Long John Silver, Karl Marx and the Ship of State

Abstract

Political readings of Treasure Island are rare, and of fairly recent date. David H. Jackson’s account, ‘Treasure Island as a Late-Victorian Adults’ Novel’, identifies a strong element of class antagonism. Against Robert Louis Stevenson’s claim that his early romances are amoral and ahistorical, Jackson proposes that ‘Treasure Island is a simplified account of eighteenth-century hierarchical society’, where ‘the premium virtue is duty – unquestioning loyalty to the hierarchy’, and in which Stevenson promotes ‘firm and conservative social values’. For Jackson, Treasure Island is mainly about good and bad children as defined by obedience to or disrespect for authority figures, engaging ‘the reader’s personal nostalgia for his or her own childhood’. In her postcolonial work Problematic Shores, Diana Loxley also counters the traditional view of this novel as a timeless romance. She finds that it is ‘in fact deeply marked by its moment of historical production in the heyday of Victorian imperialism’, and she convincingly provides ‘the colonial context within which Treasure Island should be read and discussed’.