A gang of bedraggled savages* sat in the shadows of the beamy old Bookshop, dripping from the tumultuous rain and blustering winds which muffled even the chimes of the St Swithuns’ Bell Ringers practice. “Arr” I greeted them (hopefully not too threateningly), “and did you enjoy it?”.What a great treat we all had reading (and some re-reading) Robert Louis Stevenson’s (RLS) Treasure Island. Everyone loved it, although some struggled with the language. Our Italian Book Clubber had resolved to look up every word she didn’t understand but quickly gave that up, whilst others found that reading the sentences out loud helped them to get the meaning. I thought this was fascinating, as I’d read that RLS was experimenting with dialect at this time, deliberating trying to move the story forwards using speech – which clearly worked.Chris opened the evening by saying that she had read Peter Pan (J M Barrie) around the same time, and how totally different they were in style. Peter Pan first became successful as a play and was only later put into book form, and I agree that it is pretty unreadable, filled with in-jokes about Etonians. However, I too had scribbled ‘Peter Pan’ in my notes because of a similarity in the idea of ‘Good Form’. There were very real codes of conduct, particularly British codes of conduct, running through Victorian/Edwardian children’s books which for a couple of hundred years had been trying to inculcate in British children/young adults the skills required to further the interest of Empire. Treasure Island repeatedly asks ‘what does it mean to be a gentleman’? There is a difference between Gentlemen, and Gentlemen of Fortune (Pirates) and the real Gentleman (the Squire) is shown to be something of a fool throughout while Silver tells Jim he is, “a gentleman you are, although poor born” (240). Loyalty, duty, honour and bravery are not, says RLS, traits of only the upper classes.Treasure Island is something of a turning point in these novels of Empire. RLS was part of a group of writers who were questioning the ethics of Empire and it is easy to see this as something of a satire. The island to which they travel is not a glorious Edenic paradise but a malarial swamp. The inhabitants are not ‘noble savages’ in need of redemption, but English Pirates (most of them now dead) and Ben Gunn who is just longing for a bit of cheese. The island’s only bounty is it’s treasure, and of that the gold has already been found and is shared out at the end, whilst the silver and the arms “still lie” (last line of the whole book) which is thought to be a comment on the debate at that time as to whether gold or silver should be the monetary standard, as well as a cry for peace and the laying down of arms.For those of the Book Club who hadn’t read this before they still found the knew the story. This is really the Ur text for pirates! Red caps, wooden legs, piratical drinking songs, parrots (“pieces of eight”!, X marks the spot – it’s all there with bells on and has informed every pirate book and film written since. It is of course fundamental in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows & Amazons, the Famous Five go to a Treasure Island, the Muppets had a go and of course Captain Jack Sparrow calls heavily on RLS work.Our next book is The Painter’s Daughters by Emily Howe. A fictional account of Thomas Gainsborough’s daughters.
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