Victorian Periodicals Review

Like the coral that serves as a guiding metaphor in Victorian Coral Islands of Empire, Mission, and the Boys' Adventure Novel, Michelle Elleray's monograph emerges organically from the collection of articles she has written on the intersections between Victorian adventure fiction, Pacific studies, and British missionaries. Elleray's goal is to "show that missionary culture's investment in the socially marginal (the young, the working class sailor, the Pacific Islander convert) generated new forms of agency that are legible in the mid-Victorian boys' adventure novel, even as that agency was subordinated to Christian values identified with the British middle class" (2). Elleray navigates an impressive array of contemporary fiction and non-fiction, including a variety of missionary periodicals, to support this nuanced view of the imperial project and its impact on our understanding of the nineteenth-century literary Pacific.

In an imaginative move, Elleray uses descriptions of coral to show how missionaries were able to encourage the participation of children in Pacific outreach. Missionaries seized on contemporary scientific discussions of coral, arguing that the small creatures that worked to build great islands through personal sacrifice were reminiscent of children whose small sacrifices could support great endeavors, such as by donating pocket money to Pacific missionaries. The focus on agency runs through all of the early chapters of Elleray's work, which demonstrates how adventure fiction celebrated the contributions of marginal groups by rewriting them as central figures in the evangelical project. Elleray also highlights the role of Pacific Islanders as Christian envoys who were often trained, after their conversions, as emissaries to islands deemed inhospitable to British missionaries.

The first three chapters weave together these threads by examining midcentury Victorian novels, such as R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857), Fredrick Marryat's Masterman Ready (1841), and W. H. G. Kingston's [End Page 160] Little Ben Hadden (1870) and Kidnapping in the Pacific (1879), alongside missionary periodicals to demonstrate how these marginalized characters developed agency. Children were targeted as essential though often overlooked workers in developing the missions project. While their smallness in both stature and significance would seem to make them incapable of sweeping change, Elleray reveals how missionaries sought to demonstrate that small agents could band together to create great works.

Sailors were also central to missionary outreach, as their mobility made them an important conduit to islanders. Elleray notes that the sailor is the evangelical force of Masterman Ready, undermining traditional assertions of middle-class domesticity as a primary form of Christian outreach. It is Ready's practical faith, combined with his prowess at survival, that completes the family's spiritual journey. Yet Ready also willingly sacrifices his life for the family, surrendering his agency to reaffirm middle-class power over the working classes.

Along with children and sailors, Elleray analyzes the importance of the Pacific Island missionary in rewriting traditional definitions of savagery, often narrowly depicted as the heathen cannibal in contrast to the white Christian boy. However, in The Coral Island the boys are educated in faith by a missionary, a fictional character based on Papehia, a historical Pacific Islander missionary. It is the islander, not the white adults (who are pirates), that provides a morally sound vision of faith and action for the boys. Thus, savagery is predicated not on race but on the proper manifestation of faith; heathenism can be found not only among foreign islanders but also in white sailors and the child reader at home.

The final two chapters deviate from this close-knit triad of child, sailor, and convert to provide variations on the central theme of how marginalized groups connect to missionary efforts. Elleray's fourth chapter examines two works by Kingston, discussing his changing portrayal of the Pacific labor trade, in which islanders were conscripted, sometimes through contracts but often through force, to work on plantations. While Kingston's Little Ben Hadden positions the British navy...