Huck’s final words express a philosophy: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally [yet another dangerous aunt] she’s going to adopt me and civilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Inevitably Tom and Huck see domestic life as a kind of prison from which they must escape. Into the jail of middle-class life, however, there may descend a gift of temporary escape, when labor and tedium lose their iron grip on mind and heart. During this period of grace stories enter to save the soul, stories designed to thrill the imagination, bearing myths of boundless quest and heroic achievement, adventures that seem the most natural thing in the world. Adolescence, for good or ill, is the springtime of the dream. Exploiting this unstable period of life, feeding upon its yearning atmosphere, the storyteller virtually commands a young person’s imagination, by creating magic carpets of freedom from being stuck in the house, even if that house is the Admiral Benbow inn.

Dreams of magic freedom (especially from illness) were never far from the young Stevenson. He was born to unusually talented Scottish parents in the year 1850. Their world was quite different from our own, and yet everywhere social changes were anticipating the strains and stresses of our present condition. His early years were mostly spent in the cold, dark, wet and windy, smoke-filled, ominous and romantic city of Edinburgh, the ancient capital of a northern kingdom. Stevenson represents all the conflicts—the imperial freedom and the cultural constraint—of the late Victorian era. He also shared in the Victorian fascination with facts and material accomplishment. Around him, as we shall see, there was an atmosphere of great engineering endeavor, for the Stevensons had long been famous lighthouse builders; they were known for meeting the most hazardous and complex construction demands. Meanwhile, as civil engineering developed rapidly during this period, a new technology arose in the parallel field of communication and recording. In Stevenson’s lifetime, authors went from using quill pens and early fountain pens to banging on typewriters.

Photography could now record human faces and natural landscapes, for peaceful scenes or war in the Crimea. Matthew Brady recorded the horrors of the American Civil War, and also the witless religiosity of slaughter. But there was still no radio, there were no movies, there was no television, there were no video games, and there were no special effects resembling the techniques of the present time. There were only the beginnings of widespread electronic communication, though it rapidly spread-London’s first telephone exchange dates from 1879, following the world’s first exchange at Hartford, Connecticut in 1877. Letters were written by hand, carried over the seas by “mailboat” steamers, while soon a massive undersea cable would carry telegraph messages linking Europe and North America, the ship Great Eastern having successfully laid the transatlantic cable in 1866. Telegraphy and its electronic siblings were soon to change the world by accelerating the exchange of information, if not of artistic instruction. These innovations in media were about to transform the very basis of literature.

On the edge of this revolution (much of it passing unnoticed by the mass of people) stood authors like Robert Louis Stevenson. For him, as we have said, literature had a strong connection to a mythology coming out of inherited memory, folktales, and legends, as well as the hard facts of history. Such sources of literature had been spoken aloud and listened to mostly by those who could not read and whose ancient oral customs would seem destined to disappear within Victoria’s reign.

There were still books, of course, books of all sizes, shapes, and subjects, from which families and individuals still read aloud to each other or read alone with silent wonder. This world could only stimulate imagination in its most active form, and onto the stage of its theater of the mind stepped Treasure Island, a sailor’s yarn if there ever was one. The novel was published first as a serial in a boy’s magazine called Young Folks in 1881 and 1882, and then in book form in 1883. Instantly, a desire to read the book caught on with readers of all ages, including among other notables the prime minister of England, William Ewart Gladstone; at the other end of the critical scale, Henry James, then the most refined of all living novelists, reviewed the book in the most glowing terms. Meanwhile, up to the present day the appeal of this tale persists unabated and undefeated by rivals, despite changes in fashion and immense competition from the new media. These new media, such as newspapers published everywhere readers could be found, tend to emphasize whatever is new and whatever therefore will instantly vanish as an object of interest the moment tomorrow’s paper arrives on the street.

In this newly engineered culture, the question remains, how could Stevenson preserve the mystery of the older spoken literature? The story is his mainstay, of course: Jim Hawkins encounters a slew of devious and cruel confederates in a mutiny whose sole purpose is to gain uncounted treasure, meanwhile taking revenge on their masters. But there is also a dreamlike mythical method at work. Jim is waging a double war, first against the “bad guys,” as we say, but second and far more important, he struggles against his own fears, against uncanny threats and overwhelming odds. In one sense the story lasts because it is an extremely efficient dream machine.

The fast-moving plot of Treasure Island is amazingly detailed in its precision.