Chapter 9 ‘I sometimes like to read a novel’: books and reading in Victorian adventure romance

Leaving the books behind

Reading’s sedentary nature makes it naturally at odds with the adventurer’s physical journeying. In the opening scene of Buchan’s Salute to Adventurers (1915), set in the religious wars of late seventeenth-century Scotland, the eighteen-year-old hero, who has set out on foot from the south-west of Scotland to complete his education in Edinburgh, is immediately assaulted by driving rain, making him thank Providence that ‘I had left my little Dutch Horace behind me in the book-box.’³ Andrew Garvald’s journey is quickly overtaken by events as he falls among religious fanatics and is arrested by a troop of passing dragoons. He never makes it back to college; his book (almost certainly an Elzevir duodecimo), which has already travelled from the continent to Scotland, must journey without him.⁴ The opening scene of Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) presents a similar picture of books being left behind. David Balfour locks the door of his dead father’s house and sets forth on his journey to the House of Shaws, taking leave of Mr Campbell, the local minister. Campbell has already purchased David’s father’s books and plenishing so that he can resell them at a profit to the local dominie. Books are part of the fixtures of life the orphaned David must forsake for the fluidity of uncertain adventure – the ‘pickle money’ from the proceeds of the sale being more useful to him on his journey.⁵ Among the other items Campbell hands him is a Bible – his prayerful wish being that it will see David ‘into a better land’ (ch. 1, p. 9). Though he quotes from the Bible at one point in his adventures, there is no evidence that David reads the volume given to him by the minister or keeps it with him during his travels. The lands over which he must travail are a test of the body and of the inner conscience, not of studied moral learning.

As has often been remarked, Kidnapped observes the standard pattern of the romance form by commencing with a journey away from home, only to undercut it with the title of the second chapter – ‘I come to my journey’s end’. In his uncle’s house David finds ‘a great number of books, both Latin and English’. We are told little about these, other than they afford David ‘great pleasure all the afternoon’, until he discovers an inscription in his father’s hand on the ‘fly-leaf of a chapbook (one of Patrick Walker’s)’ (ch. 4, p. 22). Patrick Walker, known as ‘the Cameronian pedlar’, wrote popular biographies of leading Covenantors of the seventeenth century which were a favourite of Stevenson’s own reading – his heavily marked copy of Walker’s Biographia Presbyteriana (1728) survives.⁶ Just as tales and histories of the persecution of the Covenanters fuelled the author’s imagination, we might conceive David’s imagination being fuelled by the chapbook. It might even serve as a warning for the persecution that awaits him at the hands of his uncle. But David is a poor reader. He fails to detect that the inscription on the flyleaf discloses his uncle’s deception: his usurpation of his elder brother’s (and so David’s) rightful inheritance. In an effort to get the baffling image ‘out of my head’, David pulls down other books from the shelf – ‘many interesting authors old and new, history, poetry and story-book’ (ch. 4, p. 22), but the riddle of the flyleaf inscription sticks to him. Naively, he confronts his uncle with innocent questions that lead first to an attempt on his life and then to his kidnapping. The alert reader of Stevenson’s romance must pick up the clues David misses.

As a passive adventure hero, it is appropriate that David should prove a naive reader of books and situations – at least at first. More successful adventurers are those better able to interpret the linguistic and bibliographic codes of the books and documents they encounter.⁷ In Rider Haggard’s She (1887), the whole mystery and purpose of the quest depends upon a successful reading of texts. Horace Holly is entrusted with the care of a locked iron chest given to him by the father of his ward Leo Vincey. On Leo’s father’s instructions, the box is opened on the son’s twenty-fifth birthday and is found to contain a letter, an Egyptian potsherd bearing some Greek uncial writing and two rolls of parchment carrying translations of the writing on the potsherd, one in English and one in black-letter Latin. The letter and the English and Latin translations of the text on the potsherd are presented verbatim to the reader, the Latin translation in an appropriately Gothic Victorian type. Holly also presents his own transcription of the uncial Greek writing and, ‘for general convenience in reading’, a further transcription into the ‘cursive character’.⁸ The potsherd, in addition, has other markings in Greek, Latin and English, which Holly again both translates and presents to the reader in their original script. It is from this relic of the past – carefully interpreted by the scholar Holly – that Leo Vincey learns his strange line of descent, a discovery that prompts the quest to Africa to find, and as it transpires to slay, the evil woman who killed his ancestors.

On one level, the presentation of these documents in their original forms recreates the textual substance of the mystery that forms the object of the quest, placing Haggard’s reader in the same position as his characters. On another level, however, the various transcriptions of the ancient writing – both those on the parchment and Holly’s own – reinforce how the text on the potsherd is, in Robert Fraser’s words, a ‘cultural reincarnation’ of a lost civilisation which survives in encoded form.⁹ The legend that unfolds in She has already been written in – or rather on – an ancient form of the ‘book’. The transcriptions and, by extension, both Holly’s narrative and Haggard’s novel are thus further cultural reincarnations, part of what Fraser calls the ‘textual recycling’¹⁰ that preserves the legend.

