[In the following article, Maher traces popular response to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) in the nineteenth century, charting both criticism of the novel and its eventual influence on Victorian adventure fiction for boys.]

When the formidable Leslie Stephen dismissed Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe [1719] as "a book for boys rather than men" [in "Defoe's Novels," The Cornhill Magazine, 1868], he was not far off the mark. By the time Stephen penned his disparaging comments in 1868, Robinson Crusoe had inspired numerous progeny ear-marked for the young. Following the 1814 English translation of J.D.R. Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson, among the most famous of the so-called Robinsonades that explore and adapt the premise of Defoe's novel, Robinsonades commanded an eager juvenile readership ready to devour the latest fiction about castaways, no matter how didactic or improbable the tale. In the nineteenth century, Robinson Crusoe itself became a prized nursery book, favored by children for its detail and adventure, by parents for its religious sentiment and work ethic. Indeed, Stephen's unfavorable assessment of Crusoe is anomalous. The popular nineteenth-century reading of Robinson Crusoe celebrates the tales of redemption and of hard work rewarded. Crusoe heroically combats madness and despair, builds himself a veritable empire on his island, transforms Friday into a loyal manservant, defends against heathen savages (native and European), and ends up with a fortune—all in all a favored son of God, an exemplary man. The words of the minor Victorian novelist, George Borrow, typify nineteenth-century admiration, as he reaches a pitch of Crusoe idolatry in Lavengro (1851): Robinson Crusoe "was a book which has exerted over the minds of Englishmen an influence certainly greater than any other of modern times . . . a book from which the most luxuriant and fertile of our modern prose writers have drunk inspiration; a book, moreover, to which from the hardy deeds which it narrates, and the spirit of strange and romantic enterprise which it tends to awaken, England owes many of her astonishing discoveries both by sea and by land, and no inconsiderable part of her naval glory."

Reviewers like Borrow omit mention of Crusoe's introspection, his inner torment and fear; instead, Crusoe, whose proportions and reputation grow increasingly sentimental, shrilly patriotic in nineteenth-century reviews, comes to signify Empire, the outer world of action, power, and expansion. His ability to subdue, to husband intractable nature into compliance; his reacceptance of both heavenly and earthly favors; his own metamorphosis into a patriarchal father of sorts prove invaluable archetypal matter to nineteenth-century writers and readers alike. Moreover, reviewers, whether praising or condemning Crusoe's vogue, agree on one thing: his tale is peculiarly suited to a boy's taste. It is significant that Stephen specifically relegates Robinson Crusoe to the hands of boys—for its textual mixture of adventure and enterprise, of survival and subjugation, as Mary F. Thwaite asserts [in From Primer to Pleasure Reading, 1963], "marks the true beginning of the adventure story for young people."

The transmutation of Robinson Crusoe by nineteenth-century readers into an imperialist fantasy explains its power over adventure fiction written for boys. Adventure, though read by girls, evolved into a distinctly masculine story type. By mid-century, as Patrick Brantlinger has suggested [in "Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent," Critical Inquiry 12(1985)], "much imperialist discourse was . . . directed at a specifically adolescent audience, the future rulers of the world. In the works of Haggard, Captain Frederick Marryat, Mayne Reid, G.A. Henty, W.H.G. Kingston, Gordon Stables, Robert Louis Stevenson, and many others through Rudyard Kipling, Britain turned youthful as it turned outward." As Robinson Crusoe became codified by its Victorian audience, so, too, did its offspring, adventure books. Crusoe's boys'-book imitators simplify its interplay of romance and realism in order to articulate a myth of cultural superiority. They recast their Crusoes into quintessential empire builders, create islands that signify a hierarchy of culture and race, and ultimately mirror a conquering people's mythology. The Robinsonade also suited the immediate professional aims of boys'-book writers, who sought to enlighten as well as entertain their young audience, to educate as well as exhilarate. Boys'-book writers, constrained by market forces, closely monitored by the champions of virtue, and saddled in an adventure formula, found in the Robinsonade the perfect sugared pill. Indeed, once writers for children seized upon the Robinsonade, writers of adult fiction left the genre well enough alone.

