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Long ago I was chatting with a colleague and put it to him that we could send out to all the people who had particularly annoyed us at work an envelope containing a single sheet of paper, entirely blank, save for a large black spot. My colleague, despite his unnecessary youthfulness, was sagacious beyond his years, and pointed out that most of the people who had really got our goats had probably never read Treasure Island. Acquainted as we were with their varying degrees of semi-literacy I had to concede that he was right. I did propose that we follow the black spot with a second envelope containing a copy of the book, though sensing we might need to follow that with adult reading classes I'd have been best off getting straight to the point and making use of The Black Arrow instead.
Occasionally in a moment of clarity I might see how odd something familiar is, in this case a children's book, because what have we here - amorality, ill-gotten gains, not simply sinister disabled persons but actually savage ones though if you are blind perhaps you prefer Blind Pew to the milk and white bread goodie two-shoes out of All the Light you cannot see. The problem is my assumption of children's literature as needing to be didactic and purposive and worthy, this rather like in the later Peter Pan and Narnia goes nowhere good at all unless you very strictly hold to life as a vale of tears through which one ought to scurry with the eyes firmly closed in a race to get to that fine and private place where none, I think, do there embrace, instead Stevenson offers up rich ooze from the imagination.
A joy in reading a few books by one author is getting a sense of the soup of their mind, the ingredients that get ladled out in varying proportions in one book after another. While in The Black Arrow we had a wicked uncle dressed up as a sinister leper, here we get the same ingredient in a less refined form - the hideous blind man and one legged man, their physical disabilities seem to make them even more powerful, Pew has a fearful speed and powerful grip, Silver is more adroit than a South-African athlete, with a crutch that doubles as a javelin when required.
I was going to say that there is something childlike in seeing disabled people as inherently sinister but then I recalled the court case in which a young woman used her crutch as a weapon and the old woman who tried to run me down with her disability scooter, luckily I was able to leap up onto the town hall steps while she drove off cackling into the evening fog that children can often be remarkably indifferent to difference accepting it at face value while adults, when one watches the evening news, can be apparently obsessed with it.
Along which lines I was worried to read the Squire's letter I forgot to tell you that Silver is a man of substance, I know of my own knowledge that he has a banker's account, which has never been overdrawn. He leaves his wife to manage the inn; and as she is a woman of colour, a pair of old bachelors like you and I may be excused for guessing that it is the wife, quite as much as the health, that sends him back to roving (p39) Treasure Islands has more on the links between contemporary piracy and banking . Ah, Jim lad, I thought, do you really want to be a cabin boy to a pair of old confirmed bachelors like that who have no comprehension of why a man might want to live together with a woman - look at the racist attitudes you could end up learning from themQuite aside from the attitude to property - who does all that gold belong to? One could say to those it was stolen from, or one might value the labour put in by the pirates in seizing the treasure and fairly ascribe it to the survivors of Flint's crew, but of anybody the Squire has the least reasonable claim - its a bit like How to Read Donald Duck which shows the same attitude present in the cartoon - if you have wealth you can use it to acquire more while if you don't have wealth you have no right to keep your gold from others - as we see here in the fate of Ben Gunn who trades a cave full of gold for the promise of some cheeseBen Gunn is sorry figure - all those goats about him and never no cheese... had he been Robinson Crusoe he'd have domesticated the goats, been clad in the finest homespun goat's wool, feasted on roast kid and had a cave full of goat's cheese.
I'm also interested just as in Kidnapped the child has the more adult behaviours than the grown ups - the pirates are rather like Stevenson's Highlanders, full of feeling but aside from Silver, showing little sense and about as much patience as a child at Christmas or similar present related festivity. So it is the boy Hawkins who runs rings round them demonstrating loyalty, cunning, and a taste for one-liners One more step, Mr. Hands...and I'll blow your brains out! Dead men don't bite, you know (p142).
