Treasure Island

In 1882, the year before Treasure Island was published, Stevenson lamented that romantic tales had become eclipsed by realism: ‘English people of the present day are apt, I know not why, to look somewhat down on incident … It is thought clever to write a novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one.’ His answer was to write an adventure story that would become ubiquitous, a novel that would not only set a course for future children’s literature, but also conjure characters, motifs and language that would become part of our collective imagination. Indeed, a pirate without a buried treasure and a wooden leg, a talking parrot and ‘pieces of eight’, is no pirate at all.

Nurtured by Stevenson’s rebellious nature, the text is informed by an air of moral ambiguity – an air that becomes manifest in the seductive charm of Long John Silver. As Michael Morpurgo writes in his new introduction, ‘Like Jim, we are at first entertained and entranced by Silver, then appalled and entranced again.’ Silver’s moral pragmatism flew in the face of the stale fiction for boys that preceded Stevenson’s landmark work. The text’s darkling nature is captured in Sterling Hundley’s enthralling illustrations, which convey both the vivid excitement of Jim’s travels and the claustrophobic terror he feels as the journey begins to go awry. Also included is the treasure map drawn by Stevenson. Rarely printed in colour, the different inks represent various characters’ annotations. The blocked, skull-emblazoned slipcase is a reminder of the pirates’ treachery, the Jolly Roger and the chilling refrain, ‘Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest / Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!’