In his Preface to R. M. Ballantyne's most famous novel, J. M. Barrie writes that “[t]o be born is to be wrecked on an island,” and so the British boy “wonder[s] how other flotsam and jetsam have made the best of it in the same circumstances. He wants a guide: in short, The Coral Island” (v). While for Barrie the island is a convenient shorthand for masculine self-actualization, the question pursued here is the relevance of a coral island, or more specifically the coral that forms the island, to the child reader. Published in 1857 and widely recommended for boys in the latter half of the nineteenth century, The Coral Island presents three boys, shipwrecked in the South Pacific, who in the first half of the novel demonstrate their resourcefulness in forming an idyllic community. Their pre-lapsarian paradise is then disrupted, first by Pacific Island cannibals and then by European pirates, the juxtaposition implicitly presenting civility as a quality that must be actively maintained by the European reader, rather than assumed as inherent in ethnicity. The second half of the novel sees the boy narrator, and eventually all the boys, implicated in key Western activities in the South Pacific: piracy, trade, and missionary activity. The latter is important to Ballantyne, a staunch Christian himself, and is focused through the historical phenomenon of Pacific Island “teachers,” that is, converted Pacific Islanders who preceded or accompanied European missionaries in the effort to spread Christianity across the South Pacific. The missionary work highlighted in the novel, as this essay will show, is also integrally connected to the coral featured prominently in its title.

The Coral Island is embedded in the science of its time; indeed, Ballantyne understood his role as a children's author to involve conveying educational information to boys in an enticing fictional format. The novel includes ethnographic observations of Pacific Island cultures, information on indigenous flora and fauna, instructions for building and maintaining an aquarium (an activity recently popularized by Philip Henry Gosse), an account of a volcanic explosion, and, most relevant here, a debate over the formation of coral islands. Science and religion are intertwined when, invoking natural theology, Ballantyne has a missionary call our attention to the coral polyps that form the island in order to direct us to their physical manifestation of God's power: “When we consider . . . the smallness of the architects used by our heavenly Father in order to form those lovely and innumerable islands, we are filled with much of that feeling which induced that ancient king to exclaim, ‘How manifold, O Lord, are Thy works! in wisdom hast Thou made them all’”Footnote ¹ (293; citing Ps. 104.24). The Coral Island's invocation of coral in its title and in repeated passages querying the formation of coral islands – passages regularly found in nineteenth-century boys’ adventure novels set in the South Pacific – is not incidental. Rather, it bears witness to an evangelical understanding of the child reader, the child's role within missionary culture, and a cultural shift in the agency ascribed to the Victorian child within these circles. This essay addresses the missionary culture that both preceded and is embedded in The Coral Island by examining popular accounts of the formation of coral islands and an evangelical periodical for children, the Juvenile Missionary Magazine.Footnote ²

The catalyst for the public profile of coral lies in the disciplinary formation of science, but in the 1840s and 1850s discussion of coral moves from scientific debate into a discourse on Victorian moral codes, in particular within evangelical circles. In addressing the evangelical framing of coral, this essay follows a route through Victorian science and the London Missionary Society's endeavors in the South Pacific (in particular the work of the London Missionary Society [LMS] missionary, John Williams), to take us back to coral, the child, and the Juvenile Missionary Magazine. In the case of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, a cultural focus on what the Victorians called the “coral insect” is reflected in an attentiveness to the child reader, and in particular, the child reader's productive capacity as a fundraiser for the missionary cause. The relationship between the child reader, the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, and missionary fundraising in turn requires us to redraw the parameters defining our understanding of the child reader's agency.

Building on recent scholarship that challenges the unidirectional assumption of empire, whereby the metropole is assumed to act on and modernize the so-called periphery, the texts examined here demonstrate how British scientific and evangelical experience in the South Pacific instead informed and modified metropolitan culture.Footnote ³ More specifically, the analysis of coral as a discursive formation draws on Laura Brown's notion of the cultural fable, outlined in Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century. In Brown's formulation, the cultural fable functions to “yoke the material and historical with the aesthetic . . . in a way that enables a simultaneous reading both of literature and of history” and is not reducible to a single author or work, ranging instead across a number of literary and non-literary texts linked together through a “common imaginative project” (1). The cultural fable examined here, that of the coral insect, while originally sourced in scientific interest in the coral polyp, manifests itself culturally as the narrative of a humble being small and insignificant in itself but that working collectively is able to produce a result disproportionate to its size, in turn provoking admiration and wonder. In the context of Victorian cultural invocations of the coral insect, this cultural fable provides a way to attend to the scientific developments resulting from investigations into coral reef formation, while providing equally serious attention to the scientifically shaky but nevertheless culturally mobilizing deployments of the coral insect in popular discourse.