By the time the century's most memorable and influential British Robinsonades appeared, Frederick Marryat's Masterman Ready (1841-42) and R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857), the genre had become an institution of sorts. To isolate a character, to test his mettle and his culture's worthiness, had proven an efficacious as well as a popular concept. Robinson Crusoe, as Erhard Reckwitz has argued in his comprehensive survey of the genre, Die Robinsonade [1976], establishes a "language" that expresses crucial dialectical poles: form versus formlessness, construction versus destruction, nature versus nurture, survival versus death, the self versus the other. This dialectical structure articulates the interplay of culture and chaos, of faith and despair crucial to Defoe's narrative and to its permutations. The island setting, then, from Defoe on, serves as an archetypal laboratory for a society's ideology. Despite its undermining subtext—Crusoe continually fights his own inner fears and desires, never conclusively defeating either—Defoe's novel privileges an ideology that is protestant, middle class, and expansionist. Crusoe masters his island, his subjects, and his own waywardness, enabling him to recover an earthly Eden. It is no wonder, then, that Robinson Crusoe appealed to the Victorian mind and its tendency to privilege action, hard work, and material progress. Moreover, Crusoe's humbleness before God, his thanksgiving to a beneficent providence appeased those children's advocates, inspired by Maria Edgeworth, who might otherwise have denied children access to the novel.

Still, Edgeworth and others objected to the romance in Defoe's novel. Edgeworth warned in her influential Practical Education (1799) that "a boy, who at seven years old longs to be Robinson Crusoe, or Sinbad the Sailor, may at seventeen, retain the same taste for adventure and enterprise." Romance, adventure threaten the young mind and must be firmly collared by a practical outlook on life: in effect, readers like Edgeworth elevate Crusoe's father to the heroic level, for he rightly adheres to the middle station of life. They applaud Crusoe's minutely realized chronicle of recreation for it reclaims the middle station's dominion over his life. Evangelical writers quickly and successfully adapted the Robinsonade to quicken their young readers' religious sentiments and promote the middle station. Mary Elliott's The English Hermit (1822), Agnes Strickland's The Rival Crusoes (1826), Mrs. Holland's (Barbara Wreaks Hoole) The Young Crusoe (1828), and Ann Fraser Tytler's popular Leila; or, The Island (1839) exploit the genre's inherent spiritual pattern to enforce duty and rightmindedness.

Significantly, Edgeworth's warning and the examples of these spiritual Robinsonades affected many writers of boys' adventure fiction throughout the nineteenth century, including writers of adventure Robinsonades, who were keenly aware of their role as socializers. Robinson Crusoe never synthesizes the push of culture and the pull of romance; an undertow of anarchic power disturbs the narrative of domestic achievement. Though master of acculturation on his island, Crusoe is beset by the devils of adventure and inner chaos; his obsessive wall building, as Paul Zweig suggests [in The Adventurer, 1974], "is almost ritualized, a psychic wall against loneliness." It is also a psychic wall against disorder, for the heart of darkness looms deep around and in him to the end. Boys'-book writers could ill afford such ambiguity. Nor were they free to imitate the license of earlier chapbook publishers, whose severely abridged editions of Robinson Crusoe delete the religious sections to glorify adventure. In Victorian boys' books, a highhanded morality keeps the freer hand of romance enchained. As the Robinsonade evolved into a children's genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Robinson Crusoe was increasingly relegated to children's bookshelves, a marked didacticism both sobered the young reading audience and mollified parents concerned that "adventure and enterprise" would corrupt their children. Still, the tempered romance of the nineteenth-century Robinsonade did not dissuade children from reading them. The virtually hundreds of Robinsonades that appeared in the bookstalls of the time testify to the genre's extreme popularity.

