I.

“I believe plagiarism was rarely carried so far,” Robert Louis Stevenson triumphantly confessed in 1894 about his first successful novel: the parrot he stole from Daniel Defoe; the skeleton he swiped from Edgar Allan Poe; the stockade he palmed from Frederick Marryat; and as for “Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters,” these, Stevenson attests, “were the property of Washington Irving” (Stevenson, “My First Book” 194; Appendix A). Elsewhere he declaimed that the Dead Man's Chest he lifted from Charles Kingsley; and “Captain Johnson,” author of what remains the most well-read if mostly fictitious account of pirate deeds, A General History of the Pyrates, provided the workaday details of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pirate culture, specifically the rules, the swearing on a Bible, and the ubiquitous pieces of eight (Moore, “Pirates” 50 and 54). Nor were the members of Stevenson's immediate family spared: from his father he took the inventory of Billy Bones's chest and the name of Flint's ship (Stevenson 195; “My First Book”); and from his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, he appropriated the seminal map: “[A]fter writing in a few more names,” Osbourne indignantly maintained, “he put the map in his pocket, and I can recall the little feeling of disappointment I had at losing it. After all, it was my map” (Smith 40). Indeed the purloined map stands as a compendium of contested authorship both within and without the text: possibly drawn and tinted by Osbourne, but certainly labeled by Stevenson, it features Billy Bones's scrawl alongside Captain Flint's neat “hand,” which is itself “forged” by Stevenson's father to counterfeit Flint's signature (Stevenson, “My First Book” 197).

Stevenson calls his theft “plagiarism,” but his copious source citations here in the essay as well as in the Dedication, make his compositional method look more like a representation of literary piracy. Certainly, plagiarism and piracy both turn on “stealing” the words of others by circulating unauthorized copies and imitations. But whereas plagiarism is a wrongful appropriation that strips the author of the credit he is due (Terry 2), piracy gleefully acknowledges credit – a famous name is what attracts the pirates in the first place; what piracy strips is the author's right to profits. Hence Nichelas Nickleberry and Oliver Twiss were trumpeted very loudly as being by “Charles Dickens” (Johnson 261) – the name bracketed more as a brand than an appellation. And hence Stevenson refers to the victims of his plunders with clear admiration, representing Treasure Island as both a set of wrongful appropriations and a self-justifying homage.

One would never guess from Stevenson's piratical boasts, that he himself, like the majority of English novelists of the period, suffered significantly at the hands of literary pirates in America (Calder 233; Norquay 181) where the unauthorized circulation of his books diminished the profits he might otherwise have realized and reduced his chances of freeing himself from the emotional manacles of his father's financial support (McLynn 218). And yet, perhaps Stevenson's rhetoric should not be taken at face value. As a marketing strategy, piracy allowed Stevenson to anticipate Amazon.com's salesmanship: if you liked Cooper, perhaps you would like Stevenson. In the same way that Dickens's infamous “Nickleby Proclamation,” which announced his upcoming novel in a notice published in Part V of the Chapman Hall reissues of Sketches by Boz, warned potential pirates at the same time as it advertised the new novel as being worth stealing, Stevenson's piratical brags represent his novel as a figurative sea chest of stolen treasure. Indeed, the very word, “treasury,” first appeared in the 1880s as an advertising slogan pitched to exploit the emerging market of children's literature, which came to life especially around Christmas time with treasure-like merchandise composed of collectible stories printed on gold-embossed parchment and bound in fine leather (Lerner 166; Buckton 115).

That these treasuries of collectible stories might also designate treasuries of literary profits emerges clearly in Stevenson's speech: in a letter to his parents, he winks that the novel “has been, for me, a Treasure Island verily” (Buckton 124), the pun collapsing professional profit, pirate treasure, and published writing. In an age where the growing split between high art and popular culture barred serious authors from conceding an interest in profits (Norquay 172), Stevenson represents his intentions to exploit the children's market in language as crass as that of any louche buccaneer: “If this don't fetch the kids,” he growled to his friend, Henley, “why they have gone rotten since my day” (McLynn 198; Harman 225). Indeed, Stevenson also plays pirate in the mannered idioms he adopts when representing his publisher's advance: “There has been offered for Treasure Island – how much do you suppose? . . . A hundred pounds, all alive oh! A hundred jingling, tingling, golden, minted quid. Is not this wonderful!” (Buckton 124). Using eighteenth-century criminal cant in “quid” (OED), Stevenson refers to the money his pirate story earned from the publisher Cassell in the rhyming, sprightly, whimsical exclamations “worthy of Long John Silver himself” (Buckton 124). From these two instances, it would seem that Stevenson adopted pirate-speak as the costume in which he might celebrate professional financial success without looking like a hack.

Stevenson's pirate play, however, was not limited to representations of his professional authorship, for the stylistic affectation of his speech replicates a theatrical posture he reportedly enjoyed striking among his friends. As Sidney Colvin recounts, Stevenson commissioned him with purchasing a cloak in Paris that would be “suited to his taste for the picturesque and piratical in apparel” (Moore, “Pirates” 56–57); in a letter to his friend Cosmo Monkhouse, Stevenson reveals his habit for imagining himself “in many favorite attitudes; signaling for a boat from my pirate ship with a pocket handkerchief” – postures Stevenson refers to as “picturesque and piratical” and “stagey and piratic” (Moore, “Pirates” 57). It would appear that Stevenson derived his pirate-speak from the costumes and poses common on the nineteenth-century stage – his sense of the piratical inseparable from the “picturesque” and “stagey.”