A similar pattern is followed in King Solomon’s Mines, where the map that leads the adventurers to the mines has been handed to Quatermain by José Silvestre, the descendant of a Portuguese explorer. The map is drawn on a torn linen rag which also contains some text ‘written in rusty letters’ – the blood of the explorer (ch. 2, p. 20). The documents convey the location of Solomon’s treasure, preserving the legend of the mines which has been passed down through oral tradition. As Thomas Vranken has argued, it is surely not coincidental that the map and the explorer’s story are written on a substance used for pre-industrial paper production – linen rag.¹¹ Readers of early editions of the work were supplied with a fold-out facsimile of the map as a frontispiece – simulated ancient paper printed on industrial Victorian paper.¹² In this instance, however, reading is fraught with danger. The dying Silvestre explains that the rag has been in the family for centuries ‘but none have cared to read it till at last I did. And I have lost my life over it’ (ch. 2, p. 20). Quatermain, for his part, explains that he has never shown the document or the map to anyone before, ‘except my dear wife, who is dead … and a drunken old Portuguese trader who translated it for me, and had forgotten all about it next morning’ (ch. 2, p. 21). The textual instantiation of the truth of the legendary mines becomes a Pandora’s box for whoever opens the book of mystery, inside or outside of the novel.¹³

What these examples show is that in adventure romance it is invariably documents of one kind or another that trigger the quest. Fragments of text written in fly leaves, on Egyptian pots, or on scraps of the raw material of paper carry the mysteries or legends that have been passed down through time. We are encouraged to believe that no adventurer would set out in search of King Solomon’s mines without documents to verify their existence and location. Books and texts may get left behind in adventure romance, but their careful reading matters.

‘This is no furniture for the scholar’s library’

In his Dedication to Kidnapped, Stevenson draws a distinction between romance-reading and scholarly pursuits. Cautioning his friend Charles Baxter not to look for historical accuracy in his story, he writes:

This is no furniture for the scholar’s library, but a book for the winter evening school-room when the tasks are over and the hour for bed draws near; and honest Alan, who was a grim old fire-eater in his day, has in this new avatar no more desperate purpose than to steal some young gentleman’s attention from his Ovid, carry him awhile into the Highlands and the last century, and pack him to bed with some engaging images to mingle with his dreams.

Romance-reading is presented here as a distraction from another kind of reading experience, its intensity carried over beyond the moment into dreams. Stevenson explored the connections between reading and dreaming in several of his critical essays, notably ‘A Gossip on Romance’, written in 1882, shortly after the serialisation of Treasure Island. His arguments in this essay – which amount to a manifesto for the romance form – create a complex dynamic for understanding the portrayal of books and reading in his texts, one that underpins the work of other romance writers. On the one hand, an art that advocates the primacy of ‘the problems of the body and of the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure’, as Stevenson puts it, must of necessity eschew the enclosed solitary world of actual reading undertaken ‘when the hour for bed draws near’ as it does for the young gentleman reading Kidnapped.¹⁴ On the other hand, Stevenson’s argument that the act of reading is what prompts ‘the realisation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of common men’, and that the true mark of ‘the great creative writer’ is ‘to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the idea laws of the day-dream’, leads him to cast the adventure narrative into close alignment with the act of reading.¹⁵ Adventure stories may reject reading at the level of narrative, but they retain at the level of form a self-awareness of how the narrative should be read and what the implications of that reading should be.

Like Stevenson’s image of the distracted young gentleman, romance narratives commonly open with a rejection of other forms of reading. In the first chapter of She, we find Holly – who wishes he could do something with the outside rather than the ‘inside of my head’ – in his rooms at Cambridge, flinging down a mathematical textbook on which he has been ‘grinding away’ (ch. 1, p. 7). One reading experience is flung aside to make way for a narrative that will subordinate mental experience – the ‘inside of my head’ – for outside adventure. This simple dichotomy underpins the whole structure of Buchan’s early historical romance John Burnet of Barns (1898). Although the adventuring hero claims that ‘the making of tales is an art unknown to me’, John is an accomplished scholar who during the course of the tale informs us that he has produced a written exposition of the works of Descartes with his own additions ‘which I intend, if God so please, to give soon to the world’.¹⁶ In this instance, the traditional caveat warning the reader not to ‘look for any great skill in the setting down’ of his tale (ch. 1, p. 13) is convincing only at the level of genre: a mind attuned to critical exegesis may legitimately approach the task of writing adventure fiction with uncertainty. John describes himself as ‘born between two stools; for, while I could never be content to stay at home and spend my days among books, on the other hand the life of unlettered action was repugnant’ (bk 2, ch. 8, p. 191). Throughout the narrative, he oscillates between a scholarly and soldiering life as the events shift between scenes of college learning in Glasgow and Leiden and the field of battle. In the early chapters Buchan subjects the reader to a lengthy summary of John’s reading in Greek, Latin and natural philosophy, but the sight of his fearsome yet graceful cousin Gilbert – who becomes the rival to the hand of his sweetheart Marjory – leading his troop off to battle unlocks his wish to ‘fling’ his books into the Clyde and head off to the wars (bk 1, ch. 4, p. 54).

