Treasure Island

About This Book

Treasure Island begins in the quietest place imaginable: a small, shabby inn on a windy stretch of the English coast, where a boy named Jim Hawkins helps his parents serve travellers and scrub floors. Then a strange guest arrives — a scarred old seaman with a heavy sea-chest, who pays for his room in gold coins and asks Jim to keep watch for a sailor with one leg. Nothing about the man is ordinary, and nothing at the inn is ordinary again. What follows is one of the most famous adventure stories ever written. A document falls into Jim's hands, a wealthy neighbour fits out a ship, and a crew is hired in the noisy dockyards of Bristol for a long voyage south. Some of the men who sign on are exactly what they appear to be. Others are not, and Jim will have to work out which is which while thousands of miles of open water separate him from home. Stevenson tells the story in Jim's own voice, which means readers learn things at the same moment Jim does — no more, no less. The result feels less like reading history and more like standing on a rolling deck, straining to hear a conversation you were never meant to overhear.

Treasure Island is the book that gave the world almost everything people picture when they hear the word 'pirate': the treasure map marked with a cross, the black-hearted crew singing on deck, the parrot, the buried chest, the phrase 'pieces of eight.' Reading it means going back to the source and discovering that the original is stranger, funnier, and far more morally complicated than the copies. It is also a superb book for studying how a writer builds suspense: Stevenson controls exactly what the reader knows and when, and once students see how that trick works, they start noticing it everywhere. Above all, it is a story about a young person who must decide, over and over, whom to trust — which is a problem middle schoolers recognize immediately, even without the ship.

Pre-Reading Discussion Questions

1. What images come to mind when you hear the word 'pirate'? Where do you think those images came from?
2. When you meet someone new who is friendly and helpful, what makes you decide whether to trust them? What warning signs would change your mind?
3. Is it ever right to keep a secret from adults who are responsible for you? What would have to be true for that choice to be justified?
4. The story is told entirely by one person looking back on events from his youth. What are the advantages of that kind of narrator, and what might a reader miss?
5. What does the word 'treasure' mean to you? Can wanting something badly enough change a person for the worse?
6. Imagine being at sea for weeks with the same small group of people and no way to leave. How might that change the way people behave toward one another?

Themes & Big Ideas to Track

• Appearance versus reality: characters in this book are constantly not what they first seem, and Stevenson gives readers clues before he gives answers.
• Courage takes several forms here — loud and reckless, quiet and dutiful — and the book quietly compares them.
• Greed acts like a force of nature in the story, changing loyalties and dissolving agreements the moment gold enters the conversation.
• Growing up is shown as a series of decisions made without permission and without enough information, each with real consequences.
• Loyalty is tested against self-interest again and again, and different characters answer that test very differently.
• The line between hero and villain is deliberately blurred; watch how often you find yourself liking someone you should not.

Chapter-by-Chapter Study Guide

About the Author

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1850, into a family of famous lighthouse engineers who expected him to follow them into the profession. Poor health kept him indoors and in bed for much of his childhood, and he spent those hours reading and inventing stories. He trained as a lawyer, then abandoned law for writing, and travelled constantly in search of a climate his lungs could tolerate. He began Treasure Island in 1881 while on a rainy holiday, after drawing a map of an imaginary island to entertain his young stepson; the story grew out of the map rather than the other way around. It appeared first as a magazine serial and then as a book in 1883, and it made him famous. He went on to write Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and a much-loved book of poems for children, before settling in Samoa in the South Pacific, where he died in 1894 at the age of forty-four.

The novel is set in the middle of the eighteenth century, a generation or two after the era historians call the golden age of piracy had already ended — which is part of the point, since the characters treat the great pirates as legends from the past rather than current news. Britain in this period was a seafaring nation whose wealth moved on wooden ships, and an ordinary sailor's life was genuinely dangerous, badly paid, and harshly disciplined, which is why mutiny was both a constant fear and a constant temptation. Stevenson wrote the book in the 1880s, at the height of the Victorian appetite for adventure stories aimed at young readers, but he refused to make his adventure simple: his most memorable character is neither a hero nor a straightforward villain. Readers should also know that Stevenson wrote in the language of his own century, so a few words and attitudes in the book belong to 1883 rather than to today, and are worth pausing over and discussing.