That the piratical in the early 1880s connoted the picturesque and the stagey makes sense in so far as the historical golden age of actual piracy was well into its eclipse. As Moore points out (Moore, “Pirates” 59), the two literary ancestors most influential in the writing of Treasure Island were the novelists Daniel Defoe and Sir Walter Scott, both of whom had personal experiences with real pirates. Having spent a fortune on marine insurance, Defoe ultimately faced bankruptcy due in part to piracy at sea; he had witnessed the corpses of real pirates, such as that of Captain Kidd, displayed on Execution Dock; he knew former pirates in London, including the beggar named Israel Hands whom Stevenson would later resurrect for service on the good ship Treasure Island. Similarly, Walter Scott could remember fleeing Edinburgh when his mother mistook the Castle drum as a signal for Paul Jones's landing, and he was almost abducted by American privateers off the coast of northern Scotland while sailing with Stevenson's grandfather. “But for Stevenson,” Moore notes (and I would add, for all nineteenth-century writers), “Execution Dock was a literary tradition” (Moore, “Pirates” 60).

I would argue further that for the Victorians, “Execution Dock,” itself a kind of theatre where pirate bodies provided a cautionary spectacle, was not only a literary tradition; by the time Stevenson was writing, the pirate body displayed there was a literary and – even more significantly – a theatrical cliché. When, for example, the Major General of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance (1880) greets the Pirate King with the observation, “. . . this is a picturesque uniform, but I'm not familiar with it” (Gilbert and Sullivan 127), the joke turns not only on the outlandishness of the pirate's costume while standing amidst the daughters of Victorian domestic respectability, but on the Pirate King's embodiment of a commonplace theatrical type. Hailing both from the opera house where Bellini and Offenbach dressed him in florid costumes and exaggerated gestures as well as from the music halls where melodramatic revivals of Charles Johnson's The Successful Pirate (1713) and of James Cross's Blackbeard, or the Captive Princess (1798) joined Douglas Jerrold's Descart, The French Buccaneer (1828), Edward Fitzball's The Red Rover, or The Mutiny of the Dolphins (1829), and False Colours: or The Free Trader (1837) (Cordingly, Under the Black Flag 24), not to mention the compulsive stage adaptations and revivals of Scott's novel The Pirate – Thomas Dibdin, James Planché, and William Dimond each produced one in 1822, the year of the novel's publication, and it continued to be a Victorian stage staple (Williams 130) – the pirate of the 1880s figured as such a clichéd theatrical villain that he could appear only in virtual quotation marks. This citational effect derives from two sources. First, the pirate's ubiquity on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stage was in part a function of the free-for-all “sharing” characteristic of the professional dramatic practice. For example, after the actor and manager Benjamin Webster “translated” (without financial or artistic acknowledgment) D'Ennery and Dugué's melodrama La Prière des Naufragés from the Paris stage, performing it in England as The Thirst of Gold, or the Lost Ship and the Wild Flower of Mexico in 1853, the details of its source were published in two London papers, which enabled three additional and independent productions: Edward Stirling's A Struggle for God, or A Mother's Prayer and the Adventurer of Mexico, the Standard Theatre's The Search for Gold, or Greenleaf and Redberry, and the Marylebone Theatre's The Struggle for Gold and the Orphan of the Frozen Sea (Mattacks 133–34). In this sense, Victorian dramatists can be seen as compulsively citing each other. Second, the pirate's citational effect is amplified by his generic origin in popular melodrama where marching-band music, the military sound effects of fifes, drums, and cannon fire, rah-rah songs, and sensational staging conspire to dress him up as an overt piece of theatre. That Stevenson's absorbed the form and feel of this theatrical world through the toy theater of his childhood play adds another citational step to the process of cultural transmission. In his loving memories of Skelt's Juvenile Dramas, the toy theater of his boyhood, he articulates an artistic vision predicated on recycling material from the melodramatic stage: “Indeed this name of Skelt appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt it boldly to design these qualities. Skeltey, then, is a quality of much art . . . not of today; but smacking of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the great melodrama” (Stevenson, “A Penny Plain” 221–22). Using the “piratic” as a synonym for the stagey and melodramatic (clearly a resonant phrase for him), Stevenson locates “art” in a place where play theater imitates theater that is itself in revival, toy theatre productions of the 1880s typically drawing from plays popular in the 1830s (Speaight 51).

If Stevenson's biographical impersonation of a stage pirate informs his expository impersonation of a literary pirate, we have to ask what else is at stake for Stevenson in calling attention so flamboyantly to his use of others’ stories. I would suggest that playing pirate allowed Stevenson to situate his project in a theatrical space where imitation could recover its artistic integrity because it did not take itself too seriously. Quoting without attribution Longfellow's poem, “A Psalm of Life” in his essay, “My First Book,” Stevenson builds a case for understanding creativity as the work of cutting and pasting, not unlike the pastiche work of today's remixes and mash-ups:

The “another” of the Longfellow poem refers to a metaphorically “shipwrecked brother” whose faith in life's meaning is restored through seeing the footprints that the poem's “we” have left after having been inspired by the “lives of great men” to make “our lives sublime” (Longfellow 25–32). Longfellow's poem follows a chain of inspiration: the lives of great men inspire the poetic we whose footprints inspire and comfort another. Casting himself as the shipwrecked other, Stevenson uses Longfellow's words to reframe inspiration as imitation: whereas the footprints of the poem function as signs of companionate consolation amid life's cosmic despair, the footprints of Stevenson's essay metaphorize literary invention as an imitation of what has already been printed, in the sand or on paper. That Stevenson pastes himself into Longfellow's poem with an exclamation point, the punctuation mark most apposite for the self-conscious theatricality implicit in melodrama, conveys the same sense of ironic fun that animates his picturesque piratical posturings. To read Treasure Island in the context of the pirate's clichéd theatrical status is therefore to glimpse pirate fiction's participation in the reorganization of an entertainment industry in which self-conscious imitation is a creative value.