As Colin Tudge explains, the debate in which polyps were initially involved was that of taxonomic classification: Renaissance scholars classed the polyp as a plant, but in the eighteenth century they were reclassified as a zoophyte, an animal whose form resembles a plant.Footnote ⁴ Georges Cuvier's 1812 classificatory system positions invertebrates, which include polyps, as one of four embranchments, thereby elevating their taxonomic significance; the early nineteenth century subsequently saw ongoing discussion of the taxonomic placement and generic relationships of polyps. Taxonomic interest gave way, however, to a fascination with the stony coral's island-building capacities, reflecting the wonder evoked at the disproportion between the size of the coral polyp and the island which it helped to form. Nineteenth-century transatlantic audiences witnessed recurring scientific debates over the process of island formation, as addressed in David Dobbs's Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral. Dobbs writes that “in the 1800s . . . the ‘coral reef problem,’ as it was known, stood as one of the most difficult and contentious in science” (4), initially because it played out debates over the privileging of either empirical observation or theoretical speculation in scientific method, and later in the century because it reprised issues at the heart of the debate over evolution.

The European scientific community was aware that coral polyps could live only in 100 to 200 feet of water; how, then, did coral reefs emerge from the depths of the ocean? And what, if any, relationship did coral atolls bear to those islands which were clearly of volcanic origin? In the first edition of Principles of Geology, Charles Lyell argued that coral islands were formed through volcanic elevation; the coral polyp built on top of the submerged volcanic crater, working its way up until a reef appeared above the surface of the ocean. Charles Darwin rejected this explanation, arguing that nowhere on dry land did volcanoes all reach the same height; therefore, to assume they conveniently did so below sea level in order to facilitate the coral polyp's depth requirements made no sense. In 1836, Darwin proposed to Lyell a radical new theory, generated from the juxtaposition of his experience of rising land forms in the Andes, with a belief that the contiguous Pacific basin was a site of subsidence. That land mass subsidence in the Pacific, he theorized, led to the formation of coral islands: volcanoes once above sea level were gradually submerged as the ocean floor beneath them subsided, enabling coral polyps to build on first the volcano, and subsequently the growing coral shelf beneath them, because they remained in the 100- to 200-foot subsurface zone.

Darwin confirmed his theories on coral reef formation when he visited Mo'orea in the Society Islands, and he included his theory briefly in his 1839 account of the Beagle's voyage. The theory was the first to provide a compelling explanation covering the three major types of coral formation – fringing reefs, barrier reefs, and coral atolls – and thereby marked his emergence as a prominent scientist. Lyell embraced Darwin's theory of coral reef formation, incorporating it into his revised 1840 edition of Principles of Geology, and Darwin published his findings fully in The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. As Sujit Sivasundaram notes, in his work on coral formation Darwin drew on the writings of missionaries working in the South Pacific, including those of John Williams (212). While a mutually informative relationship between evangelicalism and science might seem odd to us now, such clear-cut divisions did not necessarily prevail in the early-nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵

The impact of Darwin's theory of coral reef formation was not confined to those invested in islands; nor did scientific debate over coral reef formation end with the publication of Darwin's Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. Rather, the coral reef problem came to be the testing ground for tensions between theoretically- and empirically-based modes of scientific inquiry, as science fashioned its disciplinary bases. Despite his Pacific wanderings on the Beagle, Darwin's solution to the coral reef problem had been primarily theoretical rather than empirical, since it derived from reading others’ first-hand accounts, such as those of John Williams, and poring over maps; his subsequent experience of coral reefs in the Pacific and Indian Oceans confirmed, rather than produced, the theory. Moreover, Darwin's theory was essentially untestable through empirical methods, since the technology did not yet exist for deep-water exploration or core drilling of coral atolls. In the course of the nineteenth century, Darwin's theory of coral reef formation came under attack from those who had visited coral formations that did not appear to conform to his theory, and who therefore asserted the primacy of empirical observation over theoretical speculation. Such ongoing debates kept coral and its role in producing land mass firmly in the public's eye.Footnote ⁶

While scientists used coral to debate tensions between theoretical and empirical science and thereby raised its public profile, the coral insect captured the Victorian imagination as the epitome of industriousness, reflecting contemporary belief in the value of labor and production. Thus, as an article titled “Coral Rings” informs us, “[f]or the most colossal specimens of industry we are indebted to one of the least promising of animated things” (360). Smallness, we are to understand, does not pre-empt industriousness. Moreover, this focus on the “least promising of animated things” can be read in the light of a wider cultural emphasis on character: rather than the genius of the exceptional individual, coral highlights the productive capacity of the ordinary individual as he or she labors dutifully and diligently.

