Historical Background

The incorporations of history and geography found in Kidnapped originate from Robert Louis Stevenson’s years as a student. And as a native of Edinburgh, Scotland, his birthplace was influential in the story as the city closest to David’s childhood home in the fictional town of Essendean and his eventual inheritance of the House of Shaws in Cramond. Well-educated in history and law, Stevenson had taken a further interest in the history of his homeland. According to Barry Menikoff in Narrating Scotland: The Imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson, he had long wanted to write a traditional history of Scotland before Kidnapped, accounting for novel’s accuracy regarding real-life characters and events (2). In addition, the study of history at the time was being closely intertwined with that of geography. Such an academic approach pushes against the modernizing world and tries to innovate and progress by means of an epic story, according to Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener in “The Romance of the Fin-de-siècle Adventure Story between History and Geography” (121-122). Therefore, Stevenson’s novel would attempt to relay history by methods perhaps unconventional today.

Stevenson had also written several volumes of letters to his family and friends when drafting the novel and during his travels throughout Scotland that would help form his image of the landscape. In the first volume of his letters, for example, Stevenson writes to his parents six years before Kidnapped was published of his interest to engage with history: he would have “a good ground to go upon” for his novel after he had “studied and written” two volumes of history books (225). Stevenson further addresses Scotland’s importance itself when he writes to a critic named T. Watts-Dunton in the second volume after Kidnapped is finished: he tells him that while writing the second part of the story where David and Alan travel through the Highlands together, “[he] found [himself] in another world” (48-49). Therefore, he went on tours there for “no work, only an essay” (48). Furthermore, Menikoff notes in “Toward the Production of a Text: Time, Space, and David Balfour” that Stevenson realized after publishing Kidnapped that due to the extensive Scottish history incorporated, the story of David Balfour “was only half told” (352).

Stevenson addresses the political history of Scotland in the mid-1700s by throwing David in the midst of the Appin murder, the death of Crown Factor Colin Roy Campbell of Glenure by an unidentified sniper, dubbing him both witness and supposed conspirator. According to Ian Duncan in his introduction to the novel’s Oxford World Classic’s edition, almost all the characters David meets through his association with the murder are real people, including Alan Breck Stewart, James of the Glens, Cluny Macpherson, and Robin Oig Macgregor (xiv). The Stewarts were still notorious at the time for the Jacobite uprising of 1745 in which they aimed to overrun the loyal clans to the Crown, such as the Campbells, to take back the throne in Scotland. Therefore, their clan was suspected of murder, particularly Alan Breck and James of the Glens as the wrongly accused (xiii-xiv). While the story suggests that Alan is innocent of the murder, his acceptance of it as the nature of the morality of two feuding tribes, according to W.W. Robson in “On Kidnapped,” displays typical clan behavior in a turbulent time (101). Furthermore, while Alan manages to escape the mainland, just as he does in the novel, James is arrested, tried, and hanged (xiv). Stevenson was able to get his hands on the official document for James’s trial during his writing of the novel. Menikoff states in Narrating Scotland that since the Appin murder was one of the most famous events in Scottish history, such information allowed Stevenson to hold “a key to documentary history of the Highlands” (133).