The choices that Frederick Marryat and Robert Michael Ballantyne made in recasting Crusoe tell us much about the influence of ideology on children's fiction, as well as the complex interchange between history, myth, and text. Marryat and Ballantyne had to find means to simplify the Robinsonade, to make it a mouthpiece for celebrating God and country. Their adventures must necessarily lack the subtle colorings of the prototype, Robinson Crusoe, a book written for adults, though beloved by children. In simplifying the Robinsonade, they produced romances that express an ambivalence to romance, novels that present a pedestrain realism. Masterman Ready and The Coral Island, the foremost Robinsonades of their day, were enthusiastically welcomed by critics. Indeed Marryat's novel rivaled the popularity of its forefather, Robinson Crusoe. F.J. Harvey Darton lauds it as "the most sincerely emotional of all the [Robinsonades]" [in Children's Books in England, 1982] and recent critical attention by J.S. Bratton, Jacqueline Rose, and Margery Fisher attest to its seminal importance in the boys'-book tradition. Ballantyne's adventure has been hailed as "perhaps the most famous of the nineteenth-century desert island tales" (The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction, [by J.S. Bratton]). Translated into most European languages, The Coral Island has claimed such devoted, and critical, readers as Robert Louis Stevenson, J.M. Barrie, H.G. Wells, and William Golding—all creators of Robinsonades. Together their two novels present us with a fascinating look at the way mid-century romance was tempered by the braided currents of evangelical, romantic, and imperial discourse.

Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) initially earned his reputation as a novelist through the publication of sea tales for an adult readership. Masterman Ready marked the beginning of what Marryat affectionately called his "second harvest," his books for children. Written as a favor to his children, who requested a sequel to The Swiss Family Robinson, Marryat's Robinsonade is a corrective to J.D.R. Wyss's peaceable kingdom with its inaccurate assemblage of flora and fauna. More importantly, its author merges the influence of evangelical tract literature into its text, punctuating each chapter with a moral lesson and heads bowed in prayer. To this didactic end Marryat shipwrecks an aged sailor, Masterman Ready, the bizarrely named "Seagrave" family, father, mother, three sons and a daughter, and their black servant, Juno. The Seagraves are bound for Australia, emigrés of a better class who look forward to gentlemanly farming and large profits. But as the boat they are on, the ironically named Pacific, rounds the Cape of Good Hope, a terrible storm tosses it helplessly about, destroys its mast, and sets it afire with lightning. The crew selfishly abandons ship while the family is asleep, leaving them to a "watery death." Only one crew member, Masterman Ready, stays aboard, for he refuses to participate in a cowardly murder.

The tale of Ready's refusal to abandon the Seagraves, his newfound adoptive family, opposes the tale of his earlier abandonment of family, when, like Robinson Crusoe, he rejected the middle station of life for the lure of the sea. Part of the novel, then, chronicles the re-creation of society on an island wilderness; the other, given in bits and pieces in the form of Ready's reminiscences, chronicles the wilderness of the soul when God's love is rejected. Thus Marryat splits his narrative, balancing Ready's first-person spiritual autobiography about rebellion, folly, and ultimate salvation when he re-embraces God, against an omniscient narrator's account of the castaways' ordeal and triumph on a desert island. It is noteworthy that upon his delivery to the island with the Seagraves Ready is essentially a "saved" man. Though, as Mr. Seagrave notes, Ready analyzes himself "very minutely," his soul-searching lacks the drama of Crusoe's because there is no need for him to change.

The island story, with its emphases on affiliation and acculturation, is clearly separate from Ready's early freedom and rebellion. However romantic his flight from filial responsibility, from the French navy that impressed him, and from a South African jail, his reflections serve to teach the Seagrave children their duty to family, to homeland, and to God. In effect, his story potently enforces the claims of filiation. "When you have heard my story," Ready declares to William, Caroline, and Tommy Seagrave, "you will say that I have been very foolish in my time; and so I have; but if it proves a warning to you, it will, at all events, be of some use". Each recounted adventure lures the young Ready further away from the middle station and entangles him in offenses of pride. Ultimately, he squanders his youth, he is responsible for his mother's death (by broken heart), and he must learn that "the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked". His conversion puts an end to his wanderlust and he returns to England to find his mother in the grave and his would-be fortune dispersed to charity.

