Treasure Island

Treasure Island: An Analysis Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, is a tale of adventure filled with exciting characters and set in exotic locales. This paper will present background information on both the novel and its author and analyze and discuss the major characters, themes and motifs. Stevenson was born the only child of a prosperous middle-class family in Edinburgh, Scotland, in November 1850. His father, Thomas, was a civil engineer who specialized in the design and construction of lighthouses. His mother, Margaret, was the daughter of a well-known clergyman (Livesey). Probably the two most important influences during Stevenson’s childhood were his family’s strict Presbyterian religion and his own poor health. During his frequent bouts with tuberculosis, his loving nurse, Alison Cunningham, liked to entertain him with stories of bloody deeds, hellfire, and damnation. This rendered him a frightened, guilt-ridden child and also apparently something of a little prude, a characteristic he certainly outgrew by the time he reached his late teens (Harvey). Stevenson found the inspiration to write Treasure Island after drawing a treasure map with his twelve-year-old son, Lloyd (Sandison). Written as a memoir, the work opens with the line “Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17-, and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow Inn, and the brown old Seamen, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof” (Stevenson 10). This opening befits Stevenson who had a “devotion to the art of letters and to the less sophisticated, though not necessarily childish, life of adventure” (Kiely 20). Stevenson would later reveal that the first fifteen chapters

Cited: Harvey, Alexander. "Life of Robert Louis Stevenson." Bartelby. 23 Mar. 2005. 9 Apr. 2008 . Kiely, Robert. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1964. Livesey, Margot. "The Double Life of Robert Louis Stevenson." The Atlantic. Nov. 1994. 9 Apr. 2008 . Sandison, Alan. "Robert Louis Stevenson." Books and Writers. 14 Sept. 2004. 9 Apr. 2008 . Scott, Patrick, and Roger Mortimer. "Robert Louis Stevenson." Thomas Cooper Library. 19 July 2002. University of South Carolina. 9 Apr. 2008 Stevenson, Robert L. Treasure Island. 1883. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005. Swinnerton, Frank. R.L. Stevenson; a Critical Study. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1915.