The value of the ordinary individual's extraordinary efforts when directed toward a socially-mandated purpose is emphasized in Samuel Smiles's account in Self-Help of the LMS missionary John Williams. In the introductory statements to the section, he writes, “It is not eminent talent that is required to ensure success in any pursuit, so much as purpose, – not merely the power to achieve, but the will to labour energetically and perseveringly” (190–91). Later in the chapter, Smiles focuses on missionaries, with their constant evangelical efforts in the context of hardship and privation, and turning to John Williams as a case study, Smiles presents him (as is standard with biographies of Williams), as an ordinary man, a manual worker called to do God's work. “Like the Apostles,” we are told, “[Williams] worked with his hands, – at blacksmith work, gardening, shipbuilding” (204). In privileging humble beginnings, Williams's biography underscores the ability of all individuals to be instruments in God's divine plan, while validating the LMS's reliance on “godly mechanics,” the term somewhat derogatorily applied to the laborers and artisans who went overseas as LMS missionaries.Footnote ⁷ In Smiles's description of Williams's successive occupations, he moves from the manual labor of blacksmith work to gardening, which functions as a metaphor for the evangelical work of tending the wild spaces of the world and bringing them into fruitful order.Footnote ⁸ The final occupation, shipbuilding, signals the ships Williams built in his efforts to proselytize in the South Pacific. Manual labor, in this trajectory, is directly linked to the missionary cause and therefore emphasizes the role of all in spreading Christianity, not just the social elite.

While Samuel Smiles focuses on exemplary individuals to make his point, coral figures the sublimation of the individual to the social, rendering what is ordinary, small, and unprepossessing, into a structure renowned for its beauty and purpose. Although as a single unit the coral insect can achieve little, combined as a community these organisms produced a structure as magnificent as a coral island, and thus for the early Victorians the synergetic superiority of coral signified the divine order in an age that was still able to see science as compatible with, indeed a witness to, the power of God. Having summarized scientific discussion on the formation of coral islands, the article titled “Coral Rings” concludes, “When the earth's crust is collapsing, and it becomes necessary to fill up the vacancy, the commission is not given to any gigantic workmen, but a number of mere polyps are bid to labour upon the subsiding soil, as if to show that the Creator could employ the humblest of His creatures in executing the largest of physical undertakings” (371).

In an unsigned article for children titled “How Islands are Formed,” appearing in the Child's Companion and Juvenile Instructor in 1859, the reader is quoted Psalm 95.5 – “the sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry land” – as the spiritual context within which to understand the popular scientific account of island formation. This narrative, indicative of many others on coral found in popular works for children, goes as follows. A volcano forms a subaqueous island, on top of which perches the coral insect, and “myriads of these creatures thus heap up their tiny habitations, one upon another, and die” (122). Gradually the coral structure reaches up until it breaches the water's surface, at which point the polyps can no longer exist and so relinquish the now uncovered coral rock to the forces of erosion. The resulting fine debris forms a shallow soil in which salt-tolerant plant life clings tenaciously, and as these plants grow and decay, they form a richer, deeper soil, into which birds deposit seeds, so that eventually an island capable of supporting human habitation is formed.

The account of “How Islands are Formed” does not stop at framing science within Christianity; it also presumes European colonization and settlement of such islands as the natural order of things. Asking the reader, “who is to be the gardener, and to plant the top of the mountain, or rather, the island?” (122), the article overlooks the Pacific Islanders whom Europeans found settled across the expanse of the South Pacific, proffering instead a “shipwrecked boat's crew . . . or a discovery ship” as precursors of the Europeans to come. In time a “kind of colony is formed, and families go out there, taking with them useful animals, implements, and grain, till the spot built principally by the coral insect becomes a beautiful and populous place.” The industrious community of coral insects here not only enables but also prefigures and naturalizes the agrarian community of European colonists, who in turn are deemed to civilize “a place that once was desolate” (123), just as the gardener imposes productive order on the wilderness. Thus the island formed through God's plan, as enacted through the coral insect, eventually produces a settled, agrarian society, and coral is equated not only to labor, community, and God's divine order, but is positioned as coterminous with Western social values (or at least appropriable for those Western values) despite the exoticism of its origins for these British readers. The intersecting axes of Western colonization and evangelization are consolidated in the final paragraph of the article, which envisions the arrival of “the missionary or some minister, who, instructed from above, may know how rightly to divide [sic] the word of truth. A congregation may be formed, schools may be established, the standard of the cross may be raised, and a goodly company of faithful worshippers may magnify the Lord, and heartily rejoice in the God of their salvation” (123–24).

