Claire Harman
Kidnapped
Arthur Ransome’s Long-lost Study of Robert Louis Stevenson
By Kirsty Nichol Findlay
Boydell & Brewer 214pp £30 order from our bookshop
In 1990 a brown-paper parcel came to light in the strongroom of the solicitors firm Linklaters and Paines in London. It had been deposited there in 1947 and had been addressed to Parr’s Bank, Regent Street even longer ago, in May 1914. The label made it clear that the parcel was to be held until claimed by ‘Arthur Ransome, Esq: or Mrs Arthur Ransome’ and it contained a manuscript of an unfinished critical study by Ransome of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Linklaters and Paines contacted the Arthur Ransome Society, which placed it with the Ransome Archive in the Brotherton Library in Leeds in 1993. Why the manuscript was never recovered by the author (who lived until 1967) and, indeed, if it was ever sent to Parr’s in the first
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