Stevenson revived Romanticism with his historical adventure novels. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Sir Walter Scott began writing spirited stories of the Middle Ages and of Scotland set during the Renaissance and eighteenth century. Scott's historical fiction was enormously popular and influential for three generations, but by Stevenson's time, when realism was on the rise, readers were losing interest in Romanticism. Stevenson's psychologically complex characters and his sharp sense of time, place, language, and historical detail reveal the realist influence on his work. Many of his details of fifteenth-century life came from The Paston Letters, a body of correspondence written between 1422 and 1509 to a prominent Norfolk family. Stevenson lacks Scott's depth, but his fast-paced narratives testify to his skill as a stylist.

Like Scott, Stevenson deftly recreates Scottish dialect in Kidnapped, David Balfour, and Weir of Hermiston, but also like Scott, he indulges in...