Robert Louis Stevenson’s Quiet Rebellion Against Imperial Ideology

How Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde Reveal a Subtle yet Brilliant Anti-Establishment Mind

There’s a certain delight in realizing that Robert Louis Stevenson, that supposed spinner of boyish yarns and penny-dreadful shocks, was in fact one of the most subversive moral thinkers of the Victorian age. His stories masquerade as adventure and horror, all the while operating as sly critiques of the very establishment that adored him. If you scratch the bright varnish on Treasure Island, or peer closely at the psycho-moral shadows of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you begin to see that Stevenson wasn’t simply entertaining the Empire. He was examining it. Questioning it. Needling it. Quietly rebelling against it.

To understand the depth of that rebellion, we must start with the world Stevenson inhabited. He came of age in the latter half of the 19th century, during the height of British imperialism. Nelson’s legacy still perfumed the national imagination – the brave admiral who died in 1805 was, by Stevenson’s youth, a figure carved in heroic marble. Britain’s navy was the Empire’s engine, its symbol, its moral fig leaf. Adventure tales flourished because they fed that national fantasy: that Britain was bold, righteous, and destined to rule the waves.

Stevenson, however, was not so easily convinced.

He grew up listening to maritime stories in Edinburgh, but he also grew up keenly aware of hypocrisy. He saw how Victorian respectability polished its boots on the backs of its colonies. He saw how much the Empire relied on a comforting myth of moral superiority. And he responded in the best way an artist can: he wrote stories that appeared to reinforce the myth while quietly dismantling it.

That is the heart of his genius. His rebellion is soft-spoken but razor-sharp. It is the smile that hides the criticism, the adventure that hides the mirror, the horror that hides the accusation.

Let us look first at Treasure Island.

The novel was written in 1881-82 and published in 1883, right in the thick of Britain’s global expansion. Adventure fiction was wildly popular. Young readers devoured anything that smelled of salt, gunpowder, or faraway islands. But instead of offering the usual patriotic bromide, Stevenson delivered something far more interesting.

The men who represent the respectable Victorian world – Trelawney, Livesey, Smollett – embark on a quest that is already morally compromised. Their goal is to take treasure that was itself stolen by a thief who had stolen it from others. They dress it up in language about order and propriety, but their motives are as greedy as the pirates they condemn.

Stevenson refuses to give the Empire a comfortable moral pedestal.

The pirates, meanwhile, are not simple caricatures. Long John Silver is cunning, charismatic, adaptable. He represents a different kind of colonial agent – the rogue entrepreneur who lives by the same principles of dominance, opportunism, and extraction as the Empire itself. Silver is the Empire without its waistcoat ironed. He behaves in ways the Empire pretends not to. In him, Stevenson shows Britain its own reflection.

The island itself plays its part. Unnamed. Uninhabited. Treated as property by whoever can plant a flag and load a cannon. This follows the colonial doctrine of terra nullius, the belief that unclaimed land was “empty” and therefore available. Stevenson reveals the absurdity of that mindset by making the island a stage for greed and violence rather than glory. It is not a paradise to be tamed. It is a mirror of human corruption.

And what of Jim Hawkins, our supposed moral anchor? He gets the treasure, but he is not ennobled by it. The ending is famously melancholic. Jim says the island haunts his dreams. The adventure has scarred him. This is not the triumphant young imperialist hero Victorian fiction usually produced. Jim has learned that the cost of conquest is psychological, emotional, and permanent.

Quiet rebellion indeed.

Now we move to Jekyll and Hyde, published in 1886, a few years after Treasure Island. It is often discussed as a psychological thriller, a study of split personality, a meditation on suppressed desire. And it is all those things. But it is also a social critique dressed in fog and horror.

Victorian London appears in the novella as a polite surface stretched tightly over a seething underworld. Stevenson understood that the Empire itself was constructed exactly this way. Respectability on top, exploitation below. Civility on top, brutality underneath. Good intentions on top, greed beneath.

Dr. Jekyll is the quintessential Victorian gentleman – educated, well-mannered, wealthy. Mr. Hyde is the shadow of that world – violent, selfish, unchecked. Yet they are the same person. That is the point. Stevenson is saying: stop pretending the establishment is clean. Stop believing your institutions are pure. Stop imagining that vice belongs only to the lower classes, the colonies, or the criminal fringe. Hyde is not foreign. He is homegrown.

Moreover, the structure of the story undermines the Victorian belief in moral dualism. Jekyll’s desperate claim that he has separated his good self from his wicked self is exposed as delusion. He has not freed goodness. He has freed brutality. The good self, the one he likes to present to society, is revealed to be weak and self-deceiving. Meanwhile, the monstrous self thrives in the cracks of society that pretends not to know him.

Again, a quiet rebellion. Stevenson is not mocking individuals – he is mocking the entire moral architecture of the age. He is questioning the idea that institutions, gentlemen, or empires can claim moral purity while benefiting from invisible exploitation.

When you combine these two works, the picture becomes unmistakable. Treasure Island critiques the imperial fantasy of noble adventure. Jekyll and Hyde critiques the imperial fantasy of moral purity. Both stories place the shadow where the Victorians least wanted to see it: at home.

Later in life, when Stevenson moved to Samoa, he became openly critical of imperial conduct. His letters reveal his indignation at how colonial powers treated the islanders. He championed the Samoan cause. He saw, firsthand, what he had sensed all along: that the Empire’s self-image was dangerously inflated.

But even before he moved to the South Pacific, the seeds of his resistance were already on the page.

Stevenson did not need to shout. He did not need manifestos. He delivered his critique in adventures, in nightmares, in elegant prose that slipped past Victorian defenses. That is why his stories have endured. They entertain. They provoke. They quietly challenge the myths that comforted a nation convinced of its own righteousness.

Stevenson was not merely a storyteller. He was a moral insurgent in disguise.

And his rebellion, subtle though it may be, still shines as brightly as the treasure Jim Hawkins left behind on the island that haunts him still.

Keep Writing!

Rob Parnell