In this way, then, Marryat fences in romance for the greater good of his audience. He favors a realistic discourse that chronicles re-creation in order to instruct young minds. By transforming Crusoe's quest for self-hood into Ready's didactic oral history, Marryat dispenses with the island setting as spiritual test. Instead, the island narrative extols the social survival of the castaways and their transformation of the wilderness into an orderly settlement that exudes the imperial spirit of their homeland, England. Much of Marryat's text devotes itself to building plans and how-to-do information, furnishing its readers with a blue-print for survival. Masterman Ready, then, is an important milestone in the transformation of the Robinsonade. In Robinson Crusoe, the prototype, the hero learns that in order to survive, he, too, must be transformed. He must become the father he has rejected. This metamorphosis, which occurs after Crusoe's near fatal fever, drives the novel. As Michael Seidel has recently argued [in Exile and the Narrative Imagination, 1986], "Crusoe in exile is always discovering himself." But in the world of the Victorian Robinsonade, writers create characters who have already been changed for the better before their isolation, or leave out problems of self altogether. The emphasis in such Robinsonades, then, is on the outer world of action, of mastery, of domination. Ironically, Marryat, whose Robinsonade is meant to strengthen its readers' sense of religious duty, sets the stage for later juvenile Robinsonades (like those of Mayne Reid) that pay lip service to God or give up any pretense of preaching to the young. When the actions of characters become paramount, then adventure takes on increasing importance in the form of chance confrontations with wild beasts, cannibals, and pirates. However, in the sober world of Masterman Ready, adventure remains firmly indentured to Marryat's religious and cultural ideology.

In such a Robinsonade, as Jacqueline Rose asserts [in The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction, 1984], "the morality is the adventure." Each episode demonstrates how extraordinarily firm and plucky the Seagrave family—and by extension any British family—is. The initial storm and shipwreck force them to repress their darkest fears and learn to accept God's will cheerfully and gratefully. Sharks swim hungrily in their lagoon and indeed threaten little Tommy Seagrave, cast adrift in a rowboat, whom Ready saves. The end results of this episode are a speech on God's mysterious ways and all heads bowed in prayer. A raging typhoon smashed up their camp, but the Seagraves and Ready pick up the pieces and commence building a plantation, a home, a barnyard with outhouses, turtle and fish ponds, a salt pan, a water hole, a road system, and a harbor. Within one year the island is completely conquered. The possibility of cannibal invasion worries Ready, but he and the Seagraves are never rattled as Crusoe is rattled when faced with a single human foot print in the sand. They build a stockade, fortify themselves with arms and supplies, and then "trust in God."

Marryat's castaways are fortunate in another respect—they can retrieve much from the abandoned ship, including tools, guns and powder, clothing, books, stationery, pens, utensils, even fine china. All the comforts of home, including two servants, Juno and Ready, are available to them. In the words of Paul Elmen [in his book William Golding, 1967], their subjugation of the wilderness validates a nineteenth-century myth "that the white man's burden would be easily borne, that the savage corners of the earth would succumb to the attraction of the cult of the gentleman, and that in time the jungles of the world would be ridden in as safely as Regents Park." As the narrative realistically develops endless details of building plans, the savage corners of romance succumb to the safety of domesticity.

Only one thing threatens these domestic Crusoes: the unrestrained instinct of cannibals and of little Tommy Seagrave, whose sole purpose in the novel is to impress upon young readers the gravity of selfishness. Tommy, like the island, requires cultivation because untamed nature can be dangerous. His tales of misadventure, though occasionally comic, reveal the forceful stamp of evangelical literature. Tommy is ruled by his stomach, not by his mind or heart. He eats all the eggs and is locked an entire day in the chicken coop for punishment; he loses his mother's best thimble in the soup because it proves too hot a ladle; during the climactic cannibal battle, the castaways discover Tommy has squandered the water supply and the noble Ready, to save the family, sneaks out to the well only to be mortally speared by a savage. Tommy's self-abandonment proves one of the essential lessons of the novel: instinct, not reason, guides the unacculturated; with maturity and development arises the mastery of reason over instinct. Tommy's presence, then, reinforces the necessity for a code of control and discipline. If all the castaways behaved as Tommy does, Masterman Ready would have been the precursor of rather than the kind of novel parodied in Golding's Lord of the Flies.

