Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of fun
Jun. 19th, 2024 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI have read Treasure Island before and have, in fact, owned a copy of Treasure Island before, but I made the amateurish error of loaning it to somebody back in the day and then never got it back, so on one of my fits of coveting Peebles Classic Library editions I bought another copy on Etsy. I had thought that my prior batch of Peebles Classic Library books included it but apparently I’d been mashing up in my head the three I did have–Robinson Crusoe, also about an island in the Caribbean; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, also about maritime adventures of dubious legality, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, also by Robert Louis Stevenson, so you can see how I got confused.
Anyway, apart from some deeply cringey period-typical casual racism, the book does hold up. The characters are memorable, the plot is exciting, the sense of Going On An Adventure is palpable. I ripped through the whole thing in one afternoon by the side of the lake and it was 100% what going to the lake is all about. Much of what goes on in this book has since become cliche, because this is the Foundational Text of fictional pirate adventures (it’s almost single-handedly responsible for the extremely ahistorical trope of burying treasure instead of immediately blowing it on booze and floozies), but at the time it was written it wasn’t cliche yet, and you really see why these things have gotten ripped off so many times: here, they really work. A lot of English children’s classics have essentially no value to the modern world except as a cautionary tale about how early you can start teaching children to be hideously racist; this one, on the other hand, has about a half-dozen unfortunate sentences scattered through it and the rest of it falls squarely into the “This is a classic for a reason” category. Reading it made me feel like an adventurous little kid again.
Anyway, apart from some deeply cringey period-typical casual racism, the book does hold up. The characters are memorable, the plot is exciting, the sense of Going On An Adventure is palpable. I ripped through the whole thing in one afternoon by the side of the lake and it was 100% what going to the lake is all about. Much of what goes on in this book has since become cliche, because this is the Foundational Text of fictional pirate adventures (it’s almost single-handedly responsible for the extremely ahistorical trope of burying treasure instead of immediately blowing it on booze and floozies), but at the time it was written it wasn’t cliche yet, and you really see why these things have gotten ripped off so many times: here, they really work. A lot of English children’s classics have essentially no value to the modern world except as a cautionary tale about how early you can start teaching children to be hideously racist; this one, on the other hand, has about a half-dozen unfortunate sentences scattered through it and the rest of it falls squarely into the “This is a classic for a reason” category. Reading it made me feel like an adventurous little kid again.