Revisions Revisited: A Narratological Reading of the Cornhill Version of R. L. Stevenson’s “The Pavilion on the Links”

Abstract

Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Pavilion on the Links”, which was praised as a “masterpiece” by Arthur Conan Doyle, was first published in The Cornhill Magazine in 1880 before it appeared in the collection New Arabian Nights in 1882. The magazine version is very different from the book version. It contains an initial paragraph of about 350 words in which the first-person narrator addresses his “dear children” and discusses his motives in telling them the story. The book version omits this paragraph and also introduces other changes that reduce the prominence of the narrator in the interest of a more exclusive emphasis on plot and suspense. The present essay gives an overview of these revisions and suggests two explanations for them, one of which is biographical, while the other is narratological. It then focuses on the magazine version and analyses it as an early and tentative experiment in foregrounding the role of the narrator, a precursor of later works which feature fully-fledged unreliable narrators, such as The Master of Ballantrae.