The Changing Portrayal of Pirates in Children's Literature

Abstract

In the last ten years there has been a boom in fiction and non-fiction titles on the subject of pirates and it is my intention to investigate pirates in literature from the eighteenth century through to 2010. In this article, I explore the changing depiction of pirates in children's books over nearly two hundred years, but I begin with a brief overview of pirates in literary history. This provides the context for Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), which I then consider in terms of its immediate and enduring success as a boys' adventure story. This allows me to move on and demonstrate how the associated piratical motifs of Stevenson's novel have been reproduced and reinterpreted over the years, looking first at Peter Pan (1911) whose theatrical pirate Captain Hook clearly has his origins in, but is very different from, Stevenson's Long John Silver. I will then consider the use of the pirate figure in Swallows and Amazons (1930) which, despite its child characters, perhaps draws more strongly than Peter Pan on Treasure Island. Finally, I explore the diverse dissemination of the pirate in twenty-first century literature for children, from picture-books to teen fiction, and in stage and screen adaptations.