Stevenson readily admitted that he depended on the works of other writers for much of the material in Treasure Island. Some of these writers were Washington Irving, Charles Kingsley, and "a parrot from Defoe, a skeleton from Poe, a stockade from Marryat."

That he rose above the literary form of the "boys' book" (a tale intended to teach boys how to be men, including such romantic adventures as H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, 1885) is now evident, but at the time many readers believed that Stevenson had simply added to the canon of such works. However, when so distinguished a person as William Gladstone, the Prime Minister of England, stated that he had sat up all night reading the book, one might agree that Treasure Island reaches far beyond any of its precedents.