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". The Coral Island – still considered a classic – was republished by Penguin Books in 1995, in their Popular Classics series. Literary and historical context Published during the "first golden age of children's fiction", 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. According to literary critic Frank Kermode, The Coral Island "could be used as a document in the history of ideas". A scientific and social background for the novel is found in Darwinism, of the natural and the social kind. For instance, although The Coral Island was published a year before Origin of Species (whose ideas were already being circulated and discussed widely), Charles Darwin's 1842 The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs was one of the best-known contemporary accounts of the growth of coral. Ballantyne had been reading books by Darwin and by his rival Alfred Russel Wallace; in later publications he also acknowledged the naturalist Henry Ogg Forbes. The interest in evolutionary theory was reflected in much contemporary popular literature, and social Darwinism was an important factor contributing to the world view of the Victorians and their empire building. Plot summary The story is written as a first person narrative from the perspective of 15-year-old Ralph Rover, one of three boys shipwrecked on the coral reef of a large but uninhabited Polynesian island. Ralph tells the story retrospectively, looking back on his boyhood adventure: "I was a boy when I went through the wonderful adventures herein set down. With the memory of my boyish feelings strong upon me, I present my book especially to boys, in the earnest hope that they may derive valuable information, much pleasure, great profit, and unbounded amusement from its pages." The account starts briskly; only four pages are devoted to Ralph's early life and a further fourteen to his voyage to the Pacific Ocean on board the Arrow. He