My big read: Treasure Island
Share
My big read: Treasure Island
https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/my-big-read-treasure-island
The ending has to be read aloud: “Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts or start upright in bed with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears, ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’”
Everyone knows Treasure Island is a romance of pirates and the sea. Butnbsp; few people know that Stevenson invented pirates as we know them. He invented walking the plank and going down to Davy Jones’s Locker. The story, which moves at a rollicking pace, is set in a place that never was. But the underlying tale is about the pain of loving someone bad. When Stevenson wrote Treasure Island in the early 1880s, he was newly married to his difficult, fascinating wife, Fanny Osborne. After a childhood in bed with tuberculosis, reading, Stevenson was more in tune than most writers with what he termed the “nameless longings of the reader” - for adventure, desire, experience. Treasure Island pulsates with its author’s passion for life, his preternatural sensitivity to colour, smell, sound - and fear. Read more in this week’s TES, page 23 See www.bbc.co.ukartsbigread for the full list, resources and details of related programmes. To subscribe to the National Literacy Trust’s Big Read e-newsletter, see: www.readon.org.uktbr.html
You've reached your limit of free articles this month. Subscribe for £1 per month for three months and get: