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Reprint. (First serialized in 1886) Hard cover, 8vo in vertically striped green cloth with an art deco style publisher's device to the front board and the titles to the spine in gold, top edge gilt, other edges untrimmed, with nine full page black and white illustrations by William Hole, including the tissue guarded frontispiece, x, 324pp. CONDITION: Fine.**This historical-fiction-adventure novel introduces the character of David Balfour, a young man, whose life as a country lad in the lowland borders of Scotland near Ettrick, (also the area from which the famous poet James Hogg came from,) is forever changed upon the death of his father, an unusually skilled school master. David Balfour is given a letter--his inheritance-- and told to approach his only living relative, an uncle who resides at Shaws House near the Firth of Forth, in a location which has been described as based on a particular house in Cramond. Unfortunately, Uncle Ebenezer Balfour, a lonely, psychotic character living in the ruins of this great house, has apparently usurped the inheritance and title owed David. An "accident" in the house has David fearing for his life. He is later tricked into boarding a ship whose captain has been bribed to make the lad disappear. Once at sea, it is made clear David is meant to be sold into slavery in the Carolinas. Bad weather and fate, however, brings the ship back toward the rocks of the Scottish coast where they take aboard the only survivor of another shipwreck, Alan Breck Stewart, an escaped Jacobite, an Appin Stewart, and with a loathing for anyone of the clan Campbell. The rest of this adventure story is loosely based on the so-called Appin Murder of 1752 (1751 in the book), a more detailed description of which can be found in this book's sequel, "David Balfour," [See our listing 9270]. The Jacobites were Scotland's Catholic rebels who wanted restoration of the Catholic Stuarts to the British throne. The Jacobites were defeated finally at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. RLS takes the 1751 murder of the British factor Colin Campbell as a plot device in the future fictional fortunes of David Balfour (a Whig) and Alan Breck Stewart (a Jacobite.) Edinburgh Author Robert Louis [Balfour] Stevenson (1849-1894) wrote this book while living in Bournemouth, England, and perhaps being somewhat homesick, had occasion to describe many settings around his homeland in this work.
Ref: RLS 9271
$60.00