II.

Although more than a thousand words, Treasure Island begins famously with a map. This is true not only in the sense that the novel's initial page features a reproduction of the fictional 1750 treasure map bequeathed to the fictional pirate Billy Bones by the fictional Captain Flint, but in the sense that Stevenson's story of the novel's initial creation begins markedly and even insistently with a play map. In his confessional “My First Book,” Stevenson ends a depressing lament over the financial failures that first marred his professional writing career with a memory of the eureka moment in which he drew a treasure map while playing with his stepson:

Drawing on clichés of Romantic spontaneous inspiration, Stevenson characterizes the map as springing effortlessly from his hand; commanding active verbs that animate the writing subject, the map is born fully formed like some cartographic Athena.

But soon the figure of Romantic genius gives way to the figure of Victorian craftsman; when, according to Stevenson's account, the cherished seminal map is lost in the mail (!) on its way to the publisher, Stevenson must engineer its reconstruction, extemporaneous originality thus transforming into painstaking copyediting: “It is one thing to draw a map at random . . . it is quite another to have to examine a whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions contained in it, and with a pair of compasses painfully design a map to suit the data” (Stevenson, “My First Book” 197). It would appear then that the map that marks the novel's gateway is a replica, an imitation of a lost original, a manufactured object – and one that Stevenson decries, “was never Treasure Island to me” (Stevenson, “My First Book” 197).

Stevenson's rhetoric in the anecdote points to an important nineteenth-century debate about intellectual property and the professionalization of authorship, which, as Clare Pettitt has outlined, employed two sometimes contradictory models of production: on the one hand, Victorian writers harbored great affection for an idea of Romantic originality whereby an author bore an organic and symbiotic relationship to products that grew spontaneously from his genius; on the other hand, they were socio-economically and ideologically invested in the middle-class values of hard work, education, and application, values that would prove central to the evolution of nineteenth-century professional culture. To the extent that intellectual property theory rested on originality as defined by the influential pre-Romantic poet Edward Young, it excluded many of the terms important to professional work, specifically artistic labor: “An Original may be said to be a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made: Imitations are often a sort of manufacture wrought up by those mechanics, art, and labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own” (quoted in Pettitt 13). When intellectual property theory had to accommodate the creativity on display at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, however, the professional senses of invention, engineering and industry – even imitation – took on new values and new positive analogies for writers (Pettitt 141). It would appear then that to the Victorians the conjunction between originality and creativity was not at all axiomatic.

Stevenson's cartographic anecdote turns on the distinction between a real fiction (the map Stevenson improvises while playing with Osbourne) and an imitated fiction (the map he is forced to reconstruct for publication) and thereby accommodates both models of authorship. By noting and italicizing that his father “forged the signature of Captain Flint and the sailing directions of Billy Bones” (Stevenson, “My First Book” 197) on this fake fictitious map, Stevenson villainizes imitation, but only after recounting his reconstructive efforts with obvious pride – thereby playing both the part of Romantic artist vested with organic originality and that of Victorian craftsman endowed with professional creativity. Due to the random misfortunes of the modern mail system, the professional writer of the anecdote can only demonstrate artistic merit through an act of imitation. According to Stevenson's story, a writer's creativity is as important as his originality.

Not only is Treasure Island The Map implicated in this strange alchemy of imitative creativity in Stevenson's tale of the novel's production history, but its internal textual status is similarly fraught. According to the fictional logic of the novel, the map's value inheres in its representation of potential wealth as figured by buried treasure, but a central component of Jim's Bildung turns on his growing apprehension that the relationship between sign and substance is complicated. Whereas Long John Silver, with his blond hair, pale complexion, squeaky-clean kitchen, and solid bank account, bears no resemblance to the other buccaneers, Jim soon learns that Silver is in fact a seasoned pirate leader, perhaps the darkest and cruelest of them all. The lability of Silver as a sign (Honaker 44; Kiely 76) – paternal figure at one moment, ruthless traitor at another – centers Jim's emotional growth on a skepticism about the reliability of signs, which culminates in a skepticism about the value of the paper map. When Silver reveals to the pirates that he has the “original” map, the one with the crosses indicating the location of the treasure rather than the cross-less copy brandished earlier on the ship, they maniacally grab at it, tearing it from one another, provoking Jim to remark, “you would have thought, not only they were fingering the very gold, but were at sea with it, besides, in safety” (161; ch. 29). Jim knows better than to mistake the treasure map for treasure, and of course he is right in that, as we later find out, the map's referentiality, and hence its value, has been erased by Benn Gunn's moving the treasure to his cave two months before the main characters arrive (183; ch. 33). The writing on a piece of paper, “X marks the spot,” has meant nothing all along.

