Treasure Island Publication Quotes

NOBEL PRIZE–WINNER, British poet laureate, essayist, novelist, journalist, and short story writer Rudyard Kipling wrote for both children and adults, with many of his stories and poems focusing on British imperialism in India. His works were popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even though many deemed his political views too conservative. Born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, Kipling had a happy early childhood, but in 1871 he and his sister were sent to a boarding house called Lorne Lodge in Southsea, where he spent many disappointing years. He was accepted in 1877 to United Services College in the west of England. In 1882, he returned to his family in India, working as a journalist, associate editor, and correspondent for many publications, including Civil and Military Gazette, a publication in Lahore, Pakistan. He also wrote poetry. He found great success in writing after his 1889 return to England, where he was eventually appointed poet laureate. Some of his most famous writings, including The Jungle Book, Kim, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Rewards and Fairies, saw publication in the 1890s and 1900s. It was during this period that he married Caroline Balestier, the sister of an American friend and publishing colleague. The couple settled in Vermont, where their two daughters were born. After a quarrel with his brother-in-law and grumblings from his American neighbors about his controversial political views, Kipling and his family returned to England. There, Caroline gave birth to a son in 1896. Tragically, their eldest daughter died in 1899. Later, Kipling’s son perished in battle during World War I. In 1907 Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize. He died on January 18, 1936, and his ashes are buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

When transports carrying survivors of the Battle of Savo Island finally returned home, the men were sent to quarantine, removed from public circulation. They had stories to tell that Admiral King would be quite happy not to see in the newspapers. Some five hundred survivors of the Astoria, Vincennes, and Quincy were held under virtual house arrest in a barracks that had been constructed on Treasure Island for the 1939 World’s Fair. Marines were detailed to prevent the sailors from leaving. “Don’t you say one word about the battle,” they were told.

The crisis created by the hurricane was the perfect excuse for a political power play—if Galveston had been Nicaragua, what Kempner and his friends accomplished might have been described as a bloodless coup. The instruments of insurrection were in place. Kempner was already city treasurer, and minister of finance for the Central Relief Committee. Kempner, John Sealy, Morris Lasker, and Bertrand Adoue provided a link between the Central Relief Committee and the Deep Water Committee. By simply withholding taxes, members of the DWC created the illusion that the Jones administration was being irresponsible and probably dishonest in handling the public purse. Whatever the DWC had in mind, the Galveston Daily News could be counted on for support. When Mayor Jones accused the DWC of using the hurricane to bring down the duly elected government, the newspaper charged that the mayor was appealing to “class differences.

Sargent painted a series of three portraits of the author Robert Louis Stevenson and the second, Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife (1885), is now one of the artist’s best known portraits. Completed less than a year before the publication of the hugely popular The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Sargent depicts Stevenson pacing before us, while his wife Fanny is seated in background to the right of the door. Reviews were mixed about the painting, with some critics feeling that the arrangement of the composition was odd and the depiction of the novelist was unflattering. However, Stevenson thought Sargent had correctly captured his odd manner of fidgeting about the room while he was trying to write. When Sargent painted the canvas, he wrote to Henry James and said that Stevenson “seemed to me the most intense creature I had ever met.” Sargent was twenty-nine years old at the time and Stevenson was thirty-four and at the height of his most productive period. He had just published Treasure Island in book form in 1883, his first full-length novel, and his popularity only grew in the public’s eye with The Black Arrow (1883), A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) and Kidnapped (1886). Interestingly, Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife sold in 2004 for $8.8 million to the Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn to be installed at his newest casino, Wynn Las Vegas.