When I was just turning twelve, my parents gave me a stack of five brand-new paperbacks for Christmas. I seem to recall that they were chosen by my father, which was kind of rare, since my mother typically did most of the Christmas gift planning and shopping when my sisters and I were growing up. It’s possible that she wanted him to pick out some proper literature that would steer me away from “those damn comic books,” but I can’t be sure.
But I do remember that my dad took a genuine interest in me having some good books to read going into the new year. It was part of a literary dynamic between the two of us that I always appreciated, even if I could never fully explain it – even now, fifty years after that Christmas and almost fourteen years after his passing.
It was an interesting selection of books for a twelve-year-old in the mid-1970s. There were three by Mark Twain: Life on the Mississippi, a memoir of his days as a steamboat pilot before the Civil War; Roughing It, his memoir of the American West in the 1860s; and a collection of short stories. The other two were Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.
They were not easy reads. Of the Twain books, I read the short stories, but I had to shelve the other two for a couple years until I could get my head around the author’s dry wit and keen insight into human nature. (I had already read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer a year or two earlier, but Life on the Mississippi and Roughing It were decidedly more adult in their content and tone.) Robinson Crusoe, meanwhile, was about as dry as my father warned me it might be – part travelogue and part survival guide, all of it written in early 18th century British English.
Treasure Island was also a struggle in its own way. Stevenson’s 19th century Scottish prose was formal and stiff, and the story was loaded with a combination of maritime terminology and pirate slang that was hard to grasp. It was a tale of adventure written primarily for boys, but it was written for boys of a different era. Maybe I would have appreciated the story more if I’d been more familiar with its author. I knew almost nothing about Stevenson at the time.
He was born 175 years ago this month (November 13, 1850) in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father was a lighthouse engineer, and Robert was expected to continue family business. But the younger Stevenson had other plans. By his mid-twenties, he had immersed himself in London’s literary community, and despite consistently poor health – which had plagued him since childhood and would continue throughout his life – he spent the next few years traveling and writing.
He started writing Treasure Island in 1881, shortly after his marriage to Fanny van de Grift Osbourne, an American woman whom he’d met in France. Fanny had a son by a previous marriage, and the new family took up residence in Braemar, Scotland, where the idea for the book initially came to him. He continued working on it after they relocated to Bournemouth, along the southern coast of England.
Some accounts suggest that Stevenson originally concocted the tale to entertain his stepson. Whatever the motivation, he took to the project with great enthusiasm and high expectations about its eventual success. He told one friend: “It’s quite silly and horrid fun, and what I want is the best book about buccaneers that can be had.”
The story was serialized in seventeen weekly installments in the pages of Young Folks magazine between 1881 and 1882, then published in a single volume in 1883. Initially, the book was well received, but Stevenson and his work fell out of favor in subsequent decades. Throughout much of the 20th century, many literary scholars and historians dismissed him as a second-rate writer, but he has been regarded more favorably in recent times. Today, Treasure Island is considered the most widely known and possibly the most influential pirate tale ever written. Most of the tropes commonly associated with pirate stories – buried treasure, tropical islands, mutiny at sea, hardened scoundrels with wooden legs and parrots perched on their shoulders – can be traced back to Stevenson’s 142-year-old novel.
I was too young to recognize or appreciate any of that when I was twelve. So fifty years later, I’m heading back to Treasure Island via the same Dell paperback edition that my father gave me in 1975. After decades of Dickens and Shakespeare, my grasp of British dialect from earlier centuries is a little firmer now than it was then. And I have the miracle(?) of Google to help me navigate the language of sailing and the sea.
I’m sure I’m not the first adult to make the return trip. Film critic and historian Roger Ebert once wrote that he – like many of his contemporaries – never cared much for Stevenson’s Treasure Island or Kidnapped when he was a boy. “But I did read the books later, when I was no longer a kid, and I enjoyed them enormously,” he said. “The fact is, Stevenson is a splendid writer of stories for adults, and he should be put on the same shelf with Joseph Conrad and Jack London instead of in between Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan.”
Jim Hawkins, the courageous and resourceful young protagonist of Treasure Island, makes a vow by the end of the story to never return to the island after narrowly escaping it with his life. Considering the perils of the preceding chapters, one can hardly blame him. But I’m going back nevertheless.
Raise the mainsail and pass the rum. Buried treasure awaits.