Or, to put it differently, the map's value inheres not in the buried treasure it purports to represent, but in its role as a narrative catalyst in so far as the map incites the novel's action not only in Stevenson's pre-textual imagination, but by virtue of its role in the financial operation of the Hawkins family business and the cancellation of the debt owed them. The novel opens with the curious arrival of the pirate Billy Bones at the Admiral Benbow Inn, owned and operated by Jim and his parents. Whereas Billy Bones, initially pays for his room and board with “three or four gold pieces,” it is not long before he owes the family money, a debt apparently so great and heedless that it contributes to the death of Jim's father (6; ch. 1) thereby animating the conventional mainspring of a youth's Bildungsroman. When Bones himself dies, Jim and his mother unceremoniously ransack his corpse and break into his sea chest in order to exact the payment they are rightfully owed. Taking payment from pirate treasure proves no easy matter, however, for, unlike Bones's initial payment of gold whose value is treated as residing in the ingot of which it is made and implicitly, however magically, correlated to a week's stay at the Admiral Benbow, the jumble of coins “were of all countries and sizes – doubloons, and louis-d'ors, and guineas and pieces of eight” (23; ch. 4) and Jim's mother, ignorant of the current international exchange rate (interestingly, only French, Spanish, and English coins are mentioned), must limit herself to the English currency, that is, to the guineas, whose value she recognizes. That the guineas are “the scarcest” (23; ch. 4) makes the work laborious and time-consuming and also gestures vaguely at some inchoate patriotism: are there so few guineas because the crews of English ships are so skilled or so lucky as to rarely fall prey to pirates or because the pirates – at least the ones in this novel – are themselves English and rarely prey on their compatriots? Surely the logic is reminiscent of the good English Pirates of Penzance, who fail to make piracy pay by honorably refusing to attack ships manned by orphans. Whatever the case, the consequence of English coinage scarcity in the pirate's chest is that Jim's scrupulous business-woman mother runs out of time to take what is owed to the inn and must settle for a substitution – the oilskin packet that, as it turns out, contains the map of “Treasure Island” (and, of course, the novel it sires). In this sense, the map's initial value rests on its status as a substitute for and hence reference to the missing English coins that themselves refer to the red of the inn's bookkeeping.Footnote ² It materializes as a written promise of payment.

The map thus raises an important if somewhat trite mimetic question: how does a written piece of paper reliably refer to what it represents – in this case, wealth. But this question of referentiality happens also to reflect the material conditions of a literary circulation in which professional authors watched literary pirates abscond with the wealth to which their own papers (their novels) ought to have referred. That the treasure map refers as well to the nineteenth-century debate over the use of paper money and bank notes suggests that pirate fiction was engaged in conceptualizing individual wealth in the terms of an economy – that is, as part of an organized system of representation. As Marc Shell points out, the disassociation between “real substance” and “intellectual inscription” took place gradually as electrum (coins whose exchange value rested on what they were materially made of – beads, chocolate beans, gold) gave way to coins (whose exchange value derived from “politically authorized inscriptions” that did not refer to the material substance of the ingots of which they were made), which gave way to paper money, which has today given way to electronic money (Shell 1). The most provocative readings of Treasure Island that address its money plot generally place the novel in dialogue with the nineteenth-century apprehension of this economic evolution as it took shape in debates over the gold standard, which many European economies adopted in an effort to build an international monetary system whereby different national currencies could be traded (Columbia Encyclopedia 1349) without the vagaries and inconsistencies that afflicted the bi- and tri-metallism characteristic of earlier European economies (Braudel 423–28). The history of this move to the gold standard emphasizes the association of gold with a transparent system of representation – gold is valued according to its metallic substance and weight (Michaels 147–48); silver, on the other hand, was seen as representative of a more abstract symbolic system, an object that did not refer to itself, but to a promise of payment (Wood 65) and was associated in England with counterfeiting (Wood 62). According to Shell, Michaels, and Wood, silver – like a credit card or a mortgage – relied on a sophisticated system of abstract exchanges well beyond the barter of a cow for a bag of beans, relied, in other words, on something like an economy of metaphorical substitutions.

As Wood has argued, the plot of Treasure Island hinges on the tension between the gentlemen of fortune (the pirates) and the gentlemen born (the cabin party, that is, a squire, a doctor, and a naval captain – that band of happy few), the coalitions between which Jim must choose (Wood 66); and this tension reflects the tension between a silver standard whereby signs do not necessarily refer to their signifieds and a gold standard by which signs of worth deliver both economic and moral value (Wood 62–63). Hence Jim's body is likened to “so much gold” (171; ch. 31) after he honorably keeps his word of honor to Silver (166; ch. 30) like a true English gentleman for whom linguistic fidelity was never to be taken lightly. In this reading, Jim, by keeping his word, follows the proverbial golden rule of doing his duty, which involves aligning himself with a transparent – shall we call it literal – system of exchange and signification.

Indeed Jim keeps his word, but it is an important dimension of the text's ambivalence towards the pirates generally that he keeps it to Silver/silver – to a figure of an oblique – shall we call it metaphorical – system of exchange and signification. In performing his “duty,” Jim invokes a Victorian keyword that Silver distorts and destabilizes with the visual pun that imitates it, “dooty” (61; ch. 11). “Dooty” exemplifies the novel's use of what Shell calls in another context “eye dialect” (Shell 20). That is, when orthography marks a character's speech in moments that pronunciation would otherwise not. Eye dialect assumes a print culture and one in which an act of imitation – “dooty” being an imitation of “duty” – can be discerned. Not only does it mark Silver as a gentleman of fortune and not as the gentleman born he intends to imitate “in Parlyment, and riding in my coach” (61; ch. 11), but it suggests that Silver serves as a figure around which several associations coalesce: anxiety in economic thought around the instability of signs implicit in the use of silver coinage and paper money, anxiety about the mutability of identity in a socially mobile world, and anxiety about a world of manufacture in which the boundary between reproduction and imitation is playfully and self-consciously porous.

