How old is David Balfour?

The first copy of Kidnapped I read was this ebook on Project Gutenberg, digitised from a 1921 illustrated edition of the book published by Harper & Brothers, New York. Its text contains four references to David’s age:

• In Chapter 1, David in the narration describes himself as ‘a lad of seventeen years of age’. He also tells us that the date is ‘early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751’.
• In Chapter 21, the Government bill ‘papering’ Alan and David as suspects in the Appin murder describes David as ‘a tall strong lad of about eighteen’.
• In Chapter 25, David is looking at the same bill again and thinks to himself that ‘Lowland boys of eighteen were not so rife in these parts of the world’.
• In Chapter 27, David tells Mr Rankeillor that his date of birth is ‘the year 1733, the 12th of March’. This ought to make him eighteen in June 1751.

In itself, we can dismiss the bill in chapter 21, as its author is clearly guessing David’s approximate age. However, the phrasing in chapter 25 sounds as though David accepts the estimate of eighteen; if it wasn’t exactly right, he could easily have thought ‘Lowland boys of about eighteen’, which is the wording of the bill anyway. This is a bit strange. But more obviously a problem is the unambiguous contradiction between chapter 1 and chapter 27. So, thought I, the book is inconsistent, but we have one definite reference to David as seventeen, and one definite and one arguable reference to him as eighteen; can we just say he’s probably eighteen? But it turns out it’s more complicated even than this...

Keeping an eye on the Wikipedia article for Kidnapped, I noticed when someone edited it to change David’s age, given at the beginning of the plot summary, from seventeen to sixteen. Well, thought I, obviously that’s wrong! But before changing it back I checked my paper copy of the book—recently bought and not at that point yet used for a full re-read—and discovered to my surprise that in that copy, chapter 1 does in fact have ‘a lad of sixteen years of age’, instead of ‘seventeen’! Further investigation revealed that in chapter 27 of this edition David’s date of birth is 12 March 1734, not 1733 (which should make him seventeen in June ’51; both numbers are changed by a year and hence the discrepancy between them is preserved). This paper copy is the 1994 Penguin Classics edition, edited by Donald McFarlan; McFarlan states that its text comes from the first book edition published in 1886 but incorporates a few later edits made by Stevenson. These edits are indicated with footnotes, and there is no footnote against any of the references to David’s age.

(After this the Wikipedia article was edited again back to seventeen; and since then I have intervened with an explanatory note.)

So, setting aside the Government bill for a moment, we have two definite discrepancies:

• One within each edition, where chapter 27 gives David a date of birth that should make him a year older than his stated age in chapter 1
• One between editions, where David is either sixteen or seventeen in chapter 1 and his date of birth in chapter 27 is either 1734 or 1733.

Now, there is one possible solution for the within-editions discrepancy. Until 1752, New Year’s Day was celebrated in England on 25 March, not 1 January (see here for details); using this calendar, first-edition David’s sixteenth birthday on 12 March 1750 would indeed be followed by June 1751, rather than June 1750. Unfortunately this only held in England; in Scotland New Year’s Day had been 1 January since 1600, and I don’t think there is any reason to suppose RLS meant to use the English New Year. Therefore I think we have to conclude that he simply couldn’t count. (Alternatively, we might expect a discrepancy of a year to arise from RLS losing track of the fact that he’d moved historical events that really happened in 1752 to 1751... except we’d expect that to produce errors in the opposite direction!)

The between-editions discrepancy is trickier. To investigate it, I examined all the copies of Kidnapped from 1921 or earlier that I could identify on the Internet Archive, and I included in my investigation the two changes noted in the Penguin Classics edition, in case they might throw any light on other changes to the text. These were a change in the time of Ransome’s murder at the beginning of chapter 8, from ‘nine o’clock’ to ‘twelve o’clock’, and a change to the passage in chapter 17 describing the wood of Lettermore, from ‘ferny dells’ to ‘ferny howes’. Here’s what I found:

• The first book editions have ‘sixteen’ in chapter 1 and ‘1734’ in chapter 27, as does the very first published text, serialised in the magazine Young Folks—many thanks to theseatheseatheopensea for finding this! So this is pretty clearly the original version.
• All editions agree that the bill in chapter 21 describes David as ‘about eighteen’ and that he thinks of the rarity of ‘Lowland boys of eighteen’ in chapter 25.
• All editions with ‘sixteen’ in chapter 1 have ‘1734’ in chapter 27, and all those with ‘seventeen’ in chapter 1 have ‘1733’ in chapter 27.
• The change to ‘seventeen’ in chapter 1 and ’1733’ in chapter 27 first appears in 1895. Editions from after this date are generally inconsistent, including some from the same publisher.
• The change from ‘ferny dells’ to ‘ferny howes’ in chapter 17 is present as expected.
• Similarly, we see the change from ‘nine o’clock’ to ‘twelve o’clock’ in chapter 8... but then, unexpectedly, there’s another, later change to ‘eleven o’clock’!
• While ‘twelve o’clock’ is introduced much earlier than any other change, ‘eleven o’clock’ and ‘ferny howes’ first appear alongside ‘seventeen’ and ‘1733’, and are almost perfectly correlated with them thereafter. (Only the undated post-1894 Blackie & Son edition and the 1920 Scott, Foreman & Company edition break the pattern; these are both ‘one-off’ editions not from the regular publishers Cassell & Company and Charles Scribner’s Sons, and we might thus expect them to be a bit irregular).

