SOURCE: "Treasure Island as a Late-Victorian Adults' Novel," in The Victorian Newsletter, No. 72, Fall, 1987, pp. 28-32.

In the following essay, Jackson discusses "the [Victorian romance revival's ideological motivation for appropriating the conventions of children's literature," and argues that Treasure Island reveals a conservative ideological agenda, despite Stevenson's theory of romantic fiction as "a value-free field for harmless imaginative play.]

Two years after the publication of his extremely popular King Solomon's Mines (1885), H. Rider Haggard launched a moral attack on French naturalism: "Lewd, and bold, and bare . . . the heroines of realism dance, with Bacchanalian revellings, across the astonished stage of literature". Haggard's essay, "About Fiction" (1887), typifies the conservative ethos of the revival of romantic fiction led by him and Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson, the focus of my essay, is the subtler moralist and more influential figure, but Haggard offers us a direct route to the ideology of what we...