Kidnapped is like Treasure Island in some ways and unlike it in others. To start with the likenesses. (1) Both of them are among those works – Jekyll and Hyde and A Child's Garden of Verses are others – which have suffered nothing from the disparagement or neglect by the critics of Stevenson's work in general. The common reader has taken them to his heart. (2) Both Kidnapped and Treasure Island are good boys' books. By that I do not mean that they are books for good boys. Nor do I wish to be taken as endorsing the tiresome and anti-literary custom of sorting out books on the basis of their supposed suitability to particular ‘age-groups’. Literature is not like that. But authors' intentions – while not necessarily decisive for criticism – have to be taken into account, and there is no doubt that authors have intended to write such things. I would define a good boys' book as a book which the author meant to be a boys' book and which does in fact appeal to many boys. (It is not necessarily a book which adults think boys like; still less one they think boys ought to like.) Both Kidnapped and Treasure Island clearly satisfy that definition, and as far as Kidnapped is concerned Stevenson seems to have indicated his intention, at any rate as it was at the moment of completing the book, by calling it Kidnapped and publishing it in Young Folks.