Kidnapped
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Summary
Newly orphaned at seventeen, David Balfour walks to the House of Shaws to claim what family and fortune he can from his miserly uncle Ebenezer, who tries to kill him almost at once by sending him up a ruined stair tower in the dark, then, when that fails, has him drugged and carried aboard Captain Hoseason's ship to be sold into servitude in the Carolinas. The ship picks up Alan Breck Stewart, a proud, quarrelsome Jacobite agent, and when the crew turns on him David sides with Alan and helps him fight them off, forging an unlikely friendship across the very real divide between David's cautious Lowland Whig upbringing and Alan's Highland loyalty to the exiled Stuarts. The ship wrecks off the coast, and soon after coming ashore David and Alan witness the murder of Colin Roy Campbell, the King's unpopular factor known as the Red Fox, a killing that David knows Alan did not commit but that puts them both under suspicion regardless. The two flee together across the Highlands, through the heather and the famous quarrel that nearly ends their friendship for good before circumstance patches it back together, until they reach safety in the Lowlands. David finally confronts his uncle with the help of the lawyer Rankeillor, forcing Ebenezer to admit the fraud and settle two thirds of the family estate's income on David for life. The novel ends with David and Alan parting on Corstorphine Hill outside Edinburgh, Alan slipping away toward exile in France while David turns to collect the fortune that is now, at last, actually his.
Stevenson keeps the pace relentless once the kidnapping itself is done, one escape or chase or argument following hard on the last, and David's own growing nerve across the journey gives the adventure a real emotional throughline rather than just a string of incidents. It reads quickly and rewards a reader who enjoys landscape as much as plot, since the Highlands themselves, bleak and beautiful by turns, are as vivid a presence as either man crossing them.
Stevenson built the murder plot around the real, still unsolved Appin murder of 1752, though he set his own story a year earlier, and he took David's surname from his own mother's maiden name.
Historical Context & Significance
Young Folks magazine serialized Kidnapped from May to July 1886, and Cassell and Company published it as a book that same year. It sold well and was well received while Stevenson was alive, one part of the run of adventure fiction, alongside Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, that made his name in the 1880s.
After Stevenson's death in 1894, critics for a time filed the novel away as merely a boys' adventure, a reputation it did not fully shake until a mid twentieth century revival restored its standing as serious fiction, admired since by writers including Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and Hilary Mantel. Stevenson wrote a sequel, Catriona, in 1893 to carry David's story forward, and the book has drawn around ten film and television adaptations since 1917, along with a 2004 sculpture in Corstorphine marking the spot where David and Alan part ways.