Luckily society is highly structured on Marryat's island. Except for instinctive Tommy, the Seagraves are exemplary. Mr. Seagrave, a benevolent master who rules with a firm but just hand, will put down axe or hoe at any moment to reflect on political economy, natural history, or God's universe. William shows promise of following his father's footsteps; he is the model boy, who has learned the importance of self-mastery and obedience to God and father. The females, Mrs. Seagrave, her black servant Juno, and "poor little Caroline," play out their roles in this benevolent paternalistic scheme. Mrs. Seagrave and Caroline fade into semi-invalidism, sewing, cooking, and nurturing one-year-old Albert. They are the least interesting of the characters because, stereotypically, gentlewomen in the wilderness are not creatures of action. Juno does much of the heavy work to protect her mistresses from exertion. She is nanny, farmhand, and construction worker. Ready, too, accepts a subservient position. "I am an old man with few wants, and whose life is of little use now," he explains. "All I wish to feel is that I am trying to do my duty in that situation into which it has pleased God to call me." He is no Admirable Crichton who inverts the master-servant relationship. Instead he works incessantly, a masterbuilder who symmetrically arranges the physical world, who accedes to an already ascribed framework, the hierarchical class system of Victorian Britain because that is God's design. Through him, through the tempered romance of his past deeds and the inspirational selflessness of his present actions, Marryat promotes the cause of continuity, of convention, of concern.

Thus Marryat's Robinsonade endorses a comforting, conservative view of life as lived in England. The castaways, Tommy excepted, act out all the graven images of Victorian iconography: they labor hard and thus prosper readily; they worship and thus behave nobly; they maintain the sanctity of family and thus survive peaceably; they accept their place and duty and thus exist happily. No cannibal invasion could ever defeat such a fortified group. The pitting of Britons against savages, then, serves to justify the necessity for émigrés like the Seagraves. Every Eden may have its serpent—in this case, in the guise of cannibals—but when Eden is ruled by the right sort, by Christian Europeans, evil is soon banished and paradise regained. Though Ready dies for the cause, the Seagraves are saved by a British schooner, emigrate to Australia, and increase their flocks and herds tenfold (even Tommy we are told "grew into a very fine fellow and entered the army"). Masterman Ready concludes on this domestic note. The Seagraves have faced great dangers: shipwreck, typhoon, shark attack, cannibal warfare. Repeatedly their security, their blessed family circle, has been tested and found sound. Even Tommy, half savage himself, grows up, an exemplary citizen of the middle station. And to this middle station Marryat's narrative bows. What romance surfaces in Masterman Ready serves an instructive purpose—rebellion against parental authority is wicked, cannibals are heathen, nature must be conquered—or underscores the levelheaded achievements of Ready and Mr. Seagrave. Adventure is not an end in itself but a means to glorify a "practical education." Moreso than Defoe, then, Marryat domesticates paradise and provides a safe haven for the optimistic beliefs of his time.

