Little Women and Treasure Island were both written with money in mind.*
As the introduction to our OUP edition of Little Women explains, Alcott’s father’s impracticality did not support the family: he even thought it ‘demeaning to work for hire’ (page xiv). Fortunately for her family, however, Alcott presented herself as a children’s writer to a publisher at a moment when he had spotted a market for a girls’ story.
Her ‘little women’ are not hopelessly poor. Unlike the Hummels in their hovel, they live in a neighbourhood where a rich man lives next door, they employ Hannah, and have some disposable income, even if they are not spared the embarrassments of relative poverty. I am struck – would this have happened in England? – that the genteel 15- and 16-year old girls ‘are allowed to do something toward their own support’. Alcott’s characters know that work is a cross to be borne even if it humiliates or demeans. I’m struggling to think of any attractive option for earning money, looking at the examples in the story. Everyone has to sacrifice themselves, apart perhaps from Laurie’s grandfather, who has accrued his wealth. But the reader cannot wholly admire him.
And like Jo who is not allowed to write the fiction of her choice and enjoy her success, Alcott seems to have felt bound to the wheel of writing sequels to Little Women, and despite her wealth ‘continued to worry about financial security’ (Little Women, introduction, pxx). It can’t have helped that her works were pirated in Britain.
Stevenson on the other hand seems more at ease. He writes frankly of ‘my paymaster, the Great Public’ in his 1894 essay ‘My First Book’ and of how his writing before Treasure Island did not provide ‘enough to live upon’. But then he had had the wealthier background and some family resources. Again, it was almost by accident that he drew his map and wrote his story and launched his career. A new Stevenson website is rather worthy, but full of information: how satisfying that Stevenson travelled to Samoa and the South Seas – even if it was more for his health than for adventure.
In Treasure Island, hard cash is morally darkened by connection with the pirates. Jim may earn his fourpenny pieces from the captain but at the cost of nightmares, and his mother puts their lives at risk by scrabbling in the captain’s belongings for the exact sum she is owed. The fascination is with uncountable coins : ‘pieces of eight’ that are more squawked than seen; a hoard that is sorted and packed into bread bags ‘for days and days’ but not quantified. We do know that one bag alone – such as Silver takes - is worth perhaps ‘three or four hundred guineas’; and we know that Silver has the sense to put his money in the bank; unlike Ben Gunn, who gets through his thousand pounds in nineteen days and is back begging on the streets. Cash is ruinous. The treasure becomes ‘abstract capital’, as Parkes points out in our Reader (p78). Investment – in the bank, in a pension, or in professional training – is wisdom.
I do hope Jim went on to a profession – although I have seen a youtube clip of Jim’s ‘Return to Treasure Island‘.
There’s hard cash for some in all these adaptations, perhaps.
* I’ve just been reminded of Samuel Johnson’s dictum, as quoted in Boswell’s Life: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’ Blockhead = bloghead?