In addition to its significance within natural history or its status as exemplar of the virtue of labor and productivity, the coral insect had a distinctly spiritual dimension – coral as moral metaphor. Of course, as a reef on which ships can be wrecked, coral fits in with the long-standing Christian image of the soul as a ship on stormy seas, seeking safe harbor.Footnote ⁹ But the nineteenth century also saw the religious invocation of coral as a positive, rather than negative, trope. The very name of one church periodical – the Coral Missionary Magazine – embodies the perceived value of the coral insect for spiritual purposes. Within the periodical, the title of the Coral Missionary Magazine is justified with the comment that “the work of the coral insects . . . produces useful results from multiplied small efforts,” highlighting the value of combined labor in the missionary effort. The “useful result” of the coral insect is the coral island, the beauty of which stands as a testament to the grandeur of God; the human parallel of the coral island, at least within evangelical circles, is the ever growing number of those (whether near or far) converted to an evangelical understanding of Christianity. Rather than the exotic Borrioboola-Gha lure of coral and the indigenous inhabitants of coral islands, however, the periodical states that its focus is on the needy near at hand: “As much as we love our distant brethren, we have still more sympathy for the poor at home. To help, to teach, to comfort them is our first duty” (Coral Missionary Magazine).

The moral economy of coral was particularly apposite, however, to children, as is evident in an American evangelical periodical, the Children's Magazine, which provides a conversation piece on coral islands. Having briefly explained to a child the role of coral insects in island formation, the adult voice concludes,

The science of coral reef formation turns into a moral lesson on the value of work in the service of a greater good, and the small, apparently insignificant child, like the coral insect, has a specific duty to accomplish in this larger scheme. Joined together in their status as “tiny creatures,” both coral insect and child produce “great wonders,” not necessarily through individual capacity but as testament to a divine plan and order in which even the humblest can participate.

The moral lesson of coral for the child reader of the Children's Magazine had a practical application in the work of children collecting money on behalf of the missionary associations, while according to the LMS's Evangelical Magazine, the children's donated pocket-money was “redeemed in great part, from what might else have been expended in useless trifles.”Footnote ¹⁰ Frank Prochaska notes that in 1814–15, the earlier days of collecting for the LMS, children brought in over five per cent of the Society's yearly total (104). In E. J. Whateley's Home Workers for Foreign Missions, an account of the child collector's labors, we see the rhetorical influence of the popular discourse on coral, even in the absence of any mention of coral itself:

The child and the coral insect merge in Whateley's humble being – humble in the sense of small as well as ordinary – and in the vision of incremental actions enabling a great goal.

Within the cultural framework of the 1840s and 1850s then, coral was a spiritual and not simply scientific discursive formation, a discourse available to all, but of particular relevance to the religious fortification of children. From the same period which saw a popular discourse on coral emerge comes also the LMS's Juvenile Missionary Magazine, first published in 1844. On occasion the periodical explicitly addresses coral, as when it publishes an excerpt from Gideon Algernon Mantell's The Wonders of Geology on the formation of coral islands (“Coral Islands”), or in the poem “Little Builders,” which compares “The coral insect [that] buildeth well / Far down beneath the sea,” with “little hands, / That little off'rings bring,” building not islands but “houses . . . in Eastern lands / For God, our heavenly King.” More significant than the explicit references to coral, however, is the manner in which the cultural fable of the coral insect manifests itself within the periodical's pages in a renegotiation of the Victorian child's public role.

The moral economy of coral encapsulates the historical circumstance of children's involvement in the South Pacific missionary effort through their fundraising for a missionary ship, a philanthropic feat which was celebrated in and perpetuated through the Juvenile Missionary Magazine. As the LMS publication specifically geared toward a child readership, the Juvenile Missionary Magazine had the double goal of the spiritual (enabling and sustaining conversion) and the philanthropic (building on the wave of enthusiasm that saw children fundraise for the purchase of a missionary ship in order to provide now for the ship's ongoing maintenance). While the periodical contains British-focused material, much of it is devoted to accounts of missionary work at LMS outposts – Madagascar, China, India, and the South Pacific – and the illustrations tend to focus on subjects drawn from these sites. The South Pacific is of particular interest because the LMS's first missionary undertakings were to Tonga, the Marquesas Islands, and the Society Islands. While the missions in the first two locations failed, the conversion of the Ma'ohi of Tahiti, in the Society Islands, was deployed by the LMS as an exemplary tale of missionary hardship followed by the spiritual enlightenment of the heathen.

