This complete and unabridged text of one of the classics of the high seas has been enhanced with over 70 original illustrations by award-winning artist Robert Ingpen, who has set his imagination loose on this breathtaking adventure, bringing the unforgettable characters and their thrilling escapades to life as never before.
Robert is also responsible for a number of other lavish productions of classics incuding Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, Wind in the Willows and A Christmas Carol. Click here to view them all.
June 2010 Guest Editor Michael Morpurgo says of Treasure Island: "I was not an avid reader at all. I liked comics and being read to, and listening to stories. This was the first real book I read for myself. Jim Hawkins was the first character I identified with totally. I lived this book as I read it."
Treasure Island (Illustrated by Robert Ingpen) Synopsis
Robert Louis Stevenson's tale of pirates, treasure and swashbuckling action on the high seas is the archetypal ripping yarn and continues to captivate readers of all ages.
Robert Louis Stevenson was born to Thomas and Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850. From the beginning he was sickly. Through much of his childhood he was attended by his faithful nurse, Alison Cunningham, known as Cummy in the family circle. She told him morbid stories about the Covenanters (the Scots Presbyterian martyrs), read aloud to him Victorian penny-serial novels, Bible stories, and the Psalms, and drilled the catechism into him, all with his parents' approval. Thomas Stevenson was quite a storyteller himself, and his wife doted on their only child, sitting in admiration while her precocious son expounded on religious dogma. Stevenson inevitably reacted to the morbidity of his religious education and to the stiffness of his family's middle-class values, but that rebellion would come only after he entered Edinburgh University.
The juvenilia that survives from his childhood shows an observer who was already sensitive to religious issues and Scottish history. Not surprisingly, the boy who listened to Cummy's religious tales first tried his hand at retelling Bible stories: "A History of Moses" was followed by "The Book of Joseph." When Stevenson was sixteen his family published a pamphlet he had written entitled The Pentland Rising, a recounting of the murder of Nonconformist Scots Presbyterians who rebelled against their royalist persecutors.
