The Coral Island A Tale of the Pacific Ocean by Robert M Ballantyne London 1876

Description: The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean by Robert Michael Ballantyne London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1876 (Early Reprint) Octavo, slightly worn and faded red cloth covered boards with black and gilt decoration to upper board and along spine, bumped corners and light wear along edges, previous owner's handwritten name (dated 1876) on front loose flyleaf, light spotting and soiling to endpapers, prelims and title pages otherwise internally a trifle age toned but very good, black and white frontis and illustrations by Dalziel, viii 9-438 pages x page of titles at rear, light spotting and dusty foredges, spine slightly cocked but still quite firm, overall a nice copy though not without its blemishes PLEASE USE IMAGES ABOVE TO SUPPLEMENT MY DESCRIPTION HERE The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1858) is a novel written by Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne. One of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes, the story relates the adventures of three boys marooned on a South Pacific island, the only survivors of a shipwreck.A typical Robinsonade – a genre of fiction inspired by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – and one of the most popular of its type, the book first went on sale in late 1857 and has never been out of print. Among the novel’s major themes are the civilising effect of Christianity, 19th-century British imperialism in the South Pacific, and the importance of hierarchy and leadership. It was the inspiration for William Golding’s dystopian novel Lord of the Flies (1954), which inverted the morality of The Coral Island; in Ballantyne’s story the children encounter evil, but in Lord of the Flies evil is within them. Although the first edition is dated 1858 it was on sale in bookshops from early December 1857; dating books forward was a common practice at the time, especially during the Christmas period to "preserve their newness" into the new year. The Coral Island is Ballantyne's second novel, and has never been out of print. He was an exceedingly prolific author who wrote more than 100 books in his 40-year career. According to professor and author John Rennie Short, Ballantyne had a "deep religious conviction", and felt it his duty to educate Victorian middle-class boys – his target audience – in "codes of honour, decency, and religiosity". The first edition of The Coral Island was published by T. Nelson & Sons, who in common with many other publishers of the time had a policy when accepting a manuscript of buying the copyright from the author rather than paying royalties; as a result, authors generally did not receive any income from the sale of subsequent editions. Ballantyne received between £50 and £60, equivalent to about £6500 as of 2017, but when the novel's popularity became evident and the number of editions increased he tried unsuccessfully to buy back the copyright. He wrote bitterly to Nelsons in 1893 about the copyrights they held on his books while he had earned nothing: "for thirty-eight years [you have] reaped the whole profits". Ballantyne never visited the coral islands of the South Pacific, relying instead on the accounts of others that were then beginning to emerge in Britain, which he exaggerated for theatrical effect by including "plenty of gore and violence meant to titillate his juvenile readership".[6] His ignorance of the South Pacific caused him to erroneously describe coconuts as being soft and easily opened; a stickler for accuracy, he resolved that in future, whenever possible, he would write only about things he had personal experience of. Ballantyne wrote The Coral Island while staying in a house on the Burntisland seafront opposite Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth in Fife. According to Ballantyne biographer Eric Quayle he borrowed extensively from an 1852 novel by the American author James F. Bowman, The Island Home. He also borrowed from John Williams's Narrative of Missionary Enterprises (1837), to the extent that cultural historian Rod Edmond has suggested that Ballantyne must have written one chapter of The Coral Island with Williams's book open in front of him, so similar is the text. Edmond describes the novel as "a fruit cocktail of other writing about the Pacific", adding that "by modern standards Ballantyne's plagiarism in The Coral Island is startling".In the early 20th century, the novel was considered a classic for primary school children in the UK, and in the United States it was a staple of high-school suggested reading lists. Modern critics consider the book's worldview to be dated and imperialist, but although less popular today,The Coral Island began a trend in boys' fiction by using boys as the main characters, a device now commonplace in the genre. It preserves, according to literary critic Minnie Singh, the moralizing aspects of didactic texts, but does so (and in this regard it is a "founding text") by the "congruence of subject and implied reader": the story is about boys and written retrospectively as though by a boy, for an audience of boys. All Ballantyne's novels are, in his own words, "adventure stories for young folks", and The Coral Island is no exception“Most of the incidents used in the plot of ‘The Coral Island’, the author’s most famous book, Ballantyne culled from an obscure work entitled ‘The Island Home; or, The Young Cast-Aways’, by James F. Bowman, who wrote under the pseudonym of Christopher Romaunt. ‘The Island Home’ was published in Boston, U.S.A. in 1851, and by Nelson’s of Edinburgh in 1852, and Ballantyne took a copy with him to Burntisland, near Edinburgh, where he spent a fortnight’s holiday during the summer of 1857. The full story is given in chapter six of Ballantyne the Brave. The writer’s other main source of information was ‘Recent Exploring Expeditions to the Pacific, and the South Seas’ by J.S. Jenkins, published by Nelsons in 1853” (Quayle).

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