The image in this novel of the adventuring hero as a reluctant reader and scholar is not, however, as simple as it first seems. In contrast to Haggard, Buchan does not set up a simple dichotomy between the battlefield and the library or university. John’s taste for the ‘profession of arms’ is fostered by the ‘many martial tales’ he reads in childhood – chronicles of Froissart, a history of the Norman kings, Tacitus and Livy, and Homer (bk 1, ch. 2, p. 30). Reciprocally, his scholarly ambitions take their inspiration from an inner lust for adventure. Tired of the ‘contradictions and phantasies’ he finds in the followers of Aristotle, and critical of the disparaging of the mind he detects in ‘Bacon and Galileo and the other natural philosophers’, he is inspired by a reading of Descartes to put aside his doubts and commit himself to physical action. Towards the end of the novel he advances the claims of his own writings on the philosophy of the Greeks in opposition to those with deeper learning, averring: ‘my mind, since it has ever been clear from sedentary humours and the blunders which come from mere knowledge of books, may have had in sundry matters a juster view and a clearer insight’ (bk 4, ch, 9, p. 442). A moderate among religious and political extremists, John’s reading tempers the fanaticism of the adventuring spirit embodied in his cousin, just as his own appetite for adventure leads him to a worldly insight beyond the ‘blunders’ of philosophical theorising. In a novel about reconciliation at the personal and national level, books and adventure are codependent and essential to resolving the conflict of a man and a nation caught between ‘two stools’.

A further episode illustrates the symbolic function of books in Buchan’s romance. Summoned home from university in Leiden, having temporarily retreated from the battlefield, John becomes a fugitive when he finds his reputation sullied and his lands seized by government forces. He takes to the hills but is one day struck by a great desire ‘for some book to read in’ (bk 3, ch. 13, p. 314). Risking his life, he sets out for Barns pursued by soldiers. With ‘mad recklessness’ (bk 3, ch. 13, p. 315) he enters the library, seizing the first volume he lays his hands on. Essentially, this episode is just another thrilling incident in the larger set of adventures, but it is also a reminder that for this scholar-adventurer a life of solitude in the moorland hills is not easy to endure without the comforts of reading. The death-defying trip to the library is symbolic of what John has lost at this stage of the narrative – the stability of home and the rights of ownership. The final chapter pictures John restored to his home sitting in his study ‘looking forth of the narrow window over the sea of landscape’ surrounded by ‘the mellow scent of old books and the faint fragrance of blossoms’ (bk 4, ch. 9, pp. 444–5) – proper furniture for an adventurer’s library.

‘A story like some ballad’

When Allan Quatermain reads José Silvestre’s document containing the blood-written testimony of his ancestor Captain Good, one of his adventuring companions, declares: ‘I have been round the world twice, and put in at most ports, but may I be hung if I ever heard a yarn like that out of a story book, or in it either, for the matter of that’ (ch. 2, p. 22). The current online edition of the OED defines ‘yarn’ in its secondary sense of storytelling as ‘to “spin a yarn”, tell a story; also, to chat or talk’. The usage, which interestingly dates from the early nineteenth century, underlines the primacy of the oral in the romance form, even when it is used in relation to the written word. As Fraser argues, ‘romance seems to have approximated in the eyes of late-Victorian people to what we now call “orature”, something handed down by word of mouth’.¹⁷ Orality is written deep into the lexical fabric of romance narratives of this period. ‘I am going to tell you a story’ (ch. 1, p. 19) is how Sir Henry Curtis begins his account of his brother’s expedition into Africa in search of King Solomon’s mines, and the men are frequently pictured ‘yarning away’ (ch. 4, p. 54) while on their journey into the interior. This characteristic is developed in a more pervasive way in Kidnapped. The turbulent relationship between the Jacobite Alan Breck and the Whig David Balfour is built on a constant exchange of stories. When Alan recounts the persecution of the Jacobites at the hands of the Campbells, David’s response is to call it ‘a strange story’ (ch. 13, p. 77). Later when he hears Mr Henderland’s view on the matter he calls it ‘a poor story’ (ch. 16, p. 100). Stories capture the moral complexity that political allegiances elide. At the height of their conflict, when David judges Alan ‘blood-guilty in the first degree’, Alan invokes fairy lore – ‘the story of the Man and the Good People’ (ch. 18, p. 108) – to persuade him of the requirement for personal loyalty above political allegiance. Significantly, the other narrative layer of Kidnapped – David’s wrongful disinheritance – is likewise cast in a form that draws on oral folklore. Having failed to pick up the truth of his uncle’s deception from the evidence in the books, David obliquely discloses the mystery to himself when he recalls how ‘there came up into my mind (quite unbidden by me and even discouraged) a story like some ballad I had heard folks singing, of a poor lad that was a rightful heir and a wicked kinsman that tried to keep him from his own’ (ch. 4, p. 23). The tale of David’s journey towards his ‘kingdom’, as the heading of the penultimate chapter has it, is thus framed as a re-enactment of a sung ballad – the unfolding of a legendary tale that has sung its way into David’s head.