"There is a crude magic," writes J. S. Bratton, "in the automatic way in which the advent of a Christian Englishman is assumed to transform the lives of all he comes across: a hero has only to be present, and his superiority works wonders, without his needing to more than assert himself physically." The Coral Island, by Robert Michael Ballantyne, presents three such heroes, "an agreeable triumvirate," bolstered by goodness and right, qualities which are, in the boys'-book Robinsonade, invincible weapons. Ralph Rover, Jack Martin, and Peterkin Gay (those familiar with Lord of the Flies will recognize Ralph and Jack), are stranded on a South Sea island, unable to retrieve provisions from their ship, virtually facing nature barehanded. No adults have survived their shipwreck to supervise and guide them. Indeed, Ralph, who has neither the supremely rational mind of Jack nor the good humor of Peterkin gives way to a Crusoe-like sense of despair: "If the ship had only stuck on the rocks we might have done pretty well, for we could have obtained provisions from her, and tools to enable us to build a shelter, but now! alas! we are lost." These words, early in the novel, are among the few that echo Crusoe's trial. For if Crusoe's wilderness contains all the tension and uncertainty of Job's in the Bible, the wilderness Ballantyne has fashioned projects all the certainty and vigor of a playing field. Thus Jack can reprove Ralph by cheerfully asserting they are all "saved," and Peterkin can proclaim, "I have made up my mind that it's capital—first rate—the best thing that ever happened to us, and the most splendid prospect that ever lay before three jolly young tars. We've got an island to ourselves. We'll take possession in the name of the king; we'll go and enter the service of its black inhabitants. Of course we'll rise, naturally, to the top of affairs. White men always do in savage countries." In a word, Peterkin has summarized the racial and colonial myths that underlie the juvenile Robinsonade, and remain the hallmark of Ballantyne's boys' books.

When the boys take inventory of their worldly goods, they discover they have but a chipped penknife, a pencil-case without any lead, a piece of whip cord, a sailmaker's needle, a broken telescope, a brass ring, and an axe. Ballantyne's ironic catalog of goods makes clear to the reader that the author, in contrast to Marryat, privileges romance over realism; Ballantyne's boys do not confine time and space but are themselves free in them.

Fortunately what they lack in tools they gain in the leadership of Jack, whose good sense, cleverness, and book knowledge enable him to teach the others how to survive. "He was," in Ralph's mind, "of that disposition which will not be conquered. When he believed himself to be acting rightly, he overcame all obstacles." He is the kind of empire builder inspired by Crusoe. Jack introduces his companions to all the edibles on the island, he organizes their bower living quarters, leads an expedition around the island, even urges them to build a boat. Furthermore, it is Jack who initiates their hunting and fishing excursions. Not long after their untoward arrival, then, the boys have settled in as amiably as clubmen, enjoying the bounty of the island and their freedom upon it. Ballantyne's boys do not put their paradise to use in the same way Defoe's or Marryat's castaways do. Re-creation is not the order of the day in The Coral Island: adventure is.

Ballantyne is the first British writer to discard the conventional cataloging of achievements; a realistic examination of survival, a minute recalling of pottery making and shelter building, are not included in his tale. The boys, in their roamings, discover the remains of a former Crusoe, whose fields, houses, even his skeleton are discovered "in a state of utmost decay." All that the lone man had salvaged from his ship moulders and rusts; nothing remains to chronicle his existence, "neither a book nor a scrap of paper." A horrifying thought haunts the boys—perhaps they, too, could end up like this forlorn Crusoe. To domesticate in the boys' minds is equivalent to a slow, quiet obliteration. Thus the order they impose upon their island world is minimal. The boys themselves, not the island, come to signify their culture's ideology. The order that counts on the Coral Island is order from within. Ralph, Jack, and Peterkin follow a daily regimen that helps preserve their identity as English boys. The Sabbath Day is carefully marked each week; keeping count of the days becomes an essential means of controlling their lives. Even their hours are structured: each morning begins with a cold bath, followed by food, exercise, and exploration. By maintaining a schedule reminiscent of home, by approaching their excursions with high spirits and pluck, the boys live united, "an agreeable whole." "There was," Ralph states, "no note of discord whatever in the symphony we played together on that sweet Coral Island."

Ballantyne is interested in testing his three young Britons, in putting them face to face with danger. In this way, his Robinsonade marks a further turning away from the complexities of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe's narrative, Seidel points out, "does not presume a single, privileged allegorical reading for Crusoe's adventures." The strata of meaning—political, psychological, spiritual—are varied, contradictory, inviting of endless exegeses. Ballantyne's juvenile Odyssey, on the other hand, winds its way back to imperial Britain, and in the unfolding of the tale, it proves an unambiguous paean to the mercantile and missionary spirit of the homeland. Each confrontation with the chaotic, savage Other reinforces the inconquerable spirit of his heroes. They are impervious to evil and destructive forces.

