Kidnapped

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

4.3

Word count: 423K words
Chapters: 43

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Kidnapped (Illustrated) by Robert Louis StevensonAuthor: Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Feb 13, 2018

Editor's review

Kidnapped is another adventure novel by Stevenson after Treasure Island, set in eighteenth-century Scotland and telling the story of the boy David Balfour, who is tricked and kidnapped by his uncle, carried to sea, and driven into flight. The work has the texture of both historical fiction and a coming-of-age novel: on one hand it lays out the social tensions between the Scottish Highlands and Lowlands, and on the other it lets the protagonist come to understand trust, courage, and justice amid danger. Stevenson's narrative is clean and brisk, the dialogue carries a Scottish dialect flavor, and the illustrated edition adds to the reading pleasure. The book is suitable as an introduction to English classics and for readers interested in Scottish history and maritime adventure. As you read, note how the friendship line drives the protagonist's growth and how geographical space participates in building the narrative rhythm.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Middle-school and university students who want to read English classic adventure novels
Readers who enjoy stories interweaving coming-of-age themes with historical background
Those interested in Scottish history and maritime voyage subjects
English learners needing public-domain English originals for extensive reading

Not a good fit for

Readers who prefer modern fast-paced thrillers or urban themes
Beginners with weak English who cannot yet read long originals independently
Researchers seeking detailed historical notes and scholarly introductions

Reading tips

Read the preface or learn about eighteenth-century Scottish background before entering the story.
Skip Scottish dialect dialogue at first, grasp the main plot, then return to it.
Read in sections according to changes in David's situation, tracing his psychological growth.
After finishing, check the story's geographical route on a map to deepen the sense of space.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

What is the relationship between this book and Treasure Island?

Both are adventure novels by Stevenson, but their stories and characters are independent. Kidnapped is set against Scottish history and leans toward a narrative of growth and flight; Treasure Island is a pirate treasure-hunting tale. Readers who enjoyed Treasure Island can take this as another reading thread by the same author.

How difficult is the English original?

On the whole it is at the upper-middle level of difficulty for reading classic novels. The narrative language is fairly clear, but it contains eighteenth-century background vocabulary and Scottish dialect dialogue, which may hinder beginners. It is best attempted after some experience with long English reading, or in an annotated edition.

What is special about the illustrated edition?

This edition is marked as illustrated; the images help recreate the clothing, ships, and scene atmosphere of eighteenth-century Scotland, lowering the imaginative threshold. The illustrations are an auxiliary reading element and do not change the original text; they suit readers who want a stronger visual sense of the story.

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About the author

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894 Author

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was a nineteenth-century British writer known for adventure fiction and poetry. His representative work Treasure Island established a classic model for treasure-hunt adventure stories and has circulated widely in many translations; the library also holds the Spanish version La isla del tesoro and the German version Die Schatzinsel: Roman. Another representative work, A Child's Garden of Verses, writes from a child's perspective about play, imagination, and everyday feelings, with fresh language and natural rhythm, and is a common reader in English children's poetry. The library holds as many as 101 of his works, showing the variety of his subjects and forms. Public information is limited, so details of his life and education are not elaborated here; overall, his writing combines thrilling narrative with a lyrical tone, being strongly story-driven yet readable aloud, and has had a lasting influence on later adventure literature and children's literature.