About the Book: Kidnapped and Catriona
Robert Louis Stevensons novel Kidnapped is set around real 18th-century
Scottish events, which occurred in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745,
a time of turmoil and political upheaval. It tells the tale of David Balfour, a
recently orphaned seventeen-year-old, who is left to seek his own fortune. A
letter from his deceased father advises him to head to the house of Shaws in
Edinburgh. He travels to Scotland as though it was a foreign country, meeting
various adventures and misadventures on the way. Many of the characters in the
novel are real people, including Alan Breck Stewart, the