Ballantyne builds exciting episode upon episode, ending in a resounding climax when the boys attempt to rescue a Christian native girl, Avatea, from a fate worse than death: marriage to a cannibal. Early episodes highlight the boys' brushes with natural dangers. They avert a rock slide; attacked by a shark while fishing, they ram an oar down its throat to avoid being devoured; a tidal wave also fails to swallow them up, and a typhoon forces them into a dark cave for three days. Each time the three are threatened they are delivered by their quick thinking and stalwart action. Never are they undermined by a loss of faith or a reversion to barbarism themselves. This steadfastness, then, expresses the morality of the adventure. When the narrative shifts suddenly to emphasize the depravity of heathens, to hammer home its didactic message, the reader is assured of final victory.

Ballantyne's tale borrows from quest fiction and implements a reductive morality typical of popular romance. Unfortunately, to the modern reader, the cliffhanging romance of the island setting becomes bogged down by Ballantyne's missionary zeal once his narrator, Ralph Rover, is kidnapped by pirates and forced to aid them in robbing cannibals of valuable goods. One critic has suggested that Ballantyne never understood the structure of romance. The quest his heroes undergo is [according to Bratton] no "proving ordeal" for they go forth from a "static condition of perfection" and return "meaninglessly in the ordinary world." We might add that Ballantyne never understood the power of the Robinsonade. What makes Crusoe's experience on a desert island so moving is his continual struggle against madness and despair; he is a modern-day Job whose small triumphs mark an increasingly spiritual state of being. Ballantyne merely bilks the Coral Island of whatever adventure capital he can.

The island experience is never meant to deliver the three boys' souls from darkness, for they are lightness, cheerfulness, goodness. Curiously, until cannibal canoes land on the Coral Island, Ballantyne subdues his religious message considerably. Despite Ralph's grief over the loss of his Bible and his heartfelt pledge never to omit his prayers, far fewer thanks are given to God than in Masterman Ready. Ralph and his two shipmates repeatedly escape harm's way, yet seldom remark upon providence. With the arrival of cannibals and pirates, however, a forceful didacticism enters the novel. Formally, then, the novel is truncated. The first part borders on secular adventure; the second part argues for further missions in the South Seas. All the romance of boys deserted on an island runs aground once Ballantyne pursues a contemporary issue, christianizing the heathen. Moreover, the boys' heraldic rescue of Avatea is deflated by propaganda. Even their quest, saving Avatea and the souls of cannibals, lacks dramatic moment because the quest reveals no inner spiritual or moral growth in Ralph, Jack, or Peterkin. Having rent asunder Robinson Crusoe's crucial conflict, Ballantyne's narrative founders in two distinct but incomplete halves.

The Robinsonade section of the novel stresses the Edenic qualities of the island, and in its way touts the natural life of the boys. The amenities of civilization are not missed: "We . . . made various . . . useful articles, which added to our comfort, and once or twice spoke of building us a house, but we had so great an affection for the bower, and, withal, found it so serviceable, that we determined not to leave it, nor to attempt the building of a house, which, in such a climate, might turn out to be rather disagreeable than useful." Celebrating harmonious untouched nature, The Coral Island taps into the romantic myth that life nearer nature is purer, more virtuous than civilized life (a myth, incidentally, Marryat does not endorse; his castaways subdue nature). Yet as Brian Street points out, such a position was problematic for nineteenth-century novelists: "[Their] literary heritage and romantic bent inclined [them] to extol the virtues of the natural setting, but [their] cultural heritage and rational belief in progress inclined [them] to extol the 'civilized' setting." This dilemma helps explain the split nature of Ballantyne's narrative. He would have been a more gifted writer of romance had he allowed his interest in the exotic and the adventurous to prevail. But, like Marryat's Masterman Ready, The Coral Island exposes an underlying ambivalence toward the freer canvas of romance. To counter the lure of the natural, Ballantyne introduces "serpents" into the Eden that is the Coral Island in order to extol the civilized.

