The isolated inn the arrival of Billy Bones Blind Pew tap-tapping through the mist the unseen but unignorable one-legged man the delivery of the Black Spot … Stevenson wrote the scenes very quickly (he wrote the whole first half of the book in about a fortnight, in fact) and the speed of his creating shows in brilliant ways. In fact, I still find it impossible to read it (especially the opening chapters) without inventing a childhood I never had, and half-scaring myself now as I wish that I had done then. I would have been 19 then and the book certainly passed the excitement test. It was only when I got to university that I started to catch up and read a lot of things I might reasonably have been expected to know already – Treasure Island among them. I read Beatrix Potter, pretended to read The Wind in the Willows, then closed my eyes for 10 years and opened them again to find I was doing my A-levels. Not because my parents and I had anything against it in particular – we weren’t much in favour of books in general. In my own case, this is tricky because I didn’t read Treasure Island as a child. Yet in order for the book to keep working, it obviously has to be exciting as well as distinguished – and for that to happen, childhood impressions have to coalesce with adult ones. That’s part of the appeal, of course: when we read Treasure Island we feel that we’re in at the beginning of something. In the same sort of way, all stories of treasure-hunting have Jim Hawkins’ journey in the Hispaniola as their ghostly counterpart. Nowadays all pirates (though not Somali pirates, interestingly) are in some sense a version of Long John Silver, even when they have got two legs – think of Captain Jack Sparrow. He wanted to create an archetype, and he did.

To this end, he cheerfully admitted, “Plagiarism was rarely carried further.” When it was first published in 1883, Robert Louis Stevenson made no bones about it being a “boy’s adventure story”, and when he discussed its origin in other pieces of writing by other writers, he confirmed the impression.īy taking elements of his narrative from Washington Irving and Daniel Defoe (as well as lesser-known figures such as WHG Kingston, Captain Frederick Marryat and Charles E Pearce), he allied his own tale with others that were designed to make a specific appeal to younger readers. We think it’s proof of the new freedom to cross what used to be barriers.Īnd how does this affect our view of children’s books from the past? Do we expect the new dispensation will allow them to escape their categories as well? Treasure Island is an interesting case in point. If we see an adult reading one of their books we don’t think it’s a sign of regression. W hen is a children’s book not a children’s book? JK Rowling and Philip Pullman have changed the answer to that question.

Treasure island characters