The children's fundraising effort on behalf of the LMS occurred immediately prior to the first issue of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine. While children had participated in juvenile missionary organizations since the 1800s,Footnote ¹¹ the LMS activity marked a distinct development in children's philanthropic involvement since they had a specific fundraising goal: to purchase and outfit a missionary ship. By donating their pocket money or collecting contributions penny by penny, half-penny by half-penny, the children gathered a combined total of £6,237, and the first issue of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine celebrates the children's efforts, devoting the entire issue to coverage of the missionary ship bought through these proceeds. The issue emphasizes the synergy that the children's generosity enables, since the individual pennies combined allow a purchase no single child could ever undertake, while the purchase – the missionary ship – continues to “give” through the ongoing conversion of souls. Thus the children, like the coral insect, produce through a process of accretion a spectacular product that bears witness to the individual labors of many. In the words of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine poem cited earlier, both are “little builders,” apparently insignificant in themselves, but whose combined efforts achieve wonders.

While often referred to as “the Missionary ship” or “the children's ship,” the vessel was christened the John Williams after the eminent LMS missionary Smiles eulogizes in Self-Help. A bust of John Williams formed the ship's figurehead, with Williams pointing to the passage from Mark 16.15, “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” (Cousins 56, 59). The children's philanthropic efforts thereby are inserted into the intersecting histories of the LMS, missionary activity in the South Pacific, and the ships used – and as Anna Johnston notes, mythologized (118) – in the early missionary work of the LMS. A brief history of the LMS's venerated ships will provide some context for the significance of the children's missionary ship, both to the children and to the LMS. The first LMS missionaries headed to the South Pacific in the Duff, a ship which would become a byword for the overseas evangelical venture and the first in the LMS lineage of ships. The second wave of missionaries to the Society Islands included John Williams who, on arrival, promptly set about finishing a boat left half-completed for a lack of knowledge of ironwork. Having been apprenticed to a blacksmith prior to volunteering as a missionary, Williams had the necessary practical skills to finish the boat, which was named the Haweis after Thomas Haweis, the LMS Director who had initiated the founding missionary venture to the South Pacific. This initial association of Williams with boats and practical knowledge is followed by the much vaunted episode of Williams improvising a boat from scratch while on the island of Rarotonga. As Niel Gunson states in his account of missionaries in the South Pacific, “[b]y using handmade tools, old iron, hibiscus cording and native matting, [Williams] seemed to outdo Robinson Crusoe himself, epitomizing in his achievement the principles of the gospel of self-help which he put before the islanders” (118). Thus the Messenger of Peace and a missionary legend were born.

The necessity for the Messenger of Peace arose from Williams's recognition that any missionary activity in the South Pacific was necessarily circumscribed by the missionary's ability to travel from island to island, sometimes over significant distances. On a similarly practical plane, Williams promoted trade as a means for Pacific Islanders to render the missions economically self-sufficient, and for this also a vessel was required. However, the LMS Directors rejected the combination of missionary and mercantile activity that Williams promulgated. Subsequent hagiographic accounts of Williams overlook the commercial motivations of his boat-building to depict instead an inspired laborer in the field hampered by authorities unable to recognize his visionary goal. In this respect, one nineteenth-century LMS historian compares Williams to the foundational figure of the evangelical movement itself: “Just as John Wesley rebelled against the limitations of the parochial system, and said, ‘The world is my parish,’ so John Williams was moved, by the sight of innumerable islands languishing in heathenism, to make this his motto: ‘For my own part I cannot content myself within the narrow limits of a single reef’” (Horne 42).

