In the Wall Street Journal, Stefan Beck re-visits the perennial children’s classic Treasure Island.

One can witness, in scholarship about “Treasure Island,” an urge to study it in a postcolonial or Marxist context. Stevenson would have wanted it read a different way. In “The Day After To-morrow,” he wrote: “Our race has not been strained for all these ages through that sieve of dangers that we call Natural Selection, to sit down…in the tedium of safety…. The bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living; he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often out of reach of any vicissitude but one of health; and there he yawns.” “Treasure Island” is a paean to risk and peril.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.