Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751

Robert Louis Stevenson

Puffin, 1994 - Children's stories - 322 pages

The swashbuckling adventures of David Balfour, set in Scotland after the Jacobite rebellion. Young David Balfour came to the sinister House of Shaws to claim his inheritance. Instead, he found himself kidnapped, the victim of a plot to murder him. With the help of daring rebel Alan Breck, David escapes, only to get mixed up in a desperate adventure - suspected of murder himself, and hunted across the Scottish moors.

Contents

• What befell at the Queens Ferry: 49
• The RoundHouse: 68
• The Man with the Belt of Gold: 76

About the author

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. The son of a prosperous civil engineer, he was expected to follow the family profession, but was allowed to study law at Edinburgh University. Stevenson reacted strongly against the Presbyterian respectability of the city's professional classes and this led to painful clashes with his parents. In his early twenties he became afflicted with a severe respiratory illness from which he was to suffer for the rest of his life; it was at this time that he determined to become a professional writer. The effects of the often harsh Scottish climate on his poor health forced him to spend long periods abroad. After a great deal of travelling he eventually settled in Samoa, where he died on 3 December 1894. Stevenson's Calvinistic upbringing gave him a preoccupation with pre-destination and a fascination with the presence of evil. In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hydehe explores the darker side of the human psyche, and the character of the Master in The Master of Ballantrae(1889) was intended to be 'all I know of the Devil'. Stevenson is well known for his novels of historical adventure, including Treasure Island(1883), Kidnapped(1886) and Catriona(1893). As Walter Allen comments in The English Novel, 'His rediscovery of the art of narrative, of conscious and cunning calculation in telling a s

Bibliographic information

• Title: Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751; Puffin classics,
• Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
• Edition: illustrated, reprint, reissue, revised
• Publisher: Puffin, 1994
• ISBN: 0140366903, 9780140366907
• Length: 322 pages