The appeal to oral traditions of storytelling in these texts nevertheless carries a paradox. At a basic level, orality and writing are entwined because the oral is inscribed in the written – the printed form of the texts themselves.¹⁸ In this context, it is significant that the romance revival of the late nineteenth century took place alongside an extended critical debate about fiction and reading which, as Stephen Arata notes, was characterised by a new interest in the activity of reading itself – ‘what it is, how it is best done, and to what ends’.¹⁹ Stevenson’s large body of critical writing was a major contribution to this debate.²⁰ In one essay from 1887 he presents the experience of reading in terms of physical enclosure leading to a mental awakening. Recalling his repeated readings of Dumas’s The Vicomte of Bragelonne (1847–50) when he lived alone among the Pentland hills during the winter, Stevenson writes:

I would return in the early night from one of my patrols with the shepherd … and I would sit down with the Vicomte for a long, silent, solitary lamplight evening by the fire. And yet I know not why I call it silent, when it was enlivened with such a clatter of horse-shoes, and such a rattle of musketry, and such a stir of talk; or why I call those evenings solitary in which I gained so many friends.²¹

The ‘silent, solitary’ venue of reading becomes in the mind ‘a place as busy as a city, bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and sounding with delightful speech’.²² In other essays, this mental awakening is linked explicitly to the creative imagination. In ‘The Genesis of The Master of Ballantrae’ (an essay posthumously published in 1896), Stevenson recalls how the idea of writing such a story came to him during an isolated walk on a ‘fine frosty night’, straight after having ‘finished my third or fourth perusal of The Phantom Ship’. The sense of one story preceding another is recognised as the very substance of writing and reading romance: ‘I saw that Marryat, not less than Homer, Milton, and Virgil, profited by the choice of a familiar and legendary subject; so that he prepared his readers on the very title-page.’²³ Stevenson here anticipates modern theories of genre fiction, which emphasise how certain forms of literature rely on a set of conventions that are anticipated by a reader before and during the process of reading: just as in detective fiction there will be a body, so in adventure romance there will be a journey or quest and a legend. As Stevenson writes in ‘A Gossip on Romance’:

It is not character but incident that woos us out of our reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves; some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realised in the story with enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance.²⁴

The requirement in romance to echo a pre-existing tale – whether directly through conscious allusion or indirectly through the deployment of familiar tropes – is what allows Stevenson, in his essay on the genesis of Treasure Island, to excuse himself of the plagiarisms contemporary readers detected in the work. Other writers leave behind them ‘footprints on the sands of time’ into which all writers of romance must tread.²⁵ Romance narratives may be couched in ballad form or re-enact legendary tales passed down orally, but the spectre of reading and other books hover perceptibly behind these apparently anti-literary works.

For Stevenson this crucial dynamic was more than a simple matter of genre and intertextuality. In a late, fragmentary essay, ‘Rosa Quo Locorum’, he meditates on childhood reading, positing that a child’s apprehension of life arises from a response to hearing and reading stories: ‘The child is conscious of an interest, not in literature but in life. A taste for the precise, the adroit, or the comely in the use of words, comes late; but long before that he has enjoyed in books a delightful dress rehearsal of experience.’²⁶ A common trope of adventure romance is to contrast the realism of a scene with the hero’s prior apprehension of reality through books. During the flight in the heather in Kidnapped, David comments: ‘By what I have read in books, I think few that have held a pen were ever really wearied, or they would write of it more strongly’ (ch. 22, p. 139). These scenes form the most intensely physical part of David’s narrative, as the bodily conditions of his plight are rendered in close sensory detail. Yet David still reaches for metaphors, finding one in the act of reading. When he wishes to describe the darkening of a July night sky in the far north of the Highlands, he informs his readers: ‘you would have needed pretty good eyes to read, but for all that, I have often seen it darker in a winter midday’ (ch. 22, p. 138). Evoking the physical sensation of reading is necessary for Stevenson’s attempt at verisimilitude – the readers’ own eyes, fixed on the pages of the story, must be made to see the darkness. Reading has been a ‘dress-rehearsal’ for David’s experience, but for the reader of his story, in their enclosed space like Stevenson with Dumas, it must be the experience.

