Half a dozen young men find themselves at the end of their
university years facing the awful prospect that they must now
support themselves. They decide to found an Ideal Commonwealth, in
the Navigator Islands - Samoa (where, by a wonderful coincidence, a
decade later, Stevenson himself eventually settled and where he
died and is buried). Here - they reason - work and money, dreary
offices and dreary jobs, will not be known or needed. But capital
is required to start even an Ideal Commonwealth. One of their
number knows of "a real, glowing, gaudy, old-high treasure" - gold
and jewels in a trunk in a family castle in the Scottish Highlands,
theirs for the stealing, and ...Robert Louis Stevenson began
writing this comic novel in April or May 1877, when he was
twenty-six, and left it unfinished - after 30,000 words, in nine
chapters - two years later. It shows a side of him whom most
readers have never known existed: a satirical Stevenson making
great fun, in a manner worthy of his contemporaries Gilbert and
Sullivan, of the events and passions, the personalities and the
predicaments, of his day. Previously published only in a French
translation, it now takes its rightful place among his memorable
early works of fiction. Transcribed, introduced, and annotated by
the noted scholar Roger G. Swearingen from Stevenson's unpublished
manuscript (now in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California),
this edition reveals glimpses of the author's developing literary
skills and of his complex and often madcap personal temperament.
The extensive and illustrated annotations are fascinating in
themselves, not least for the references to the contemporary
late-Victorian scene.
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