Narrating Scotland: The Imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson (review)

In Narrating Scotland, Barry Menikoff undertakes to examine the printed sources from which Robert Louis Stevenson drew his depictions of the Scottish history in Kidnapped (1886) and David Balfour (1893). Part of Menikoff's project is to argue that, far from being mere adventure stories, designed, as Stevenson suggested in the preface to Kidnapped, "for a winter evening school-room when the tasks are over and the hour for bed draws near," the two novels represent the culmination of Stevenson's painstaking research into Highland history: "In these two novels he placed his extensive historical and legal training in the service of his country's past" (2).

In Chapter 1, "A Scots Historian," Menikoff traces Stevenson's interest in "original" historical documents back to his early The Pentland Rising (1866), noting Stevenson's concern with authenticity: "his preference is always to work with primary materials," searching in particular for first-hand accounts "from people who were there" (9). Menikoff then examines the juxtaposition of two major events in Stevenson's life. In the 1880s, Stevenson grew passionately interested in writing a "circumstantial history" of Scotland from the Union to the present. Menikoff argues that, although scholars have generally regarded this project as one that "could hardly be taken seriously" (20), Stevenson himself could not have been more serious. In fact, he devoted himself with characteristic enthusiasm to the extensive reading required for the book, much of which would contain material "written about for the first time" (21). His interests in the story of Scotland included, as one might expect, stories of Rob Roy and Flora MacDonald, but he also noted his concern with "the odd, inhuman problem of the great evictions" and "the growth of the taste for Highland scenery" (Letters 3: 149; quoted on p. 21). During the time when he was planning his history of Scotland, Stevenson also secured a nomination for himself as a candidate for the chair in constitutional law and history. Despite acquiring letters of recommendation from notable scholars (including the vice-chancellor of St. Andrews), Stevenson failed to gain the post. One consequence of this failure, suggests Menikoff, was that Stevenson abandoned his project to write a history of Scotland and, instead, turned his attention to a fictional account of the Highlands. Much of the material Stevenson researched for his intended history of Scotland appears in fictionalized form in Kidnapped and the sequel, David Balfour.

The rest of the book proceeds to examine the two novels in relation to the sources that Stevenson used, drawing on evidence from Stevenson's notebooks which, according to Menikoff, he "cannibalized . . . for incidents that would give his fictional narrative the factual reality of his source narratives" (47). Chapters 2 and 3 examine accounts of Highland life that Stevenson used extensively: Edmund Burt's Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to His Friend in London (1754), Colonel David Stewart's pro-Jacobite Sketches of the Character, Manners, and Present State of the Highlands of Scotland (1822), and to a lesser extent John Buchanan's Travels in the Western Hebrides: From 1782 to 1790 (1793) and John Knox's A Tour Through the Highlands of Scotland, and the Hebride [sic] Isles, in 1786 (1787). In Chapter 2, "Country of the Poor," Menikoff considers how Stevenson used information and events found in these texts in his depiction of the Highlanders as desperately poor but proud. Focusing on Allan Breck's concern about attire, for example, Stevenson indicates his understanding that in such poor conditions, finery was a mark of status. Chapter 3, "Country of the Brave" examines Stevenson's use of the same sources for his representation of the Gaelic language and the clan system. Stevenson's depiction of David Balfour's reaction to the strangeness of the Gaelic language works to make the reader aware of the exclusivity of the linguistic borders in the Highlands. David's subsequent realization that the Highlanders mask their ability to speak English also shows the...