I say “playfully” because the eye dialect that Stevenson uses, like his other techniques for designating pirate speech in all of its sea-salt flavor, calls attention to itself as a theatrical posture. In the dialogue that Jim overhears while hiding in the apple barrel, for example, many of the attributes of Stevenson's pirate speech emerge:

Besides the slurs and contractions and missing phonemes that convey the oral and pre-literate dimensions of the pirates’ speech – not unlike any conventional representation of dialect as so many of Scott's historical romances can attest – Stevenson marks the pirates’ language with compulsive nautical tropes: in enjoining the hands to plan carefully and patiently, Silver cautions, “If you would on'y lay your course, and a p'int to windward”; in admiring Billy Bones's steadfastness, Israel remarks, “if ever a rough hand come to port, it was Billy.” Indeed the pirates seem so bereft of any other frame of reference from which to draw their comparisons, that the effect of their figurative language is comical: even on land, Billy Bones refers to everyone as “mate” and his lodging as a “berth” (3; ch. 1). Of course, “sea salt lingo,” as Carolyn Williams has pointed out in quoting V. C. Clinton-Baddeley's work on burlesque, was a “peculiarity of the English theatre” (Williams 100) and in this light, piratic speech is indeed stagey. Moreover, the anaphoric rhythm of Silver's “hurry and hurry and hurry,” the call and response tone of his rhetorical questions, his use of the old-fashioned ballad pronoun “ye” and the vividness of his imagery – the corpses of lads drying in the sun, of human bodies cut down like slaughtered pigs – attest to pirate speech's melodramatic dimensions in so far as melodrama is “drama underlined and emotionalized by the addition of music” (Clinton-Baddeley 88).

Silver's “eye dialect” not only participates in this stylistic theatricality, it uses imitation to make fun of the orthodoxies that govern the literary representation of dialect even as it conveys a truth about Silver's social status. Like the difference between the real fictional map and the imitation fictional map, the difference between a real gentleman and an imitation gentleman emerges as a function of print culture whether as a casualty of the Royal Mail or an orthographic convention, both institutions that govern the circulation of print. Although the novel makes legible the distinction between reproduction (the boy Jim reproduces gentlemanly identity) and imitation (the pirate Silver can only imitate it), that distinction is destabilized by what Stevenson suggests are the accidents and eccentricities of print culture.

III.

The plot of social mobility that Silver's ambition articulates and that the novel's orthography ridicules frames Jim's own social ascension as a matter of narrative transmission that derives from the map's complex of imitative values. It is clear from the first sentence that Jim's narrative voice is licensed by figures of adult male social authority, specifically, Squire Trelawney and Dr. Livesey:

Although grammatically subordinate to Jim's act of writing, the “gentlemen” – both members of the gentry (one a landowner and one a professional) – appear syntactically prior to the story they have commissioned. Crammed into a diffuse subordinate clause whose disproportionate length threatens to overwhelm the sentence's semantic subject, the commissioning frame underscores Trelawney and Livesey's attention to Treasure Island's story value even as it coyly maintains Treasure Island's continuing economic worth, veiled as it is by the elision of the island's “bearings.”

Indeed the novel goes to great lengths to stress that Trelawney and Livesey are less interested in Treasure Island as a place than in Treasure Island as a theatrical story, a distinction that crystallizes most starkly in their response to the map itself. The dramatic opening of the oilskin packet is prefaced by the revenue officer's account of Jim and his mother's escape from the map-hungry pirates and the squire and doctor's applause:

Trelawney and Livesey respond to the story of the map's escape with all the bravado of eager schoolboys at a public reading of the latest bestseller. Trelawney, especially plays what Claudia Nelson has identified as the “child-man,” a common character in Victorian fiction. Interestingly and especially relevant to the reception history of Treasure Island, the child-man – an adult male eager to be addressed as a boy (Buckton 112; Mathison 175; Nelson, “Adult Children's Literature” 137) – was also well-represented in the marketing demographic of juvenile readers where he bolstered sales of adventure fiction and contributed to Treasure Island's profitability in single-volume format after its failure as a serial in the boys’ magazine, Young Folks (Nelson 137; Buckton 124). In other words, one of the most important fan bases of Treasure Island appears to be men at play. Bradley Deane has persuasively situated a version of this “play ethic” in the context of a late-nineteenth-century imperialist ideology where playground spontaneity and improvisation displaced playing-field athleticism and sportsmanship (Deane 692).

As a man at play, Trelawney emerges as a connoisseur of pirate lore and an agent of its circulation: by recognizing Flint's name as “the bloodthirstiest buccaneer that sailed, Blackbeard was a child to Flint” (31; ch. 6), Trelawney draws on legend and stage: though Blackbeard, a pseudonym for Edward Teach, enjoyed a relatively short career as a pirate (Cordingly, Under the Black Flag 194–201), he achieved apocryphal status through the sensational efforts of “Captain Johnson” and the melodramas his A General History of Pyrates generated: for example, James Cross's Blackbeard, or the Captive Princess, a “serio-comic ballet of action” was a London hit of 1798, a consistent presence in revivals and adaptations throughout the nineteenth century, and subject of a favorite scene for Pollocks Toy Theatre (Cordingly 200–01), a descendant of Skelt's Juvenile Drama, which Stevenson, along with many men of his generation and class, might well have enacted, toy theatres being fixtures of the Victorian nursery especially for boys (Farr 44). Whereas Captain Johnson recounted Blackbeard's dastardly deeds in sinister detail, the version Pollocks repackaged as Blackbeard the Pirate; or, The Jolly Buccaneers featured scenery cutouts in colors so cheerful they would have been more appropriate in nursery décor (Figure 22). Indeed, Trelawney, as if taking his cues from those toy figures, demonstrates his theatrical pedigree in his exuberant use of nautical phraseology, announcing that the preparations for the journey are complete with the fanfare, “I have a boatswain who pipes; so things shall go man-o’-war fashion on board the good ship Hispaniola” (39; ch. 7). That Trelawney's preparations are complete only for a fictional voyage emerges in the incidental detail that he forgot stores of fresh water (!) and in the glaring detail that he hired a crew composed almost entirely of former pirates.

Figure 22.

Front page of Pollock's Toy Theatre version of J. Cross's Blackbeard the Pirate; Or, The Jolly Buccaneers. [Reprinted by Pryor Publications, Whistable 2007.] Courtesy of Pollock's Toy Museum, London. Copies are available from Pollock's Toy Museum, 1 Scala Street, London W1T 2HL (0207-636-3452).

