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    A Study Guide for Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped"
    A Study Guide for Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped"
    A Study Guide for Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped"
    Ebook46 pages30 minutes

    A Study Guide for Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535826839
    A Study Guide for Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped" - Gale

      10

      Kidnapped

      Robert Louis Stevenson

      1886

      Introduction

      Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped (1886) is widely regarded as one of the finest boys' adventure novels ever written, although it is often overshadowed by the author's other major adventure tale, Treasure Island (1883). Still, many critics and scholars have agreed with Stevenson himself that the novel is, as he wrote in a letter to his father, "a far better story and far sounder at heart than Treasure Island."

      Stevenson was inspired to write Kidnapped after researching an important murder trial that took place in Scotland in 1752—the Appin Murder, which figures prominently in the plot of the book. The novel tells the story of David Balfour, a poor Scottish teen who discovers upon his father's death that he is actually the heir to a wealthy estate. Before he can claim it, however, his greedy uncle has the boy kidnapped by sailors and taken to sea, to be sold into slavery in the American Colonies. The novel weaves fiction with the significant historical events of the time and includes detailed descriptions of various Scottish locales Stevenson had visited during his youth. Although the novel contains a great deal of phonetically rendered Scottish dialect and words specific to the region, the compelling story has helped the book remain a favorite among young readers for more than a century.

      Author Biography

      Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of a lighthouse engineer. He was an only child, and suffered from illnesses made worse by the damp weather and air pollution in their ever-expanding capital city. Much of his youth was spent reading books, although he also enjoyed exploring the outdoors when his health allowed. He worked briefly with his father as an engineer in training. Although he was not consistently healthy enough to make it a career, this period of travel with his father opened his eyes to many new places such as Erraid, the Scottish tidal island on which David Balfour becomes shipwrecked in Kidnapped.

      Stevenson went to law school to please his father but never actually practiced law, preferring instead to write. His first books mainly concerned his travels, and are considered among the first and finest examples of what came to be called the travelogue. In Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), Stevenson wrote not only of the sights he saw, but also the history of the region and the sharp divide between Catholic and Protestant cultures—elements that would appear throughout much of his work, especially Kidnapped.

      While traveling, he met and later married Fanny Osbourne, a woman from California with a young son named Lloyd. One day he and Lloyd began playfully creating a treasure map that showed the location of a pirate's gold. This eventually grew into Stevenson's first truly popular work and his first novel, Treasure Island. This marked the start of a creative period in which he produced his best-known works, including Kidnapped, Strange

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