‘A mine of suggestion’

In the remainder of this chapter, I want to bring together the various threads of the discussion into a reading of some key scenes in Treasure Island. Serialised in Young Folks from 1 October 1881 to 28 January 1882, Stevenson’s ‘story for boys’²⁷ was the pioneering work of the romance revival, inspiring Haggard to write King Solomon’s Mines and influencing the form and style of many lesser works of adventure fiction aimed at a juvenile audience in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. At first glance, the work appears to follow the structural patterns mentioned above where books are left behind as the adventurers take to their journey. Jim Hawkins’s first meeting with Dr Livesey and Squire Trelawney takes place in the Squire’s library – ‘all lined with bookcases and busts upon the top of them’.²⁸ If the cases contain any books, Jim appears not to notice them; or perhaps he decides they are of no consequence to the story he has been asked to ‘write down’ (ch. 1, p. 1). Later, during the island adventure, when Jim returns to the Hispaniola just before his encounter with Israel Hands, he notices one of the doctor’s medical books ‘with half of the leaves gutted out’ – for ‘pipelights’, he supposes (ch. 25, p. 201–2). The image seems symbolic of the redundancy of reading in this ‘boy’s game’ (ch. 26, p. 214), which is about to take a deadly turn.

These instances of the absence or destruction of books underline the importance of orality to Treasure Island which both pervades the narrative and lies behind the work’s composition. Stevenson’s initial audience for the story was his stepson Lloyd Osbourne and the circle of family and friends who visited the Stevensons in Braemar in the wet summer and autumn of 1881. According to his own and his wife’s testimonies, the author ‘read aloud’ instalments of the story daily, and among the captive audience was his father who ‘not only heard with delight the daily chapter, but set himself acting to collaborate’.²⁹ Stevenson claimed that his father was responsible for the inventory of contents in Bones’s chest along with other descriptive elements of the story. This picture of oral exchange and collaborative authorship typifies the notion of textual recycling discussed above – the interdependency of reading or listening to stories and writing romance.

Oral exchange is also prominent in the text itself. Linking the work to Stevenson’s two-part essay ‘Talk and Talkers’ – where the author ‘elevates the activity of talk above any kind of literary endeavour’ – Amy R. Wong emphasises the recurrent interest in talk in Treasure Island: ‘Squire John Trelawney fatefully “blabs” secrets away, the marooned Benn Gunn is impossibly loquacious, Long John Silver is a smooth talker with a pet parrot.’³⁰ One might go further and note how talking in the form of stories creates the necessary anticipation of adventure: Billy Bones’s stories about hanging, walking the plank, and storms at seas are what ‘frightened people worst of all’ in the Admiral Benbow Inn (ch. 1, p. 5), and it is Bones who puts the image of ‘the seafaring man with one leg’ into Jim’s mind so that it haunts his dreams before he actually meets Long John Silver – at which point the story becomes reality.

It would be wrong to read Treasure Island as exclusively concerned with orality, however. Books and other written and printed documents play a significant part in the adventure, both as literal markers of reading and misreading, and as metaphors for channelling the text’s preoccupation with the moral problem of duty and allegiance. For one thing, it is not only Billy Bones’s stories that fuel Jim’s imagination. The map he secretes from Bones’s possessions performs a similar function. Before the voyage commences, Jim recalls how he ‘brooded’ over the map ‘in charming anticipations of strange islands and adventures … Sitting by the fire in the house-keeper’s room, I approached that island in my fancy, from every possible direction’ (ch. 7, p. 54). In his essay on the genesis of the story, Stevenson identifies the drawing of the map as the true inspiration for writing Treasure Island and ‘the chief part of my plot’.³¹ A map, he argues, provides an author with ‘a mine of suggestion’ – a threshold into an imaginative world: ‘The tale has a root there, it grows in that soil.’³² Like his author, Jim’s finds the map ‘a mine of suggestion’, and his brooding over it provokes an imaginative encounter with the island before the adventure has taken place.

