The thrilling adventures of David Balfour are told by himself in this fast-paced narrative of kidnap, escape and a quest for revenge. Set against the rugged Scottish scenery which Stevenson evokes beautifully, the story ducks and dives to a most satisfying conclusion.
Set in the year 1751, this classic adventure story centers around David Balfour, a young Scotsman orphaned by the death of his father. Through the treachery of his uncle, the young hero finds himself shanghaied and headed for bondage in the New World. Just when things look their worst, a swashbuckling Highlander, Alan Breck Stewart, comes to the rescue.David eludes his shipboard captors and joins Stewart on a wild flight through the Highlands, pursued by both the King's forces and a notorious clan of Highland Jacobites. Flavorful, suspenseful, and peopled by realistic characters, this stirring novel was considered by the author to be his finest work of fiction. It is reprinted here, complete and unabridged, in a high-quality, inexpensive edition sure to delight a new generation of readers.
Robert Louis Stevenson was born to Thomas and Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. From the beginning he was sickly. Through much of his childhood he was attended by his faithful nurse, Alison Cunningham, known as Cummy in the family circle. She told him morbid stories about the Covenanters (the Scots Presbyterian martyrs), read aloud to him Victorian penny-serial novels, Bible stories, and the Psalms, and drilled the catechism into him, all with his parents' approval. Thomas Stevenson was quite a storyteller himself, and his wife doted on their only child, sitting in admiration while her precocious son expounded on religious dogma. Stevenson inevitably reacted to the morbidity of his religious education and to the stiffness of his family's middle-class values, but that rebellion would come only after he entered Edinburgh University.
The juvenilia that survives from his childhood shows an observer who was already sensitive to religious issues and Scottish history. Not surprisingly, the boy who listened to Cummy's religious tales first tried his hand at retelling Bible stories: "A History of Moses" was followed by "The Book of Joseph." When Stevenson was sixteen his family published a pamphlet he had written entitled The Pentland Rising, a recounting of the murder of Nonconformist Scots Presbyterians who rebelled against their royalist persecutors.
