If “You take the boat at San Francisco, and then my place is the second to the left” sounds at all similar to “second to the right and straight on till morning”, it could be because the latter was written by JM Barrie as the instructions to Never-neverland, and the former was the instructions Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to Barrie while trying to coax him to visit Stevenson in Samoa.

Robert Louis Stevenson initiated a correspondence with JM Barrie, which some infer inspired a number of themes in Barrie’s masterpiece Peter Pan. By that time, however, Stevenson was already an accomplished, established literary force having published Treasure Island. His interest in Barrie seems to have been perfectly friendly and admiring, as he was the much more famous of the two at the time and had nothing to be cloying about.

Stevenson had initially reached out to Barrie and Barrie in turn smothered Stevenson with adoration. They frequently plotted meeting but Barrie’s devotion to his ill mother kept him from heading to Samoa, and Stevenson’s poor health (which initiated his move from Scotland in the first place) prevented him from visiting Barrie.

They never, technically, met.

Barrie often fantasized in his letters that they were secretly related in some way, stemming from the same ancient clans in Scotland, and now-infamously wrote in his letters “To be blunt I have discovered (have suspected it for some time) that I love you, and if you had been a woman ….” A sentence which Barrie did not finish.
The confession didn’t impact their correspondences negatively at all and they continued to be pen pals until Stevenson’s death. Stevenson’s half of their correspondences were published posthumously by Barrie. At the time Barrie suspected that his letters to Stevenson had been destroyed and that his half of their relationship would remain a secret.

Dr. Michael Shaw, a scholar in Scottish literature who discovered the ‘lost’ Barrie letters, published “A Friendship in Letters”. He notes the impact Stevenson had on Barrie and his development of Peter Pan, not just in his references to Treasure Island in script but allusions directly to Stevenson and their correspondences.
Stevenson, like Peter Pan, was the proverbial outsider to English society.

First, Scottish. Bad start to get ahead in England.
Robert Louis Stevenson grew up ill, often bullied, rebelling intensely against the strict Presbyterian upbringing of his parents who once regarded him and themselves as failures after Stevenson was found to be an atheist and participating in socialist societies. Stevenson was a conservative later in life and never fully reconciled his conflicting beliefs or his conflicting religious and irreligious beliefs.

Much of Stevenson’s mercurial fight with morality and political allegiance seems to be mirrored in arguably his seminal work, “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”.
The most annoying thing that comes with talking about Dr Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, personally, is when people allege that the potion which Dr. Jekyll takes transforms him into Hyde. Perhaps I’m being pedantic, but the literary theme of Jekyll and Hyde is that they are one in the same man, that the potion gives Jekyll permission to be Hyde, not that Hyde is an invention of some drug. Hyde is the invention of Jekyll. He is, already, wicked.

The Body Snatcher, a short story inspired by Burke and Hare’s crimes which were contemporary to it’s publication, follows a man employed by a surgeon to procure bodies who comes to suspect that his partner is supplying bodies in more ways than one. Again and again, Fettes is talked out of implicating MacFarlane in any of the suspected murders and keeps his silence.

Kidnapped, which details the young, orphaned David Balfour discovering that he may be the rightful heir to an estate, with his uncle promising to explain the story of his father to him in the morning, only to arrange for Balfour to be kidnapped with the intention to be sold into slavery in the Carolinas that night. Much as with Jekyll and Hyde and with the Body Snatcher, ‘what is moral’ is the central theme. Balfour is concerned primarily with pursuing his version of justice against his uncle and nothing else, namely, getting his inheritance.

He doesn’t even want to kill the guy for selling him into slavery. When they finally trick Uncle Ebenezer into admitting he arranged for Balfour to be sold, Balfour immediately uses it to blackmail him and receive a salary to be paid so long as Uncle Ebenezer lives.

Stevenson’s characters, overall, are not concerned with morality but with the pursuit of a personal goal. Jekyll seeks permission to be Hyde and experience the immortality that he denies himself; Fettes is complicit in multiple murders to assure his own financial stability; Balfour doesn’t seem to care about anything except getting his money.

Literary critic Leslie Fiedler refers to Stevenson’s heroes as “the Beloved Scoundrel”, characters to which personal justice is the only morality.

Which brings us at last to Long John Silver.

Barrie quipped that the only man Long John Silver feared was Captain Hook and often intimated that Peter Pan took place in the same literary world as Treasure Island.

Greatly impacting the modern image of a pirate, Long John Silver is technically the main antagonist of Treasure Island. I say ‘technically’ because Long John Silver is genuinely fond of Jim Hawkins and based on Stevenson’s mentor William Ernest Henley (Henley’s daughter, Margaret, influenced Barrie to use the name ‘Wendy’ in Peter Pan.)

Like many of Stevenson’s characters, Long John Silver has a great deal of duality. He is charismatic, hardworking, likeable, and gradually revealed to be a villain as well–his earlier qualities aren’t fully negated by his conspiring.

Much of Stevenson’s work asks the reader if they’re able to forgive or find likeable someone who does wicked things if it’s also true that they are not wicked all of the time.

Whatever that makes you think of Stevenson, he puts back on you.