Letters | 6 March 2010

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.