Jim’s actions can be linked to Stevenson’s own childhood experiences recalled in the essay ‘Popular Authors’ (1888). Here Stevenson recounts how, when he had been unable to obtain the latest penny number of a favourite author, he would ‘study the windows of the stationer and try to fish out of subsequent woodcuts and their legends the further adventures of our favourites’.³³ A similar situation is explored in another essay, ‘ “A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured”’ (1884), where Stevenson recalls his childhood love of Skelt’s Juvenile Drama, the interactive model toy theatres packaged in magazine form. Here it is the materiality of the printed illustrations that triggers the creative imagination, and the material destruction of the prints – their disintegration into ‘dust’ – that signals the nightmare of imagination’s extinction.³⁴ In each case, it is images inspired by a pre-existing story that fuel the creative imagination and allow the story to continue. Crucially, however, that continuation depends upon the existence of print or illustration. Without a material text, there is no ‘mine of suggestion’, and no story.

Captain Flint’s map plays a crucial part in the narrative of Treasure Island as well, despite the fact that it proves ultimately useless – Ben Gunn having already moved the treasure from its original location. On the island, reading the map becomes less about finding treasure and more about discovering the truth about character and motive. This is evident in Silver’s first encounter with the map. Captain Smollett presents him not with the original document but an ‘accurate copy’, lacking the all-important red marks and written notes. Jim recognises it as a copy because it is printed on paper which has a ‘fresh look’ (ch. 12, p. 95). His reading of the materiality of the document is what allows him to follow the course of the game that subsequently takes place between Silver and the Captain: ‘Sharp as must have been his annoyance, Silver had the strength of mind to hide it’ (ch. 12, p. 95). Yet Jim picks up the bibliographical cue and sees beyond the hidden gaze. In his reading of this passage, Vranken highlights the difference between this document and the reproduction of Flint’s map printed as a frontispiece to the volume edition of the story in 1883. Emphasising the ‘strict eighteenth-century guise’ of the frontispiece, which in the first edition printed Flint’s crosses in red ink, Vranken argues that the reproduction, printed on industrial-made paper that would yellow over time, helps its readers to ‘imagine the materiality’ of Jim’s map, ‘the worn, yellowed paper on which it is drawn, and the world of pre-industrial print culture that it metonymically represents’.³⁵ Reader and character are placed in the same position of having to read the bibliographical features of a document as well as its actual content.

‘Speak like a book’

In Treasure Island books and documents have a metaphorical as well as a material significance. On the sea voyage, the coxswain, a ‘great confidant’ of Silver, tells Jim that the sea cook is ‘no common man … He had good schooling in his young days, and can speak like a book when so minded’ (ch. 10, p. 80). The estimate of Silver’s rhetorical powers ascribes to print a power and authority beyond orality. The scarcely literate coxswain is easily influenced by Silver’s eloquence. Elsewhere in the text, print is used as a metaphor for certainty. Bones tells Jim that in his moments of delirium – which only rum can hold at bay – he sees old Flint in the corner of the room ‘as plain as print’ (ch. 3, p. 20); later, when Jim has become attuned to Silver’s duplicity, he claims to be able to read the pirate’s thoughts ‘like print’ (ch. 32, p. 273).

For all the emphasis on talk, therefore, the ‘remarkable game’ (ch. 29, p. 246) played out on Treasure Island is articulated through metaphors of the book, as another pivotal scene illustrates. After Jim has cut loose the Hispaniola and shot Israel Hands, he returns to the stockade, only to find it has been taken by the pirates. Stranded in the enemy camp, he realises he must temporarily side with Silver. The pirates, mistakenly thinking Silver knows the location of the treasure because he has possession of the map, turn against him. From a distance, Jim observes the pirates in conference:

About halfway down the slope to the stockade, they were collected in a group; one held the light; another was on his knees in their midst, and I saw the blade of an open knife shine in his hand with varying colours, in the moon and torchlight.… I could just make out that he had a book as well as a knife in his hand; and was still wondering how anything so incongruous had come in their possession, when the kneeling figure rose once more to his feet, and the whole party began to move together towards the house. (ch. 29, p. 238)

The book is a Bible, out of which one of the pirates has torn a leaf to mark the ‘black spot’ – the signal that a pirate crew has turned against its captain. The leaf is handed to Silver. ‘Where might you have got the paper?’ Silver asks before quickly detecting traces of the final verses of Revelation: ‘Why hillo! look here, now: this aint lucky! You’ve gone and cut this out of a Bible. What fool’s cut a Bible?’ (ch. 29, p. 239). At the end of the scene, Silver tosses the paper to Jim, who describes it as ‘round about the size of a crown piece. One side was blank, for it had been the last leaf; the other contained a verse or two of Revelation – these words among the rest, which struck sharply home upon my mind: “Without are dogs and murderers”’ (ch. 29, p. 245). The King James Version known to Stevenson has: ‘For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie’ (Rev. 22.15). Jim may only have read or recalled the words that struck his mind most sharply, but it appears that the torn page, blackened with the wood ash the pirates have used for ink, cuts through the quotation.

