Treasure Island is Born at Braemar

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 357-358:

To amuse themselves during the endless rain, Louis and Lloyd drew a map of an imaginary island and made up stories about it. As Louis remembered, “It was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance Treasure Island.” The tale may have been predestined, but its title wasn’t. Originally he called his story The Sea Cook after Long John Silver, the former pirate who joins the treasure-seeking voyage disguised as a cook. The Sea Cook is almost as unpromising a title as Trimalchio at West Egg, which Fitzgerald originally wanted for his masterpiece The Great Gatsby. It was a publisher who told Louis that Treasure Island would be more effective.

Louis added that the story “seemed to me as original as sin.” There were plenty of melodramatic sea stories in existence, as well as histories of eighteenth-century piracy that he had devoured, but those are forgotten today while Treasure Island is a world classic, translated into scores of languages and reissued in countless editions. It was especially gratifying that the project brought out the adventure-loving romantic in Thomas Stevenson.

I had counted on one boy, I found I had two in my audience. My father caught fire at once with all the romance and childishness of his original nature. His own stories, that every night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealt perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, and commercial travelers before the era of steam. He never finished one of these romances; the lucky man did not require to! But in Treasure Island he recognised something kindred to his own imagination; it was his kind of picturesque; and he not only heard with delight the daily chapter, but set himself actively to collaborate.

Treasure Island is constructed with consummate art, but the best art conceals art. The story is told by Jim Hawkins, recalling his boyhood in a seaside inn kept by his parents in the west of England.