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Trading Texts Negotiations of the Professional and the Popular in the Case of Treasure Island              In many of his letters and essays Stevenson engages with the idea of writing as a trade: what impact does the need to earn a living through his craft have on a writer’s work?1 A further concern is the ways in which texts are traded: what distinguishes serious artistic endeavor from popular fiction aimed at the commercial market, and how might the circulation of a text through that market affect its status? And what exchanges might occur between such different forms of writing? Stevenson’s concerns about authenticity and seriousness were highly representative of his time with its concerns over the increasing professionalization of the author and the resultant reconfiguration of aesthetics, but also particular and characteristic in their subtle negotiations of such tensions. A paratextual exploration of Treasure Island shows how Stevenson as author traded texts to establish his own literary authority and reveals how his work became part of contemporaneous debates on the nature of artistic production. The story of Treasure Island’s creation is well known: on vacation in Braemar, kept inside with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne in a period of bad weather, Stevenson produces a treasure map at Lloyd’s request, then begins a yarn to accompany it. While reading the tale to the boy and to his own father, the household receives a visitor, Dr. Japp, who listens to the story and is so impressed that he carries away the manuscript and passes it on to his friend Mr. Henderson, the editor of Young Folks.2 In Young Folks it is subsequently published.3 In , six years after Stevenson’s death, a curious spat takes place in  the pages of The Academy. Stevenson’s friend (and the inspiration, of course, for Long John Silver), W. E. Henley, writes for the North American Review an article later reported in The Academy, which suggests that the “gold” of Treasure Island was not fully appreciated by its readers, so much as it was recognized by other writers who realized its value and therefore made it “currency” by debasing it through imitation in their own popular fictions: “He had paid in gold and his gold was not recognized as current coin until it was turned into copper. The currency was debased? Of course it was . . . it was turned into copper” (Henley ). The tale when first published was not a great commercial success, but other writers recognized its worth and—through their imitations—a wider public learned to become more responsive to Stevenson’s novel. The reading public, Henley suggests, might be compared to a set of Japanese boxes: “one inside the other, the larger containing the lesser throughout the series,” and this is why “a good writer . . . is very often felt to some extent a great way outside the limits of the particular public which happens to be his” (Henley ). Musing upon his own particular example of this phenomenon—the publication of Treasure Island—Henley speculates about the fate of the Young Folks editor, James Henderson, whom he believes might be dead. The Academy’s plea for information on this subject elicits a response the following week from Robert Leighton, an editor of Young Folks in , who confirms Henley’s point that Treasure Island was not a great commercial success, helpfully notes that James Henderson is still alive, but then immediately complicates the picture by stating that Mr. Henderson (introduced to Stevenson by their mutual friend Dr. Japp) “offered to take a story from the young Scotsman, and, as indicating the kind of story he desired for Young Folks, he gave to Stevenson copies of the paper containing a serial by Charles E. Pearce—a treasure-hunting story entitled ‘Billy Bo’s’n’” (Leighton : ). Leighton continues: “In his ‘My First Book’ article in the Idler, Stevenson seems to suggest that ‘Treasure Island’ was already formed and planned in his mind prior to the time at which it was thought of as a serial for Young Folks; but there is evidence that in ‘Billy Bo’s’n’ he found and adopted many suggestions and incidents for his own narrative.” Leighton’s version of events, suggesting that Stevenson was inspired by a “popular” story, quite reverses Henley’s reading of Treasure Island as encouraging weaker imitators who then educate public taste into an appreciation of the novel—which Henley sees as quite properly belonging to the realm of art...

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