For Silver, the desecration of the Bible is a sign that nothing good will come of the pirates’ actions; its owner, Dick, has ‘crossed his luck and spoiled his Bible’ (ch. 29, p. 245). In playing on Dick’s fears about having destroyed the word of God, however, Silver seizes on the book’s broken materiality as a metaphor for the now broken association between the mutineers:

‘It’ll do to kiss the book on still, won’t it?’ growled Dick, who was evidently uneasy at the curse he had brought upon himself.

‘A Bible with a bit cut out!’ returned Silver derisively. ‘Not it. It don’t bind no more’n a ballad-book.’ (ch. 29, p. 245)

As Alex Thomson points out, Stevenson is referring here to the pirate tradition of swearing an oath of allegiance on a Bible.³⁶ The disbound book symbolises the breaking of bonds among the pirates. Critics have made much of Stevenson’s pun on ‘duty’ in this critical scene, but we should be alert to the complexity of the verb ‘to bind’ as well. When Silver is handed the black spot, a crew member challenges him by the code which apparently makes him duty ‘bound’ to accept the deposition: ‘This crew has tipped you the black spot in full council, as in dooty bound; just you turn it over, as in dooty bound, and see what’s wrote there’ (ch. 29, p. 240). Silver’s response continues the metaphor: turning over the paper and seeing the word ‘Deposed’, he reacts calmly: ‘Very pretty wrote to be sure; like print, I swear’ (ch. 29, p. 240). In fact, as Jim later reveals when Silver tosses him the paper, not only is the written word on the document – ‘Depposed’ – misspelt, but the makeshift ink is already fading, blackening Jim’s fingers as he turns over the paper. And as he writes, Jim observes: ‘I have that curiosity beside me at this moment; but not a trace of writing now remains beyond a single scratch’ (ch. 29, p. 245). As Thomson argues, the disintegration of their document ‘confirms the insubstantial nature of the pirate’s access to textual authority’.³⁷ Crucially, however, it is the textual authority embedded in Stevenson’s deployment of bibliographical terminology that marks out the superiority of Silver, the man who can ‘speak like a book’. Silver’s reference to a ballad-book is telling, because a ballad-book, if it is a broadside, would not be bound at all, but printed on a single sheet and folded. His careful pun clinches his message that the pirates’ case for deposition is no more binding than a book without a binding.

The apparent fixity of print and the bound book, then, becomes a metaphor for the pervasive ambiguity that surrounds the problem of authority in Treasure Island, a problem that can be crystallised into a simple question: who has a right to the treasure? That question has provoked a host of critical responses to this deceptively simple ‘story for boys’. Close attention to the role of books and reading in the story, and in the adventure romance genre more widely, can offer new ways of approaching the matter, and to understanding the interplay between the written and the oral in the romance form.

Notes

1. 1.  H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885), ed. by Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), ‘Introduction’, p. 8. Further references are in the text.

2. 2.  In the Revised New Illustrated Edition of 1905, Haggard inserted a further reference to Quatermain’s reading when he makes his adventurer use a highfalutin phrase drawn ‘from the pages of a popular romance that I chanced to have read recently’ (H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (London: Cassell, 1905), p. 165).

3. 3.  John Buchan, Salute to Adventurers (1915; London: Thomas Nelson, 1922), ch. 1, p. 12.

4. 4.  Andrew later completes his education in Glasgow before sailing to America where the main adventures take place against the backdrop of the newly settled plantations in Virginia.

5. 5.  Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped (1886), ed. by Ian Duncan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), ch. 1, p. 9. Further references are in the text.

6. 6.  See Barry Menikoff, Narrating Scotland: The Imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), p. 189.

7. 7.  The terms ‘linguistic codes’ and ‘bibliographic codes’ are taken from Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 77.

8. 8.  H. Rider Haggard, She (1887), ed. by Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), ch. 3, p. 33. Further references are in the text.

9. 9.  Robert Fraser, Victorian Quest Romance: Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, and Conan Doyle (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998), pp. 44.

10. 10.  Fraser, Victorian Quest Romance, p. 45.

11. 11.  Thomas Vranken, Simulating Antiquity in Boys’ Adventure Fiction: Maps and Stains (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 16–18.

12. 12.  Reproduced in Vranken, Simulating Antiquity, p. 17.

13. 13.  As discussed below, the map in Stevenson’s Treasure Island performs a similar function.

14. 14.  Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (1882), repr. Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto & Windus, 1887), pp. 247–74 (p. 251).

15. 15.  Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on Romance’, p. 255.

16. 16.  John Buchan, John Burnet of Barns: A Romance (1898; London: Thomas Nelson, 1922), bk 1, ch. 1, p. 13; ch. 4, p. 52. Further references are in the text.

