The literary critic Henry James helped dispel the myth that Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel “Kidnapped” was merely a boy’s adventure book. James recognized that the novel was much more. He saw high literary merit in Stevenson’s work and pointed out the vividness of its scenes and settings, the intricacy of its characterization, and its true-to-life representation of the complexity of human relationships. James believed that Stevenson demonstrated in this work “what the novel can do at its best and what nothing else can do so well.
“In the presence of this sort of success, we perceive its immense value. It is capable of a rare transparency—it can illustrate human affairs in cases so delicate and complicated that any other vehicle would be clumsy.”
