Novel: Kidnapped

Overview
Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, published in 1886, is a swift, first-person adventure set in Scotland in the uneasy years following the failed Jacobite Rising of 1745. It follows David Balfour, a recently orphaned Lowland teenager, who is thrust into a web of family treachery, maritime peril, and political intrigue. The novel combines the pace of a sea-and-land quest with a precise rendering of Scottish speech, landscape, and the cultural rift between Lowland Whigs and Highland Jacobites. It stands as both a coming-of-age story and a historical romance rooted in real events, most notably the Appin Murder.

Plot
At seventeen, David leaves the parish of Essendean carrying a letter from his late father to the House of Shaws, where he expects to find kin and perhaps fortune. He meets his miserly uncle, Ebenezer Balfour, who treats him with hostility and fear. After a near-fatal "accident" engineered by Ebenezer, David realizes his uncle’s malice. Lured to the port under false pretenses, he is seized and sold to the brig Covenant, captained by the ruthless Elias Hoseason, to be transported to the Carolinas as an indentured servant.

At sea, the Covenant rescues a lone survivor, Alan Breck Stewart, a proud Highland Jacobite carrying rents for his clan. Sensing the crew’s plot to rob and kill Alan, David warns him, and the two form a bond. In a fierce skirmish in the roundhouse, they fend off the crew together. A storm drives the ship onto the Torran Rocks off Mull; David is cast ashore, wanders hungry and alone through the Hebrides and western Highlands, and eventually reunites with Alan.

Their flight takes a dire turn when Colin Roy Campbell of Glenure, the government factor known as the Red Fox, is shot in Appin. The murder inflames the authorities, who suspect Alan and his associates. David and Alan become fugitives, slipping through the heather, over moors and mountains, sheltered at times by Highland sympathizers, including the exiled chieftain Cluny Macpherson in his hidden “cage.” The pursuit by redcoats tests their endurance, courage, and trust in one another. As they reach the Lowlands, David resolves to right the wrong at the core of his misfortunes.

With the help of the shrewd lawyer Mr. Rankeillor, David sets a trap to force Ebenezer’s confession. In a staged confrontation at the House of Shaws, Ebenezer unwittingly admits to attempted murder and the conspiracy to have David kidnapped. Rankeillor brokers a settlement restoring David’s rightful position and income. Alan, still a wanted man in the wake of the Appin affair, slips away into exile, while David, sobered and matured, takes up his life as master of the Shaws.

Characters and Dynamics
David Balfour’s moral steadiness and practical reason mark his growth from naïveté to adult resolve. Alan Breck Stewart, volatile, brave, and fiercely loyal, provides a romantic counterpoint, his pride and panache offset by a deep code of honor. Their friendship, strained at moments by class, politics, and temperament, becomes the novel’s heart. Ebenezer embodies familial betrayal; Captain Hoseason the cold calculus of profit. Mr. Rankeillor represents the humane face of Lowland law and order.

Themes and Style
Stevenson explores the chasm between Highland and Lowland worlds, honor-bound clan culture versus cautious commercial modernity, without caricature. The Appin Murder lends historical gravity to a narrative that otherwise revels in pursuit, stratagem, and narrow escapes. The first-person voice gives immediacy to landscape and peril, while Scots dialogue enriches character and place. Beneath the adventure beats a story of identity, inheritance, and the forging of loyalty under duress, a tale that continues in the later sequel, Catriona, but stands complete as a classic of youthful ordeal and hard-won belonging.