However ironized, Trelawney's starry-eyed gung-ho-ness animates the preparation for what would in reality have been a dangerous and morally repugnant cruise into clear slave-trade territoryFootnote ³ with the chipper eagerness of a camp counselor casting parts for the summer's musical: “You'll make a famous cabin-boy, Hawkins. You, Livesey, are ship's doctor; I am admiral . . . We'll have favourable winds, a quick passage, and not the least difficulty in finding the spot, and money to eat – to roll in – to play duck and drake with ever after” (34; ch. 6). This “Hey Kids Let's Put on a Show” atmosphere culminates when Trelawney appears decked out in the appropriately picturesque costume: “all dressed out like a sea-officer, in stout blue cloth, coming out of the door with a smile on his face, and a capital imitation of a sailor's walk” (41; ch. 7). Indeed, the squire explicitly states that he imagines the journey as a kind of Maritime Fantasy Camp: “. . . I shall not enjoy a moment till I hear my old tarpaulins tramping round the capstan. Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It's the glory of the sea that has turned my head” (39; ch. 7). Hang the treasure?! Isn't this “Treasure Island”? Yet according to the expedition's chief organizer, it would appear that acting out a nautical adventure story takes precedence over actually capturing pirate treasure.

In light of Trelawney's hallucinatory project – in spirit so akin to David Byrne's protagonist who dreams of pirates on parade while his neighbors drudge through their workday morning routines – it is not surprising that piracy first occurs in the novel primarily in association with stagecraft. Endowed with attributes filched from nautical melodrama of the 1820s and 30s and from Captain Johnson's bestseller, Billy Bones, the novel's first pirate, unites what by the 1880s would have been a set of props associated with nautical life and a series of clichés that designate “pirate,” very few of which had anything to do with documented pirate life: the sea-chest, the sea-song, the maritime cant absurdly applied to land life, the rum, the gold, the tattoos, the map. As Jan Rogoziński puts it in a history of pirates, a work that spends most of its time debunking such pirate myths, “Since pirates did not bury their Treasure, they did not need maps to find it” (Rogoziński 215).

In his stagey and piratical attributes, Billy Bones hails not only from the early-century stage, but from the toy theaters that adapted, generally without authorization (Speaight 54 and 55), those earlier dramas. The toy theaters, which would prove so formative in the childhood imaginations of male writers like Stevenson, Dickens, Chesterton, Beardsley, Millais, and Yeats (Farr 43), not only featured stock figures that included pirates alongside Regency dandies and overly armed banditti, but revisited the theatrical styles of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in picturesque backgrounds and posed tableaux (Farr 50), drawn as many of them were from turn-of-the-century advertisements of well-known actors in characteristic poses and costumes (Farr 44). Indeed melodrama itself, an outmoded theatrical style by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, survived primarily through juvenile literature and its commercial ties to juvenile drama (Emeljanow 223). Edwin J. Brett, for example, launched his children's magazine, Boys of England with the serial Alone in the Pirates’ Lair and published a toy theatre version at the same time (Emeljanow 225). In this context, it is clear that Trelawney and the voyage to Treasure Island he engineers comes directly from Stevenson's affection for the toy theaters that repackaged cut-and-paste versions of previously popular novels as they were adapted into melodramas, burlesques, and pantomimes. As a toy-theater pirate, Billy Bones is a copy of a copy.

IV.

Unlike the gold-hearted tars who animated the turn of the century stage with domestic dramas that pitted naval obedience against familial responsibility (Williams 99–100), Billy Bones's status as a sailor registers in the novel exclusively by virtue of his skills as a storyteller:Footnote ⁴

The pastiche of details that mark Billy Bones not only as a sailor, but as a pirate – hanging, walking the plank, the Spanish Main – bolster his vernacular designation as a “true sea-dog” and a “real old salt” in patriotic terms that collapse the lawful and the unlawful means of making “England terrible at sea,” a sentiment echoed by Trelawney's admiration for the pirate Flint: “The Spaniards were so prodigiously afraid of him, that, I tell you, sir, I was sometimes proud he was an Englishman”(31; ch. 6). Although this conflation reflects the realities of privateering whereby wartime laws throughout the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries sanctioned as a service to the nation the same piratical deeds that were recognized as an international crimes during times of peace – as Captain Johnson puts it, “Privateers in Time of War are a Nursery for Pyrates against a Peace” (Defoe 4) – the designation here derives specifically from narrative work; Billy Bones's skills as a raconteur of thrillers produce – almost irrationally – the popular perception of his authenticity; the “true” and the “real” emerge as storytelling effects – the products of a “fine excitement” (6; ch. 1). In this sense, his identity as a pirate is contingent on his identity as a pirate-tale raconteur. And, though Bones the pirate owes money to the family business, Bones the storyteller generates interest, especially in terms of the increase in traffic he brings to the family's pub. Although Bones the pirate within the narrative is a scoundrel, Bones the teller of pirate stories generates financial rewards that accrue outside the narrative, whether outside Bones's narrative in the Hawkins’ pub or outside Jim's narrative in Stevenson's literary marketplace.