Rather serendipitously, while aimlessly looking up other stuff about Kidnapped I found this letter of RLS’s from December 1893, in which he describes sending ‘a corrected Kidnapped’ to his publishers in connection with the sequel. Now, I submit that this is where he introduced ‘seventeen’, ‘eleven o’clock’, ‘ferny howes’ and ‘1733’. The 1895 edition in which this set of correlated changes first appears has on its title page a super-title very similar to that given by RLS in the letter (The Adventures of David Balfour, Part One: Kidnapped, vs. The Adventures of David Balfour, Vol. I, Kidnapped)—and the other 1895 Cassell & Company edition, which does not include the changes, does not have this title either. Further evidence comes from a notice in The Times for 10 May 1895, which announces the publication of the two-volume edition and states that ‘Shortly before his death Mr. Stevenson corrected “Kidnapped,” and the revised text is here used’. So those four changes first appear here; and then they’re either picked up or not by later editions depending on which earlier texts the publishers used in each case, resulting in the pattern of the above table.

We are left with the mystery of how McFarlan, putting together the Penguin Classics edition, was aware of ‘ferny howes’ but not ‘eleven o’clock’ or ‘seventeen/1733’—this perhaps suggests that ‘ferny howes’ might have been introduced separately and earlier. Now, McFarlan’s footnote about the change does not refer directly to a later edition with ‘ferny howes’, but reads ‘The first edition gives "ferny dells". Stevenson later amended this at the suggestion of Edmund Gosse.’ I would conjecture that McFarlan found the correspondence in which RLS and Gosse discussed this change (I don’t know what this is; I looked briefly through the above-linked collection of RLS’s letters, but couldn’t find it there), went ‘aha!’, checked in a later edition to make sure it read ‘ferny howes’ and then incorporated the change into the Penguin Classics edition—but, unaware that RLS had made any other changes, McFarlan didn’t check for them and hence missed them. This is merely a conjecture, and it is possible that the changes were made separately and/or that McFarlan was working from an edition with ‘ferny howes’ but not ‘eleven o’clock’ or ‘seventeen/1733’ (the 1920 Scott, Foreman & Company edition has exactly this pattern, for instance); but I think the near-perfect correlation between the three changes does make this unlikely.

So, in conclusion: ‘sixteen/1734’ was the original text, but ‘seventeen/1733’ was RLS’s final intention. But which of these—and which of the contradictory numbers within each of them—should we the fandom now accept as canonical? The first question depends, of course, on whether you think it’s valid for an author to edit their fic after it’s already posted, and that’s a matter of opinion. Some other points to consider when answering both questions:

• We could consider David seventeen, accepting the date of birth from the first editions and the stated age from the later ones, and thus avoid a definite choice between them.
• It is, of course, far more likely that the stated ages in chapter 1 were RLS’s actual intentions for David’s age and that the dates in chapter 27 were a maths error than the other way round; therefore from a Doylist point of view it’s more valid to accept the stated age.
• You’ll recall from the subtitle that Kidnapped is presented as David’s in-universe memoirs. Accepting this conceit, it seems quite possible that David, writing many years after the fact, simply couldn’t remember exactly how old he was at any given time (and this could cover the ‘eighteen’ in chapter 25 as well as the stated ages in chapter 1); but it’s much more likely that he would remember his exact date of birth correctly. Thus from a Watsonian point of view, the date of birth is more reliable.
• If we accept the date of birth from the later editions, which makes David eighteen, this resolves the arguable discrepancy with chapter 25.

Now, the NTS stage adaptation makes David nineteen. I did wonder at one point if this was perhaps a deliberate cheeky reference to all these discrepancies in the book; but according to Isobel McArthur in this behind-the-scenes video the change (from seventeen) was made partly because the creators felt that David’s actions seemed more plausible for a slightly older character and partly to avoid too dodgy an age gap with Alan (who is aged down, being described as ‘about twenty-five’ in the play and stated to be twenty-six here) in a version making their romance textual. So there you go; yet another possibility is added to the confusion.

Addendum: Since writing this article I have acquired the 1991 Reader’s Digest ‘The World’s Best Reading’ edition of Kidnapped, and discovered to my delight that it corrects the date of birth discrepancy: chapter 1 has ‘seventeen’ and chapter 27 has ‘1734’! (It also has ‘twelve o’clock’ and ‘ferny howes’.) I do not know how many other later editions manage this, and it would be an interesting topic to investigate further. If you have another edition of the book with an interesting combination of these variable lines, please tell me about it!