future rulers of the world". Modern critics find darker undertones in the novel. In an essay published in College English in 2001, Martine Dutheil states that The Coral Island can be thought of as epitomising a move away from "the confidence and optimism of the early Victorian proponents of British imperialism" toward "self-consciousness and anxiety about colonial domination". She locates this anxiety in what she calls the "rhetoric of excess" that features in the descriptions of cannibalism, and especially in the accounts of Fijian savagery provided by Bloody Bill (most notably that of the sacrifice of children to the eel gods) and the missionary, a representative of the London Missionary Society, an "emblematic figure of colonial fiction". Others have also linked popular boys' fiction of the period with imperialism; Joseph Bristow's Empire Boys (1991) claimed to see an imperialist manhood,' which shaped British attitudes towards empire and masculinity." The novel's portrayal of Pacific culture and the effects of colonisation are analyzed in studies such as Brian Street's The Savage in Literature: Representations of 'Primitive' Society in English Fiction (1975) and Rod Edmond's Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (1998). The domination imposed by "geographical mapping of a territory and policing of its native inhabitants" is an important theme in the novel both specifically and in general, in the topography of the island as mapped by the boys and the South Pacific's "eventual subjugation and conversion to Christianity", a topic continued in Stevenson's Treasure Island. The exploration of the relationship between nature and evangelical Christianity is another typically Victorian theme. Coral connects the two ideas. Literary critic Katharine Anderson explains that coral jewellery, popular in the period, had a "pious significance". The "enchanted garden" of coral the boys discover at the bottom of their island's lagoon is suggestive of "missionary encounters with the societies of the Pacific Island". In Victorian society coral had been given an "evangelical framing", and the little "coral insect" responsible for building coral reefs mirrored the "child reader's productive capacity as a fundraiser for the missionary cause"; literary critic Michelle Elleray discusses numerous children's books from the early to mid-19th century, including The Coral Island, in which coral plays such an educational role. The novel's setting provides the backdrop for a meditation in the style of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who promoted an educational setting in which lessons are provided by direct interactions with the