At least for the general public assembled at the Admiral Benbow, Bones wears a badge of authenticity by virtue of the popular sensationalism his stories generate. In this sense, Bones the storyteller embodies an important dimension of pirate historiography, which is anchored, along with Treasure Island itself, in Captain Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates. “Captain Johnson” is a pseudonym that many scholars believe belonged to Daniel Defoe,Footnote ⁵ whose commitment to historical accuracy was not known to be watertight. As James Sutherland put it, “By 1724,” the publication date for A General History, Defoe “had become so accustomed to living in a twilight world between fact and fiction that the two mingled imperceptibly in his mind” (Rogoziński 140). Indeed – whether by Daniel Defoe or not – A General History of the Pyrates mixes fact and fiction with surprising license so much so that it qualifies as a peculiar kind of historical fiction that, with the exception of Exquemelin's 1678 history, Buccaneers of America, remains the single most influential source of pirate history, cut and pasted into Charles Ellms's 1837 bestseller, The Pirate's Own Book and copied into Howard Pyle's immensely popular Buccaneers and Marooners of America (1891). For example, there is little evidence that the Caribbean buccaneers frequently killed their victims; they were more interested in robbing ships and since many of them robbed with the sanction of either the English crown or a local “haven” (Rogoziński 97) there was no need for secrecy or unnecessary bloodshed (Rogoziński 96–97). The author of A General History of Pyrates (let us call him “Defoe”), however, exaggerates their brutality for the salacious appeal that violence always commands commercially, inventing the pirate saying, “Dead Men Tell No Tales,” which Charles Ellms further popularized for the same reason – the myth of pirate atrocity selling more books. When Jim Hawkins threatens the life of Israel Hands (142; ch. 26), he repeats a version of the phrase (“Dead men don't bite”) by ironically quoting what he had heard Hand himself say earlier when quoting yet another pirate, Billy Bones (60; ch. 11). Whereas it would appear that Jim is quoting Hands's quoting Bones, he is really quoting “Defoe” and a set of fictions that quote him.

The point here is that the most important historical source of nineteenth-century pirate fiction was itself a piece of fiction, which means that works like Treasure Island are implicated in various acts of citation not only philosophically in the Derridean sense that all discourses cite other discourses, or in the Butlerean sense that all linguistic acts are measures of identity performance, but quite literally and literarially in the sense that pirate fiction self-consciously quotes itself. In this sense, pirate fiction as exemplified in Treasure Island bears comparison to camp in its attention to the “echoic and ironic” dimensions of speech (Harvey 1147) and assumes a place in the constellation of ideas that fall under the rubric of influence theory whereby a work's responsiveness to textual antecedents can be measured. It seems to me, however, that whereas Treasure Island employs various forms of allusion – Harold Bloom's psychic model of Oedipal struggle, Julia Kristeva's dialogic model of intertextuality, Linda Hutcheon's imitative model of parody, even Frederic Jameson's archeological model of sedimentation all pertain, its unacknowledged source citations, its quotation-mark-less quotations, occupy a different though related corner of this conceptual sphere, a place where reproduction sits next to copying. The boundary separating the two groupings emerges through an idea of intellectual property that criminalizes certain forms of imitation: allusion is good; cutting-and-pasting is not. Treasure Island in fact uses both.

If we take A General History's patchwork as exemplary, it is not surprising that Defoe elsewhere endorsed a model of professional writing not unlike the one Stevenson champions in “My First Novel.” In the kerfuffle resulting from the disclosure that Alexander Pope used “contracted labor” in his translation of Homer's The Odyssey, an essay attributed to Defoe defines professional writing as necessarily and unapologetically contingent on the imitation of and use of others’ work (Terry 87). It would seem that Stevenson not only relies heavily on “Defoe's” real and invented account of pirate history and culture in assembling the novel's material details, but he also resurrects an early eighteenth-century model of composition that advocated “copying as a literary practice” (Terry 136). One need only remember Swift's allegory of the spider who perversely creates out of her own entrails and the bee who industriously gathers from various flowers to see how literary merit that relies on an individual's own reserves could be construed as “a form of cultural insularity and chauvinism” (Terry 6). In his atavism, Stevenson rejects the Napoleonic sui generis spirit of a Balzac who pioneers into new narrative territory by dismissing Molière and Scott or an Eliot who similarly dismisses Fielding.Footnote ⁶ Whereas Jane Stedman and Carolyn Williams have identified in the genre parody of Gilbert and Sullivan “a modern and relative form of originality that acknowledges the claims of adaptation and partial derivation as legitimate forms of authorship” (Williams 13) – a form of what I would call creativity – pirate narrative allows us to locate that form in the eighteenth-century past as well. To the extent that this chronology is meaningful, we can think of the Victorian war against literary piracy as a moment in which a legitimate form of creativity is temporarily demonized.

Obviously, nineteenth-century literary piracy is about markets and it flourished in the liminal places between them – in the world of dramatic adaptation wherein a novel moved from page to stage and in the world of English-language reprinting wherein novels, plays, and musical scores moved internationally from England to the United States. It is not surprising, therefore, that Treasure Island, and pirate fiction generally, dwells not only on imitative speech, but on its citation, acknowledging in this way that it hails from somewhere else. Like “Dead men don't bite,” the words that Jim uses to end the novel, “Pieces of eight! pieces of eight!” (190; ch. 36) represent a robust citational history. In an immediate sense, the words refer to the nightmares Jim acquired on Treasure Island and function to decry the journey's financial motivation. As quoted speech, however, the words belong to Silver's parrot – and stand, in fact, as the parrot's virtual signature.

