship that rolled like God Almighty, and with no style on, and plenty of sailors to talk to, and the endless pleasures of the sea - the romance of it, the sport of the scratch dinner and the smashing crockery, the pleasure - an endless pleasure - of balancing to the swell.
Stevenson's own experiences and travels were a consistent source of inspiration. His first published book, An Inland Voyage (1878) was an account of a canoe trip in northwest France, followed in 1879 by a second travelogue, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévannes. Stevenson was to continue writing about his travels throughout his life, notably in The Silverado Squatters (1883) and The Amateur Immigrant (1895), so perhaps it is inevitable that actual locations feed his fiction.
Extract from Louise Welsh's preface to Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped by kind permission of Canongate Books, Edinburgh, 2006, and remains the copyright of Louise Welsh.
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'Kidnapped' is Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure novel. David Balfour sets off to find his last remaining relatives, but is tricked into boarding a ship, and finds himself bound for slavery in Carolina.