Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson - David H. Jackson (essay date 1987)

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David H. Jackson (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: "Treasure Island as a Late-Victorian Adults' Novel," in The Victorian Newsletter, No. 72, Fall, 1987, pp. 28-32.

[In the following essay, Jackson discusses "the [Victorian] romance revival's ideological motivation for appropriating the conventions of children's literature," and argues that Treasure Island reveals a conservative ideological agenda, despite Stevenson's theory of romantic fiction as "a value-free field for harmless imaginative play.]

Two years after the publication of his extremely popular King Solomon's Mines (1885), H. Rider Haggard launched a moral attack on French naturalism: "Lewd, and bold, and bare . . . the heroines of realism dance, with Bacchanalian revellings, across the astonished stage of literature". Haggard's essay, "About Fiction" (1887), typifies the conservative ethos of the revival of romantic fiction led by him and Robert Louis Stevenson....

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1. Introduction
2. Criticism
   1. Richard Middleton (essay date 1911)
   2. David Daiches (essay date 1947)
   3. William H. Hardesty, III and David D. Mann (essay date 1982)
   4. Sister Mary Louise McKenzie (essay date 1982)
   5. William Blackburn (essay date 1983)
   6. Susan Gannon (essay date 1985)
   7. David H. Jackson (essay date 1987)
   8. David Angus (essay date 1990)
   9. Max Sutton (essay date 1994)
3. Further Reading
4. Copyright

1. Robert Louis Stevenson