The island is invaded, first by cannibals who have come to roast their enemies and enjoy a feast, then by hardened pirates who "[care] . . . precious little for the Gospels." The cannibals, "incarnate fiends," "demons," "monsters," are obvious villains. The boys' battle with them dramatically "proves" the supposed evolutionary distance between savages and Europeans and the necessity for benevolent missionaries. The pirates, on the other hand, are able to maintain the veneer of civilization, and the Captain tries to convince Ralph his vessel trades in sandal-woods. But their souls are benighted, anarchic, savage; consistently their behavior is reminiscent of the cannibals—worse, in fact, for as Europeans they should know better than to slaughter wantonly. Missionaries have made inroads into cannibals' hearts; but wonders Ralph of the pirate Captain, was it possible "for any missionary to tame him." Significantly the two forces of evil in the novel, pirates and cannibals, do battle in the night while Ralph listens from afar to their "wild shrieks" and "confusion." Evil negates evil and good escapes: a typical equation in this didactic adventure. In the end, all the pirates, save one Bloody Bill who is born again on his deathbed, are murdered and presumably roasted. Such is the fate of lawless wretches who "cannot restrain [their] wickedness."

The remainder of Ballantyne's novel continues in this vein, undermining the effect of the Coral Island adventures. Once centered on cannibals, Ralph's single-minded narrative sounds much like a missionary tract, describing a degraded, backward, immoral heathen world in need of missionary mercy. Avatea is finally rescued and married off to a Christian prince; an English gentleman, blown off course, arrives in the nick of time to convert the savages before they devour Ballantyne's heroes; and the cannibal chief, Tarraro, proves so penitent he persuades others on the island to embrace the true faith. The three boys are now free to return to England, where their descriptions of savage life will further recruiting of missionaries.

The two island worlds—the Coral Island and the cannibal Tarraro's island—represent the competing structural halves of Ballantyne's novel. Moreso than Marryat, Ballantyne turns the Robinsonade into a genre that can accommodate adventure pure and simple. In its descriptions of island life, in its exciting episodes, the novel has charm. In this way, Ballantyne anticipates the secular adventures Robert Louis Stevenson and others perfected. Ballantyne, however, re-embracing his role as educator, tacks onto the story of the Coral Island a diatribe on the evils of heathenism. Once again the light subjugates the sweet, and romance is pushed aside, enchained in heavy-handed rhetoric. A later romance writer, Rider Haggard, once remarked [in The Secular Scripture] "that a series of adventures was easy enough to write, but that a real story had to have 'heart,' that is, a focus or center implying a total shape with a beginning and an end." The Coral Island, opening up as a Robinsonade and concluding as a religious tract, lacks center; it is half wish-fulfillment, half promoter of colonial and missionary policy. Both radical and reactionary, split asunder structurally by cross purposes, it highlights the best and the worst in the juvenile Robinsonades that dominated the pages of boys' magazines and crowded the shelves of nurseries in the nineteenth century.

In a genealogy of the British Robinsonades, Masterman Ready and The Coral Island hold pivotal stations. Retaining the moral earnestness of evangelical Robinsonades, yet replacing an introspective religiosity with a delight in the material world and an emphasis on decisive action, these two works prompted the genre's transmutation into an adventure mode. Appearing after the publication of Masterman Ready are juvenile Robinsonades clearly intent upon adventure, Captain Mayne Reid's The Desert Home (1852) and Percy St John's Arctic Crusoe (1854). Anne Bowman's The Castaways (1857) and The Boy Voyagers (1859) owe much to both Marryat and Ballantyne, as do Reid's The Castaways (1870) and W.H.G. Kingston's Rival Crusoes (1878), to name only a few progeny. Even later writers like H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, J.M. Barrie, and William Golding, who subvert or parody the Robinsonade, admit their debt to Marryat and Ballantyne. In particular, the longevity of The Coral Island, reprinted to this day, suggests a decided fascination with a cultural mythology more assured than our own. Indeed, the language of the nineteenth-century juvenile Robinsonade continues to haunt, to influence, and to appall the twentieth-century imagination.