The thing about Treasure Island is that the whole adventure is for the sake of adventure. Ok, Ben Gunn gets a job, Silver gets three hundred guineas and hopefully gets back to Bristol so that he and his wife can enjoy one another and start the ground work for International Talk like a Pirate Day. Do the Squire and the Doctor need the money? Does Jim Hawkins get anything? Perhaps Widow Hawkins gets her son back, now a killer and hardened brandy boozer, to sit in her tavern, bullying the regulars with tales of piracy and bloodshed while still barely twelve years old or how ever old he is .
Occasionally in a moment of clarity I might see how odd something familiar is, in this case a children's book, because what have we here - amorality, ill-gotten gains, not simply sinister disabled persons but actually savage ones though if you are blind perhaps you prefer Blind Pew to the milk and white bread goodie two-shoes out of All the Light you cannot see. The problem is my assumption of children's literature as needing to be didactic and purposive and worthy, this rather like in the later Peter Pan and Narnia goes nowhere good at all unless you very strictly hold to life as a vale of tears through which one ought to scurry with the eyes firmly closed in a race to get to that fine and private place where none, I think, do there embrace, instead Stevenson offers up rich ooze from the imagination.
A joy in reading a few books by one author is getting a sense of the soup of their mind, the ingredients that get ladled out in varying proportions in one book after another. While in The Black Arrow we had a wicked uncle dressed up as a sinister leper, here we get the same ingredient in a less refined form - the hideous blind man and one legged man, their physical disabilities seem to make them even more powerful, Pew has a fearful speed and powerful grip, Silver is more adroit than a South-African athlete, with a crutch that doubles as a javelin when required.
I was going to say that there is something childlike in seeing disabled people as inherently sinister but then I recalled the court case in which a young woman used her crutch as a weapon and the old woman who tried to run me down with her disability scooter, luckily I was able to leap up onto the town hall steps while she drove off cackling into the evening fog that children can often be remarkably indifferent to difference accepting it at face value while adults, when one watches the evening news, can be apparently obsessed with it.
Along which lines I was worried to read the Squire's letter I forgot to tell you that Silver is a man of substance, I know of my own knowledge that he has a banker's account, which has never been overdrawn. He leaves his wife to manage the inn; and as she is a woman of colour, a pair of old bachelors like you and I may be excused for guessing that it is the wife, quite as much as the health, that sends him back to roving (p39) Treasure Islands has more on the links between contemporary piracy and banking . Ah, Jim lad, I thought, do you really want to be a cabin boy to a pair of old confirmed bachelors like that who have no comprehension of why a man might want to live together with a woman - look at the racist attitudes you could end up learning from themQuite aside from the attitude to property - who does all that gold belong to? One could say to those it was stolen from, or one might value the labour put in by the pirates in seizing the treasure and fairly ascribe it to the survivors of Flint's crew, but of anybody the Squire has the least reasonable claim - its a bit like How to Read Donald Duck which shows the same attitude present in the cartoon - if you have wealth you can use it to acquire more while if you don't have wealth you have no right to keep your gold from others - as we see here in the fate of Ben Gunn who trades a cave full of gold for the promise of some cheeseBen Gunn is sorry figure - all those goats about him and never no cheese... had he been Robinson Crusoe he'd have domesticated the goats, been clad in the finest homespun goat's wool, feasted on roast kid and had a cave full of goat's cheese.
I'm also interested just as in Kidnapped the child has the more adult behaviours than the grown ups - the pirates are rather like Stevenson's Highlanders, full of feeling but aside from Silver, showing little sense and about as much patience as a child at Christmas or similar present related festivity. So it is the boy Hawkins who runs rings round them demonstrating loyalty, cunning, and a taste for one-liners One more step, Mr. Hands...and I'll blow your brains out! Dead men don't bite, you know (p142).
The thing about Treasure Island is that the whole adventure is for the sake of adventure. Ok, Ben Gunn gets a job, Silver gets three hundred guineas and hopefully gets back to Bristol so that he and his wife can enjoy one another and start the ground work for International Talk like a Pirate Day. Do the Squire and the Doctor need the money? Does Jim Hawkins get anything? Perhaps Widow Hawkins gets her son back, now a killer and hardened brandy boozer, to sit in her tavern, bullying the regulars with tales of piracy and bloodshed while still barely twelve years old or how ever old he is .
