Critical Analysis on Kidnapped Kidnapped was written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886 Stevenson based his novel on a lot of things that had been going on back in that time The motifs he uses are all alluding to things going on around the world and in Scotland in the eighteenth century like the differences of the Lowlands from the Highlands in Scotland and the different views of the Jacobites verses the Whigs Robert Louis Stevenson writes in a past tense form making it sound as if the things go