When the Messenger of Peace proved too small for Williams's ambitions, he used a personal inheritance to buy a ship but was promptly told by the Directors to dispose of it, leaving the missionary thwarted. Then in 1834, Williams returned to England, where he engaged in a speaking tour and wrote a book, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands, in an attempt to get the British public to donate enough funds for a missionary ship to facilitate evangelical work in the South Pacific.Footnote ¹² Williams's account of the conversion of Pacific Islanders was widely read, selling 38,000 copies in six years and attracting widespread attention, from the nobility to the cabman who refused to take Williams's fare as his contribution to the mission (Hilliard). Through public lectures and his book, Williams raised enough money to buy the Camden, on which he returned to the South Pacific, and then in 1839 Williams sailed to Erromango intending to convert the ni-Vanuatu. He was killed, however, and his death, following so shortly after his stay in England, raised the profile of missions generally among the British public. Thus, in naming the children's ship the John Williams, the LMS memorialized their seafaring institutional history, their missionary endeavours in the South Pacific, and John Williams, popularly known as the “Martyr of Erromanga.”Footnote ¹³

Thanks to Victorian children's efforts, the first John Williams missionary ship was launched in 1844 and was followed by many others, all named John Williams, until 1971, with children continuing to fundraise for the purchase and maintenance of the successive ships; for example, Ebenezer Prout, in his history of the LMS missionary ships, states that in 1850 the children raised £3,200 for ship repairs, and in 1855 £3,673 (72, 81). Emphasizing the privilege rather than the financial liability of the children's relationship to the John Williams, another chronicler of the missionary ships writes, “The [LMS] Directors wish the children to feel that the vessel is theirs, that in a very honourable sense they are the owners” (Cousins 124). Nor was rhetorical ownership the only benefit to the children, since in addition to the conversion of heathen souls, the missionary ship was attributed with helping some British souls to recognize their calling:

Thus the ship devoted to conversion of Pacific Islanders also promoted a spiritual vocation for the British.

The highly successful participatory model used to generate funds for the initial John Williams demonstrated the value, both financial and (hopefully) spiritual, of the children's role in missionary work. The Juvenile Missionary Magazine both rewarded and sustained such participation, providing ongoing information on the John Williams as she was outfitted, launched, and sailed to the South Pacific. Children could further invest in a commemorative medal of the John Williams and visit her for a tour on board when she was in dock being refurbished; indeed, one issue describes such groups having cups of tea on her deck (“The Missionary Ship” 148). The periodical published letters from missionaries on board the John Williams detailing their journey, as well as letters from missionaries in the field on the success of the labors facilitated by the children's ship.

The engagement with the child reader in the Juvenile Missionary Magazine reflects a broader cultural movement to provide morally appropriate texts for this age group. Literacy was of central importance to the evangelicals, who stressed a relationship between the reader and the Bible unmediated by representatives of the Church. Of necessity, then, the evangelical Christian must be able to read, which in turn led to a demand for morally sound yet appealing texts. Alongside the concern for the moral content of children's reading matter, the proliferation of juvenile religious periodicals in the early-nineteenth century reflects developments in print culture (such as the decreasing cost of paper, distribution networks established through the promulgation of religious tracts, and the mechanization of paper production and printing)Footnote ¹⁴ as well as the missionary societies’ investment in fundraising mechanisms. The Editor writes in the 1845 issue of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, “if all who buy this little Magazine would give or get only one farthing each every month, that would be one thousand seven hundred and fifty pounds in the year,” adding shortly after, “[o]nly let this be in addition to all your other contributions to the Missionary Society” (Freeman iv).

The Juvenile Missionary Magazine displays features common to other Christian texts geared for a young readership: ready availability through pricing and distribution, short articles, and tales geared towards a moral message, particularly of conversion, but also informative articles on natural history and modern technology. Plus it offers the inevitable child deathbed scene highlighting the need for piety early in life. The periodical differs from other contemporary religious publications for children, however, in the relationship between reader and text, and in turn the relationship between the child and the child's world. While displaying some of the didacticism evident in, say, the Youth's Magazine or Children's Friend, the Juvenile Missionary Magazine encourages a participatory relationship, repeatedly invoking the child's agency both economically and spiritually through its articulation of the John Williams as “the children's ship.”Footnote ¹⁵

Such attribution of agency to the child reader forms a radical break from juvenile texts premised on adult guidance of the developing child, whether that child is understood as the site of original sin or as a Rousseauian blank slate. In her account of Victorian children's fiction, Jacqueline Bratton states that since adults chose children's books, “[t]he intended [child] reader had . . . none of the freedom of choice which constitutes the [adult] novel-reader's influence upon the adult fiction which is written and published, but could only accept whatever books were offered to him, complete with the lessons they taught” (Impact 20). Through their control over reading matter at the levels of creation, production, and consumption, adults strove to mold the child to adult ideals, and the “good” child was the child who voluntarily conformed, as far as possible, to those ideals. The projected child reader is therefore acted upon rather than acting and is attributed agency only in the sense of his or her acceptance or rejection of such ideals (dire consequences were understood to follow on the latter). Thus, as Claudia Nelson states, in nineteenth-century children's literature “the goal of overweening obedience forbids the implication that children may in any way positively affect their environment; their world neither asks nor needs any help from them” (8). Referring specifically to the evangelical literature for children available prior to the advent of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, Constance Padwick notes “that the two earliest children's missionary classics, The Lady and her Ayah (1816) and the more famous Little Henry and his Bearer (1832 [1814]), while making clear to young readers the conditions of their own salvation, give no suggestion that children in Britain can have any partnership in missionary work” (564).

