Letters | 6 March 2010 | The Spectator

The story behind Kidnapped

Sir: Not withstanding my gratitude for Andro Linklater’s kind words in his recent review of my book Birthright: The True Story That Inspired ‘Kidnapped’ (Books, 27 February), I must correct his description of the subtitle as ‘simply wrong’.

It is inconceivable that Stevenson, a voracious reader of legal history, was unfamiliar with the saga of James Annesley, which by the time of Kidnapped’s publication in 1886 had already influenced four other 19th-century novels, most famously Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815) and Charles Reade’s The Wandering Heir (1873). As I note in Birthright, a review of Kidnapped in the Athenaeum (London) of 14 August 1886 pointedly observed: ‘Of both Guy Mannering and Kidnapped the main action was suggested by the Annesley case, that marvellous romance of real life… And no doubt it may be said that in [David] Balfour’s struggle with old Ebenezer there is nothing so improbable as the real struggle of Annesley with his wicked uncle, and that Annesley’s adventures in the plantations… surpass in wonderfulness any of the chances, escapes, and disasters that befell Balfour.’

This is not to deny the obvious importance of historical events in Scotland, notably the Appin murder, to Stevenson’s classic adventure story. But just as clearly, Annesley’s ordeal afforded a template for Kidnapped, which, not coincidentally, involved the dramatic abduction of a fatherless heir by a villainous uncle for the purpose of usurping the lad’s patrimony. Then, too, both boys were consigned to servitude in the American colonies, though the fictional Balfour manages to escape after his ship wrecks off the Scottish coast, and ultimately he succeeds in reclaiming his inheritance; whereas young Annesley, in real life, first endured 12 years of indentured servitude before returning to Ireland to bring his Uncle Dick, the Earl of Anglesea, to justice.

A. Roger Ekirch
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