A seventeen-year-old goes to collect his inheritance, is clubbed on the head and sold onto a ship bound for the Carolinas, and washes up in the Highlands beside a wanted man with a price on his head.
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David's only living relative meets him with a blunderbuss, feeds him porridge, and then sends him up an unfinished staircase in the dark on an errand — no rail, no candle, and the stair simply stops in mid-air over a drop. Four chapters in, and a kid has worked out before David does exactly what the errand was for.
The siege of the round-house is the fight everything since has copied: Alan holding the door with a sword, David loading pistols behind him and firing through a skylight, the whole crew coming at them in the dark. Alan makes up a song about it afterwards, and the song is printed in the book.
He cuts a silver button off his own coat and hands it over: show that anywhere and my friends will come to you. Then David tells you flatly that he said it 'as if he had been Charlemagne, and commanded armies,' and that he was always in danger of smiling at the man's vanity. Kids get to admire him and laugh at him on the same page.
David Balfour, seventeen and newly orphaned, walks to the house of the uncle he has never met to claim what his father left him. The uncle tries to kill him, fails, and sells him instead: David wakes clubbed and chained in the hold of a brig bound for the Carolinas. Then the brig runs down a boat in the fog, and the one survivor hauled aboard is a Jacobite agent with a belt of French gold and the government’s price on his head. What follows is a shipwreck, a murder on a public road, and two hundred miles on foot across the Highlands with soldiers behind them, told by a boy who is not sure, most of the way, whether the man beside him is his friend or his ruin.
This is the harder Stevenson. Treasure Island is told in plain English; here the dialogue is broad Scots — slockens, gliff, kittle, bouman — and that is the wall a reader hits, usually in chapter two. Stevenson glossed the words himself in footnotes, and this edition sets each gloss into the sentence where the word appears, so nothing has to be looked up at the back. Even so it suits confident readers from about grade 6, and it goes down considerably easier read aloud, where a parent doing the voices carries the meaning that the spelling hides. It is thirty chapters and about 80,000 words. Our edition is the Scribner Illustrated Classics one — N. C. Wyeth’s 1913 paintings, nine of them, plus the fold-out map of the Covenant’s cruise and David’s route, which is worth having open beside you. Stevenson also wrote a sequel, Catriona (1893), which picks up on the same afternoon this book ends; two of the three screen versions borrow from it, and the free text here is Kidnapped alone.
Stevenson wrote it at Skerryvore, the house in Bournemouth his father bought for his wife Fanny, where he lived from 1885 until the doctors ordered him out of Britain altogether in 1887. He was there because of his lungs. He haemorrhaged repeatedly and spent long stretches flat on his back, forbidden to move in case the bleeding started again — so a book that is two hundred miles of heather, scree and river-crossing on foot was written by a man who could not reliably cross a room, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde came out of the same rooms in the same eighteen months. The story itself is not invented: Alan Breck Stewart was a real man, Colin Roy Campbell of Glenure was really shot near Ballachulish in 1752, and James Stewart was really hanged for it on evidence that has convinced almost nobody since. It ran first as a serial in Young Folks, the boys’ magazine that had carried Treasure Island three years before, and Cassell published it as a book in 1886.
Modern books (still in copyright, so not free) that scratch the same itch.
For the kid who spent the whole book trying to decide about Alan Breck. A long overland journey with a companion who is boastful, maddening, and lying about exactly one enormous thing — and the reader is meant to be caught out along with everyone else.
For the kid whose favourite chapters were Earraid and the flight in the heather — a boy alone in country that does not care whether he lives, working out shelter, food and fire in the same flat, practical detail Stevenson gives the shellfish and the drammach.
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Prefer a printed copy? Scribner Illustrated Classics hardcover — the same Wyeth edition, in print (affiliate links). Not sure whether your reader needs the original or an abridged edition? Our guide to choosing →
Send the free EPUB to your Kindle with Amazon's free Send to Kindle — it appears in the library like any book.
Opens straight in Apple Books. Tap the file, choose Books, done — great for bedtime read-alouds.
Google Play Books opens it in a couple of taps, and syncs your place across devices.
Apple Books on a Mac, or the free Calibre app on Windows. No account needed.
We shelve it for grades 6–9 — that's where the language and the length sit for a reader on their own. Read aloud, it works earlier, from about age 9–10 — kids follow a story by ear well before they can read it alone.
The unabridged text measures 990L Lexile, AR level 7.6 (14 points). (one list shows 780L.) In everyday terms: grades 6–9, and easier as a read-aloud.
Real violence — a boy dies, and a man is shot on the road. The cabin-boy Ransome is a child, drunk most of the time, covered in bruises put there by the officers, and he is beaten to death below decks — David hears it happen and later dreams of him being 'carried below on the men's backs.' David is clubbed unconscious and sold: Stevenson writes that 'white men were still sold into slavery on the plantations, and that was the destiny to which my wicked uncle had condemned me.' Four men die in the round-house fight; David shoots two of them himself and afterwards sobs 'like any child' with the thought of them on him 'like a nightmare.' Colin Campbell is shot from cover on a public road in front of David, and the book takes its plot from the real Appin Murder of 1752, in which a man most historians think innocent was hanged for it. Drink runs through the sea chapters. The Whig-and-Jacobite argument between a Lowland Presbyterian boy and a Highland Catholic soldier is the spine of the book and neither side is made to be wrong. Stevenson writes broad Scots in the dialogue; this edition carries his own footnote glosses, which are set into the sentence where the word appears.
Yes — the complete, unabridged text, with the original N. C. Wyeth illustrations. Kidnapped was published in 1886, so it's in the US public domain: sharing it free is legal, and there's no signup or catch. We build the ebook ourselves from the original edition.