17. 17.  Fraser, Victorian Quest Romance, p. 7.

18. 18.  For a deeper exploration of this topic, see Penny Fielding’s chapter ‘Bookmen: Orality and Romance in the Later Nineteenth Century’, in her Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 132–52. Fielding usefully reminds us that one of the main advocates of the romance revival, Andrew Lang, was a prominent bibliophile.

19. 19.  Stephen Arata, ‘Stevenson Reading’, Journal of Stevenson Studies, 1 (2004), 192–200. For an account of the critical debate itself, see Kenneth Graham, English Criticism of the Novel 1865–1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 61–70.

20. 20.  For a detailed study, see Glenda Norquay, Robert Louis Stevenson and Theories of Reading (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

21. 21.  Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s’ (1887), repr. Memories and Portraits, pp. 228–46 (pp. 231–2).

22. 22.  Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s’, p. 232.

23. 23.  Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays in the Art of Writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905), pp. 135–42 (pp. 135–7).

24. 24.  Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on Romance’, p. 268.

25. 25.  ‘My First Book: Treasure Island’ (1894), repr. Essays in the Art of Writing, pp. 111–32 (pp. 120–1).

26. 26.  ‘Rosa Quo Locorum’, in The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. Miscellanies, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1896), pp. 302–12 (p. 302).

27. 27.  The appellation is Stevenson’s own. See ‘My First Book’, p. 118.

28. 28.  Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (London: Cassell, 1883), ch. 6, p. 46. Further references are in the text.

29. 29.  Stevenson, ‘My First Book’, p. 121–2. Stevenson’s account of the genesis of the work has provoked a lot of enquiry and contradictory opinion. For a summary of the debate, see the introduction to Centenary Edition of the work, ed. by Wendy R. Katz (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).

30. 30.  Amy R. Wong, ‘The Poetics of Talk in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 54(4) (2014), 901–22 (pp. 901, 902).

31. 31.  ‘My First Book’, p. 127. In his introduction to the Tusitala edition of Stevenson’s works, Lloyd Osbourne maintains that he, not Stevenson, drew the original map. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (London: William Heinemann, 1923), p. xviii.

32. 32.  Stevenson, ‘My First Book’, p. 131.

33. 33.  Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Popular Authors’, Scribner’s Magazine 4 (July 1888), 122–8 (p. 125).

34. 34.  Repr. Memories and Portraits, pp. 213–27 (p. 227).

35. 35.  Vranken, Simulating Antiquity, p. 15.

36. 36.  Alex Thomson, ‘ “Dooty Is Dooty”: Pirates and Sea-Lawyers in Treasure Island’, in Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Grace Moore (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 211–22 (p. 212). It is worth noting that while, according to Silver, the Bible is no longer of use for the purpose of oath-swearing, Dick clutches it and prays when the pirates think they hear Captain Flint’s voice come back from the dead (see ch. 32, pp. 270, 272).

37. 37.  Thomson, ‘Dooty’, p. 213.

Bibliography of secondary literature

• Arata, Stephen, ‘Stevenson Reading’, Journal of Stevenson Studies, 1 (2004), 192–200
• Fielding, Penny, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
• Fraser, Robert, Victorian Quest Romance: Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, and Conan Doyle (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998)
• Graham, Kenneth, English Criticism of the Novel 1865–1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965)
• Katz, Wendy R., ‘Introduction’, in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, ed. by Wendy R. Katz (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. xix–xli
• Luckhurst, Roger, ‘Introduction’, in H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885), ed. by Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. vii–xvii
• McGann, Jerome J., The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991)
• Menikoff, Barry, Narrating Scotland: The Imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005)
• Norquay, Glenda, Robert Louis Stevenson and Theories of Reading (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007)
• Osbourne, Lloyd, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (London: Heinemann, 1923), pp. ix–xix
• Stevenson, Robert Louis, Essays in the Art of Writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905)
• Stevenson, Robert Louis, ‘A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s’ (1887), repr. Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto & Windus, 1887), pp. 228–46
• Stevenson, Robert Louis, ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (1882), repr. Memories and Portraits (London: Chatto & Windus, 1887), pp. 247–74
• Stevenson, Robert Louis, ‘Popular Authors’, Scribner’s Magazine 4 (July 1888), 122–8
• Stevenson, Robert Louis, ‘Rosa Quo Locorum’, in The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. Miscellanies, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1896), pp. 302–12
• Thomson, Alex, ‘ “Dooty Is Dooty”: Pirates and Sea-Lawyers in Treasure Island’, in Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Grace Moore (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 211–22
• Vranken, Thomas, Simulating Antiquity in Boys’ Adventure Fiction: Maps and Stains (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022)
• Wong, Amy R., ‘The Poetics of Talk in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 54(4) (2014), 901–22