About the Author
William Golding was born in the year 1911(died in 1993) in Cornwall, England. Golding was raised by his parents who were a schoolmaster and a suffragette (a member of women’s right to vote movements), who brought him up to be a scientist. He instead studied English literature at Oxford for five years, writing poems. He then joined the navy in 1940 for six years. “He was present off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Walcheren. After the war he returned to teaching, and began to write again” (“Biography” 1). His first novel was Lord of the Flies, and he “clearly intended Lord of the Flies (1954) as a realist’s answer to The Coral Island” (Dick 1).
“In 1857 Ballantyne published The Coral Island, “something of a children’s classic in England, in which three boys are shipwrecked on an unidentified Pacific island--Ralph Rover, the fifteen-year-old narrator; Jack Martin, "a tall, strapping broad-shouldered youth of eighteen, with a handsome, good-humoured, firm face"; and Peterkin Gay, "little, quick, funny, decidedly mischievous, and about fourteen years old." The lads live in "uninterrupted harmony and happiness," presumably without the aftereffects of original sin, although faint, post-lapsarian rumblings can be heard in some of their activities, especially in Peterkin's butchery of an old sow to get leather for "future" shoes. These intimations of mortality are muted, however, since Victorian schoolboys do not kill for pleasure. Cannibals are also encountered, but heathen bloodletting can be overlooked. At the end of the novel, just as the boys think they will be devoured by savages, they are released into the hands of their deus-ex-machina teacher who announces that "through the great goodness of God you are free!" (310). The natives embrace Christianity, and all is well.
To a generation that has witnessed two world wars, Ballantyne's resolution is laughable. One is tempted to repeat Judge Brack's feeble reaction to Hedda Gabbler's suicide, "People don't do things like that," and to consign The Coral Island to the bedtime reading of the very young, the very old, or historians of ideas” (Dick 1).