The Juvenile Missionary Magazine functions in direct contrast to the scholarly points summarized above. Rather than simply relating tales of conversion efforts in distant lands, the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, through its structure, content, and institutional history, positions the child as a direct intervener in missionary efforts, since it is the children's ship which enables conversion of the heathen. The child reader is thereby established as an active agent in a dialogic relationship with his or her world to an extent not seen in prior juvenile publications.Footnote ¹⁶ Within the larger cultural model of the child reader's passivity, such juvenile missionary publications provide a circumscribed arena in which children are understood to have agency, and while the goal of the child's philanthropic gesture is determined by adults, the assumption of philanthropic agency demonstrates a cultural shift that attributes the child with the ability to enact meaningful change in his or her world. Fundraising juvenile missionary publications, it would appear, provide a unique countervailing dynamic to the broader cultural positioning of the child reader. The jump in perception that allows the LMS directors and Juvenile Missionary Magazine editor to see children as active participants in the missionary effort is enabled at least in part, I suggest, by the newly developed cultural fable of the coral insect: what is small and seemingly insignificant nevertheless has a key role to play in bearing witness to the power of Christianity.

In the pages of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, agency in terms of the missionary movement is not confined to the British child but extends also to the Pacific Island child, though the extent of such agency is asymmetrical. One particularly fascinating account, often repeated in LMS publications, reinforces the fact that the Pacific Islanders were not simply passive recipients of British children's goodwill but were themselves engaged in fundraising in order to provide further vessels for missionary work, in this case canoes for the Samoan faife'au, or teachers, who preceded the European missionaries in their conversion efforts.Footnote ¹⁷ The situation is asymmetrical, since the initial impetus for generating funds is located in Britain and the Pacific Islanders are rendered merely imitative, but the dynamics of agency and labor for the missionary cause are attributed to both cultural groups, thereby countering any suggestion that Pacific Islanders were the passive recipients of British largesse.

For the most part, the Pacific Islanders’ conversion to Christianity is presented as coterminous with assimilation to British cultural mores, often observable through the material markers of the whitewashed English-style cottage, or the donning of European dress. In a letter from Reverend William Gill, published in the Juvenile Missionary Magazine under the title “Native Juvenile Meeting in Arorengi [sic], in Rarotonga, South Seas,” the title references the juvenile meetings through which British children raised money for missionary work, while the Pacific juvenile meeting takes place in celebration of the new chapel in Rarotonga, opened December 1844. The letter states of the Rarotongan children, “But for their faces, you could have supposed them an assembly of English children. . . . Almost every child was clothed in garments sent out from England in ‘the children of England's Missionary vessel,’ the ‘John Williams.’ You cannot think how swiftly our thoughts flew to England that morning!” (238). Here, Christianity is equated with Englishness: these Rarotongan children are not only “clothed, and in [their] right mind,” to quote Mark 5.15, but literally clothed as and by the English child.Footnote ¹⁸ The racial and cultural alterity of the Rarotongan children is subsumed beneath their sartorial and spiritual similarity, such that they function as both reward for and validation of the English children who donated to the John Williams.

It is not just the clothing, however, but the financial sacrifice of the English children represented in the missionary ship that strikes the Rarotongans, as voiced through a Rarotongan elder who speaks of the “little boy who worked all night in the coal mines for two weeks, in order to get something towards the purchase of ‘John Williams,’ the Missionary ship, and of the little girl who sold her doll, and gave her money in compassion to us and to the little children in heathen lands that yet remain.”Footnote ¹⁹ The Rarotongan elder finishes by commenting, “I wish we were like the children of England. Let us imitate them; let us be diligent in planting arrow-root, to encourage the children in England to go on in their good work” (240). The result of the English children's self-sacrifice is a call to labor to produce goods, in conformity with the Victorian privileging of industrious self-help. The role of the missionary ship, the John Williams, would have been of particular import to the Rarotongan elder, since it was the missionary John Williams who claimed to have “discovered” Rarotonga and who oversaw the establishment of Christianity on the island.

