Set in Scotland just after the Jacobite rebellions and narrated by the teenager David Balfour, Kidnapped is an adventure book that focuses very much on travel. It moves from the Lowlands of Scotland, to a ship, to the west of Scotland and then all the way across the Highlands—through forests, plains, and moors—before finally returning to the Lowlands. It is a story of the narrator who is searching for his true birthright and is determined to make a fortune after the death of his parents.
David leaves his home in Scotland after the death of his parents and meets his uncle for the first time in his life. His uncle is a very mean person who, at first, tried to kill David by devious means and later got him kidnapped onto a slave ship. David meets many characters of different backgrounds and social status. On the ship, he makes friends with a Scottish rebel, Alan, and together they successfully defeat the crew members. Alan cherishes a dream to overthrow the British rulers of Scotland. Soon after the shipwreck, the two escaped but were later charged for being accomplices in the murder of a British supporter, Colin Campbell.
The story is very exciting and adventurous, and the readers will like the way the novel slowly unfolds. The story is set in 1751 and the author has successfully narrated the story keeping in mind the history of the time.
The primary motive of the author for writing this adventurous story is for the pleasure of schoolboys. The story is fairly well researched and includes a great amount of realistic description. The book has originally been published in Young Folks magazine, but it is written in a style that can entertain both children and adults.
Robert Louis Stevenson, in full Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, (13th Nov., 1850, Edinburgh, Scotland—3rd Dec., 1894, Vailima, Samoa), was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of English literature, best known for his novels Treasure Island (1881), Kidnapped (1886), Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and The Master of Ballantrae (1889).
Stevenson was the only son of Thomas Stevenson, belonging to a family of engineers who had built many of the deep-sea lighthouses around the rocky coast of Scotland. His poor health made regular schooling difficult, but he attended Edinburg Academy and other schools before, at the age of seventeen he enrolled at Edinburgh University to study engineering, with the aim, his father hoped, of following him in the family profession of lighthouse engineering. But he had no desire to be an engineer, and he eventually agreed with his father, as a compromise, to prepare instead for the Scottish bar. He passed advocate in 1875 but did not practice since by now he knew he wanted to be a writer.
Stevenson’s youthful enthusiasm for the Covenanters led to his writing The Pentland Rising, his first printed work. He was frequently abroad, most often in France. Two of his journeys produced two books—An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879). His career as a writer developed slowly. His essay “Roads” appeared in the Portfolio in 1873, and in 1874, “Ordered South” appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine, a review of Lord Lytton’s Fables in Song appeared in the Fortnightly, and his first contribution appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, then edited by Leslie Stephen, a critic and biographer. Several of Stevenson’s texts are written for children. Treasure Island (1883) was the first of these, inspired by a map Stevenson had drawn with his stepson Lloyd whilst holidaying in Scotland. This was followed by A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), The Black Arrow (1883), Kidnapped (1886) and its sequel Catriona (1893). However, although these four novels have youthful protagonists and were all first published in magazines for young people, they are also clearly intended for adult readers. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is the most famous of Stevenson’s novels.
