Treasure Island

Life & Times About the Author

Robert Louis Stevenson could be described as a career novelist. That is to say, he fashioned himself as a story teller and wrote as much as he humanly could for his rather short life, which ended aged 44. He wrote a dozen novels and a number of collections of short stories. Stevenson is best known for two books that fall into entirely different genres: Treasure Island (1883) and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The former was his first novel and the one that put him on the literary map at the age of 33. Stevenson was beset by ill health, so writing became an escape while convalescing. In this instance he took himself away to the high seas to a world filled with lawless pirates, intent on finding buried treasure.

His Works

The clichéd image of the fictional 19th-century pirate was born with Treasure Island. Stevenson put together a collection of pirate characteristics in Long John Silver and his crewmen, which have become standards used in many other pirate stories since. However, Stevenson’s pirates were not charismatic and engaging rogues or anti-heroes. They were seagoing outlaws and villains, driven by selfishness and greed, and readily willing to kill.

Parallels have been drawn between Long John Silver and Robin Hood, but the former has no loyalty in his band of men and is not motivated by a desire to help anyone. On the contrary, he only uses the other pirates for his own ends and turns his back when he no longer needs their protection.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is entirely different. Treasure Island is essentially a boy’s adventure story, while this novel investigates the disturbing psychology behind split personality disorder, or schizophrenia. In Victorian times, there was an inevitable religious overtone to the interpretation of psychological conditions, so Stevenson saw the dual personality of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a conflict between the good and evil sides of the personality. The implication being that we all suffer a similar conflict, but this case was heightened and amplified by Dr Jekyll imbibing a drug potion. In fact, there is such a pronounced change in personality that Dr Jekyll alters in appearance and posture when he metamorphoses into Mr Hyde.

It seems likely that the drug potion used by Dr Jekyll is representative of opium, which was taken in opium dens in London in the late Victorian era. At first the potion enables him to switch from one persona, or alter ego to the other at will. However, the dosage is increased until he can no longer control the situation and Mr Hyde becomes all consuming. In effect, the subconscious animal mind overpowers the conscious human mind, because his primal needs and desires are allowed to develop and grow.

This is evidently also an expression of the feelings of suppression that Stevenson felt in Victorian society. There was such a pressing requirement to behave in a certain way, which denied acknowledgement of the baser instincts, that Dr Jekyll was the personification of this frustration in Stevenson and other Victorian men. Dr Jekyll is compelled to transform into Mr Hyde so that he can do things that polite society would have normally found scandalous.

In the end, the inner turmoil is too much for Dr Jekyll. He feels more human as Mr Hyde, yet society views him as being more human as Dr Jekyll. Aware that his desire to remain as Mr Hyde forever will conflict with the values of society, he ends things so that others do not have to witness his indulgence.

The book evidently struck a chord with Victorian society, judging by its success and by its lasting impact. We now use the term ‘a Jekyll and Hyde character’ to describe someone with unpredictable behaviour or violent mood swings. In addition, the concept of character transformation has been borrowed many times over in fiction.

A Contribution to Literature

Like many Victorian novelists, Robert Louis Stevenson was highly regarded by his contemporaries and writers of other generations. It is easy now to forget that English literature had to start somewhere and that those who ‘invented’ the novel had no precedent.

For Stevenson the novel was only a century or so old and there was still plenty of room to try new approaches to the narrative form. To be successful was to be pioneering, which meant that one had to be innovative and visionary in outlook, as well as being able to weave together a compelling story.

By and large Victorian novelists tended to be loyal to their chosen genre. Once they found their niche they stuck to the same formula, so it was quite unusual for a writer to attempt to write in more than one genre, but Stevenson managed with consummate ease. Had he lived beyond his 44 years then he may have continued his ascent as an original thinker and become one of, if not the, greatest writer of all time. As it was, he managed to make his permanent mark on the register of classic novelists and claim his place in the story of English literature.

Stevenson ended his life on the island of Upolu, Samoa, in the South Pacific Ocean. He had sailed extensively among the Pacific Islands and made Upolu his own ‘treasure island’ in 1890. He bought an estate on the island with the proceeds of his book sales and lived there happily for four years until he was struck down by a seizure. It was probably a stroke (cerebral haemorrhage) caused by an embolism.

His health had been compromised in 1879 when Stevenson took a long journey by sea and rail from Europe to California. He chose to travel second class, which was ‘roughing it’ in those days. By the time he arrived at his destination he was at deaths door. It seems that he never fully recovered from these self-imposed hardships. Stevenson was, surprisingly, viewed as something of a failure by his family. He had been expected to become a successful engineer, but rejected convention and expectation in pursuit of his writing. Although he was successful as a writer in his own lifetime his naturally Bohemian and unorthodox behaviour made him feel marginalized by Victorian society. This could explain why he felt more at home in far flung places, where he was free from the parameters of Victorian etiquette and expectation. Before he started to travel, he found his escape in visiting places of ill repute and iniquity where the underclass would not judge him and where he met more interesting people on the fringes of society.