When the parrot uses them to alert the pirates of Jim's nocturnal return thereby triggering his captivity (147; ch. 27), these words signal betrayal – the context of their utterance completely overwriting their naked semantic value. In the context of their narrative history, however, the words quote utterances the parrot learned at the sacking of a Spanish treasure ship by another legendary pirate, “Cap'n England” (54; ch. 10), who, like a good English buccaneer, raided Spanish treasure with impunity, thereby amassing quantities of the Spanish silver coins called reales de ocho (“pieces of eight”), the name not only for the Spanish dollar, but the coin on which many countries during the first half of the nineteenth century based their own currencies: the American dollar, the Canadian dollar, and the Chinese yuan were based on the pieces of eight – virtually cited (as the basis for valuation) in an effort to regulate transnational trade. While the parrot's phrase refers in this way to an international valuation that enabled transactions across national markets, its purpose in the novel is atmospheric. As “the most famous of the coins associated with the new world” (Cordingly, Under the Black Flag 35), pieces of eight are comme il faut in pirate fiction – a standard prop less fantastical than earrings or tattoos, but a theatrical commonplace and a “pirate” credential nonetheless. That this illustration of narrative citationality is engineered by a parrot calls attention to its overlay of campy self-conscious irony.Footnote ⁷

Like the map, the black spot featured in Chapter 29 similarly illustrates the synthetic composition of the pirate text and, like the “pieces of eight,” it emphasizes a self-conscious citationality. Having been initiated into the novel's pseudosociological interest in pirate culture, Jim and the reader learn from Billy Bones that when pirates depose an elected leader, they pass him a black spot, that is a piece of paper with a word quoted on it in black. Later in the novel, Silver foils the pirates’ attempt to depose him and tosses Jim the now defunct black spot to keep as a “cur'osity” (162; ch. 29) – both a souvenir of the cruise and an artifact of piratology:

At first, the black spot promises to represent a virtual treasure trove of meanings in which writing, money, nation, authority, and history all take their places. Shaped like a crown piece, the black spot is a piece of writing that resembles a paper simulation of a silver coin, the English equivalent of pieces of eight, thereby evoking an association to the parity of money and words in symbolic systems and the collapse of a national difference that relies on the authority of promiscuous signs. Torn from that paragon of extreme textual authority, The Bible, the black spot transmits fragments of stolen words and deracinated applications on one side and misspelled rebellion (“[d]epposed”) – rebellion against social as well as orthographical authority – on the other. Written in ash, the quoted word itself emblematizes the perishability of historical materiality whose erasure nevertheless remains ironically legible. This total riot of signs, however, calls us back to the sense of Stevenson's mimetic game and the exaggerated theatricality of pirate fiction's central props. As an illustration of the pirated text, the pirate text of the black spot patches together slips of quoted phrases and hyper-symbolic motifs (the Bible, the lost text) with a self-conscious wink.

That Stevenson's novel similarly aspires to create something out of stolen words emerges in its use of fragments. This is indeed a text that is littered with fragments, specifically, the mutilated bodies of the pirates – bodies without fingers, without legs, without eyes – fragments that coalesce figuratively around that proverbial synecdoche, “hands.” As every literature student can recite, “all hands on deck” exemplifies the metaphorical operation whereby a part substitutes for the whole. In Treasure Island, this figure of speech is literalized in the pirates’ bodies with which Jim struggles and culminates with his confrontation with the coxswain, Israel Hands. Although Hands's name refers to a pirate mentioned by Defoe, it is hard not to situate him within the novel's meditation on the circulation of over-used figures, the word “hand” and its avatars repeated over a hundred times in the course of a short novel.

The exaggerated use of this synecdoche suggests – however bizarrely – that Jim's climactic struggle with Hands in Chapters 25 and 26 is, in a way, a struggle with the personification of an overused figure of speech, a struggle in which Jim's imitation of a pirate – that is, his quoting “Dead men don't bite” – is rewarded providentially when the guns go off accidentally, thereby keeping Jim the pirate fake – a mere imitation – and Jim the innocent boy real. In other words, Jim's sojourn in the world of pirates and piracy, of creative and theatrical imitation, ends when it becomes clear that his piratical imitation is only a matter of cited words, not a real adoption of piratical life.

It is a matter of cited words that reflects an entertainment industry organized around a public domain of fictional references. Again, Dickens provides an apposite point of comparison. In his providential rescue from Israel Hands, Jim resembles Oliver Twist, similarly rescued from the “hands” of Fagin's den. The remarkable parallels between the two novels suggest a common thread in nineteenth-century narrative development. Like Fagin, who provides food for the abused orphan, Silver is also a provider of food, the ship's cook, thus nicknamed “Barbecue” (53).Footnote ⁸ While Fagin's boys anticipate death by hanging on the gallows, Silver's hands expect the same at Execution Dock. Just as Oliver's initiation into the gang begins with comic irony when he watches the “game” of pickpocketing without realizing it is an earnest rehearsal, Jim's initiation begins when he watches Silver disingenuously stage a mock hunt for Black Dog (43; ch. 8). And both scenes end with laughter: Fagin performs his part “in such a very funny and natural manner, that Oliver laughed till the tears ran down his face” (Dickens 71; bk. 1, ch. 9); when Silver pretends to realize that Black Dog absconded without paying his bar bill, “he laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks. I could not help joining; and we laughed together, peal after peal” (45; ch. 8). Both Oliver and Jim come of age when they glimpse beneath the veneer of entertainment an industry of human manufacture: just as Fagin manufactures criminal identities for lost boys through the stealing and circulation of handkerchiefs that, as John Jordan has argued, stand in the novel as texts (Jordan 580–93), Silver manufactures pirates, coercing the young seaman, Dick, to join the gentlemen of fortune “in the same words of flattery” (58, ch. 11) that he used with Jim. As agents for the circulation of stolen properties – whether handkerchiefs or pirate treasure – Fagin and Silver use words to coerce as well as to entertain.

It is common to attribute the appeal of fictional pirates to a fantasy of freedom from social obligation and quotidian monotony (Cordingly, Under the Black Flag 244) and to a Romantic tradition of bad-boy Byronic corsairs and the Victorian heroines who love them. Treasure Island, however, drafts a riveting and prophetic vision of a literary marketplace where creativity means entertainment. Entertainment that relies on the unbridled exchange of cited words.