Sven says:

Why did it take so long? It’s not a very heavy book? Nowadays I read books mostly while being out, in the subway or in a pub. At home I watch TV, read blogs, blog myself etc. Unlike Dickens and Walter Scott, Stevenson concentrates on the very action and does not give much details of landscape and gear and such. This may be the “plain” thing about the book, but it makes the story strong. It’s a long time since I read something this fascinating, even more and more towards the end.

My pen is clear enough to tell a plain tale; but to render the effect of an infinity of small things, not one great enough in itself to be narrated; and to translate the story of looks, and the message of voices when they are saying no great matter; and to put in half a page the essence of near eighteen months – this is what I despair to accomplish.
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Master of Ballantrae, Chapter II.
It seems to me Stevenson excuses himself because his novels are not so heavy as those by Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. But I wonder if that makes them “plain”?

A lot of pictures remain inside me. Many parts of this story are clear and detailed like film scripts. You could start making a new film at every passage where there is a time gap. Or produce a lot of drawings, as if it were still The Pickwick Papers going on. The humour and the phantasy is still there, for sure.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only a small injustice the child can be exposed to; but the child is small; and its world is small …
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, chapter 8.
You may remember from your own childhood such happenings which made you suffer then, and now you have overcome – but you can’t take for granted that your children overcome.

Right now I am reading Great Expectations in a pocket edition from Airmont in NYC, 1965 or so. You know what age can do to thin paper and cheap glue, don’t you? The leaves disjunct by and by as I turn them.

Imagine I sat reading it outdoors in the winds of autumn. A lot of paper leaves would cruise around the world, each of them promising GREAT EXPECTATIONS!

The story of a young English officer who by a series of coincidences gets into fighting against his army gives much to reflect upon, and many questions to ask. I doubt whether there has ever been a first novel by any author that has made such an impact on the very milieu where it was created. If you go by train to the centre of Edinburgh, you arrive at Waverley Station. Imagine there could be a Pickwick Station in London, or a Gare Quasimodo in Paris? Or a Red Room Station in Stockholm? It also seems that the growing enthusiasm for “the author of Waverley” who was at first anonymous, gave popularity to the then obsolete kilt as a Scottish national attire.

In this novel, there are more mentionings of whisky than of brandy, quite naturally since the great part of the plot is located in Scotland or among Scots.

Have you thought about this, how many great novels in English are about travelling? A recent example:  preparing for the final battle against the Dark Lord, Harry Potter and his two best friends have to visit various places in Britain to find some mysterious necessary objects. For Charles Dickens, when he took over the concept of the Pickwick Club which was already conceived by others, the right thing to do seemed to get the whole show moving. And when you are on the move, you need refreshments.

In The Pickwick Papers, published around 1835,  there are some fifty mentionings of brandy. Brandy is the category name of various liquors that are distilled from wine. Mr Pickwick and his friends and foes consume lots of this stuff at many places. There are also three mentionings of whisky, but mark well: no one of the active characters gets a single drop of it. It is only mentioned in some tales that are told by minor characters who occasionally show up.

It can be concluded that in England whisky was very little known, although precisely in those times the government was working hard to get a legislation of the whisky production which had been going on in Scotland for centuries.

Then what happened? In the second half of the 19th century the Phylloxera destroyed much of the vineyards in Europe, causing a shortage of wine. So whisky conquered England, and the world!