Victorian Coral Islands of Empire, Mission, and the Boys’ Adventure Novel, by Michelle Elleray

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Coral Islands of Empire, Mission, and the Boys' Adventure Novel by Michelle Elleray Melissa Free (bio) Victorian Coral Islands of Empire, Mission, and the Boys' Adventure Novel, by Michelle Elleray. London and New York: Routledge, 2020, $160.00, $41.60 ebook. The primary subject of Michelle Elleray's Victorian Coral Islands of Empire, Mission, and the Boys' Adventure Novel is the mid-nineteenth-century boys' adventure novel set in the South Pacific. But, like "minute coral polyps," living organisms that "in building a coral structure" make recognizable "the barely visible," Elleray's generic focus brings more to the surface. "Collating pervasive but apparently small and minor references—to the formation of coral islands, the British child's missionary fundraising, the pious sailor, and the Pacific Islander Christian"—Elleray makes "visible the latent connections between missionary culture" and a popular, if specialized, literary genre (166). Elleray contends that not only was "awareness of the South Pacific and its missionary links … assumed knowledge for the mid-Victorian reader," but also that Victorians were fascinated by coral polyps (30). The subject of both scientific investigation and popular discourse, coral polyps signified "the accretive possibilities of small acts" (46), "the generative capacity of the ordinary individual" (39), "the value of work in the service of a greater [social] good" (43), and "God's divine order" (42). Mobilized by evangelicals in juvenile missionary periodicals and mid-century boys' adventure fiction set in the South Pacific, the cultural narrative of the coral polyp "enable[d] agency to be transposed to the child, the working-class sailor, [and] the Pacific Islander convert." This agency, however, was "constrain[ed] … to approved goals through the operations of adult supervision, class authority, and imperial control" (167). Elleray's interesting if overdetermined analogy between the coral polyp and the "socially marginal" organizes her reading of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine (1844–87), published by the London Missionary Society (LMS), and fiction by Frederick Marryat, R. M. Ballantyne, W. H. G. Kingston, and Robert Louis Stevenson (3). Her chapters consistently and smoothly build on each other. In addition to developing material in her introduction, chapter 1 demonstrates the ways in which the LMS established an "affective connection" between the child reader and the Pacific Islander (53); encouraged the child's investment in the sailor's spiritual welfare; and "enjoin[ed]" the child's "spiritual self-reflection" (58), since salvation was not "inherent in … ethnicity or nationality" (61). Marryat does these things as well, we learn in chapter 2, which explores evangelical mobilizations of "the globally mobile sailor" to better understand his importance in Masterman Ready (1841) (68). As the subject of evangelical outreach known as the Seaman's Cause, the sailor played an important role in the South Pacific. His "state of grace (or not) often formed Pacific Islanders' first interactions with Westerners, and [End Page 320] thus the perceived value (or not) of Christianity" (75). Though her focus is on Ready, Elleray notes that he is "led … to Christianity" by another sailor (82) and that a formerly enslaved African woman now working as a servant "transition[s] from nominal Christian to a person of deep and abiding faith" (90). From these working-class characters, the middle-class Seagraves learn "submission to God's will," which validates their position as "the appropriate administrators of imperial rule" (93). While this line of argument is convincing, Elleray's claim that the text "attempts the management of class tensions within Britain" that manifest in Chartism is less well developed (68). The "spiritual status of the working-class sailor" is also an important theme of chapters 3 and 4 (131). Reading Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857) alongside "British documentary accounts of … Pacific Islander missionaries" and juvenile missionary periodicals, chapter 3 focuses on the often-overlooked second half of the novel (102). There, "the teacher," a Pacific Islander convert, "offers a model of muscular Christianity" (111), while Bloody Bill and his compeers illustrate "piratical savagery" (105). "The message" for the novel's "British sailor boys" and its "British child reader[s]" (115) alike is that "physical activity" must be balanced with "spiritual contemplation" (129), "humankind's propensity towards violence" must be managed "through a...