If the examples above are asymmetrical in that Pacific Islanders are rendered as imitative of the British, in one significant instance the dynamics are reversed. In a letter to the child reader of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, the Pacific Island converts become cautionary messages for the British children who “own” the missionary ship to look to their own souls; as the missionary author suggests, wouldn't it be awful if on Judgement day the Pacific Island children converted through the work of the John Williams were to enter heaven, while the British children who raised the money for the missionary ship were left behind (Harbutt, To the Contributors)?Footnote ²⁰

Such moral warnings about the state of one's soul are well and good, but did the British child heed them? As various scholars have noted,Footnote ²¹ the publication figures for religious periodicals, reward books, and tracts are greatly in excess of the number of people who are presumed to have read them, leading to questions about how we are to assess the reception of their content as opposed to their demonstrable ubiquity. The Juvenile Missionary Magazine is a case in point, since by 1850 over a million juvenile magazines a year were issued by the LMS (Prochaska 112). In the case of the Juvenile Missionary Magazine, however, the tangible funds raised for the ongoing maintenance of the missionary ship suggests not only that the magazine had a readership but that it reached a key proportion of its targeted audience and generated the desired response. If we cannot attribute the funds raised solely to the periodical, we also cannot completely dismiss its likely contribution.

The interwoven cultural histories of coral, children, missionaries, and ships come into prominence in the 1840s and 1850s, then diminish in significance. While children keep fundraising, the juxtaposition of children and the coral insect within an evangelical framework becomes problematic with Darwin's new theory of evolution; John Williams's cultural resonance is overshadowed by the new missionary hero of the day, David Livingstone; and ships conveying missionaries to the Pacific are outnumbered by ships conveying settlers, as the lands Christianized become the lands colonized. For roughly those two decades, however, the annexation of the natural phenomenon of coral to missionary discourse initiates a shift in the dynamics between the child and evangelical institutions. We see the emergence of the child as an active agent in the missionary cause and, within the circumscribed field of the juvenile missionary periodical, the construction of the child as a participatory reading subject.

The publications addressed here exhibit the wider pervasiveness in cultural life of a relatively narrow and focused scientific debate: the phenomenon by which minute coral polyps enable an island, capable of supporting human life, to appear in the South Pacific and other equatorial oceans. Scientific discourse is then mobilized into a cultural fable that, while taking scientific accounts of the coral polyp as its premise, shifts the terms of that discourse into the realms of morality, social duty, labor, and missionary activity, and becomes of particular relevance to evangelical representations of the child. We can then recognize three key tenets interwoven in the rhetorical structure of this cultural fable: the productive capacity of what had been deemed (socially) marginal in the form of the child; the accretive possibilities of small acts of labor; and a belief in a greater spiritual plan or goal that no one individual can achieve but that is made possible through the synergetic labor of many. The little builders – whether coral insects or children – gain cultural significance through the apparent disproportion between their size and their productivity.

If the coral insect diminishes in spiritual and cultural significance after the 1850s, the recognition of the child's potential as an active agent in the world remains. Returning to the novel with which we began, we see that Ballantyne's The Coral Island intersects with the subject matter of this essay insofar as Ballantyne references debates on the formation of coral islands and draws from missionary accounts of the South Pacific for the novel's details (including Williams's Narrative of Missionary Enterprises), while interspersing the boys’ adventures with statements reflecting his evangelical beliefs.Footnote ²² But The Coral Island can be read also as a product of the cultural discourse on coral in its evangelical application to the child reader. The Coral Island is held by scholars to mark a significant advance in the Robinsonade, insofar as children successfully fend for themselves with no adult supervision.Footnote ²³ In the genealogy of famous fictional characters stranded on desert islands, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was an adult (1719), and Johann Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson arrived as an intact familial unit (1812; 1816, English edition), as did the Seagraves of Frederick Marryat's Masterman Ready; or, The Wreck of the Pacific (1842). Ballantyne's boys therefore mark a development in the literary articulation of the child's capacity for self-sufficient action. Rather than seeing this development as emerging from some sort of cultural vacuum, attention to the cultural significance of coral in the decades immediately prior to the novel's publication in 1857 suggests its literary break in form is not so much radical as logical. The novel's boy heroes are an extension of the cultural fable of the coral insect, their agency and self-sufficiency stemming from the previous decades’ articulation of children as active interlocutors in missionary efforts in the South Pacific, even if the texts and cultural references from which Ballantyne draws have receded from our cultural memory. The Coral Island is, if you like, the visible projection of a submerged discourse on coral insects, missionary culture, and the Victorian child.