The Mother of Boys’ Adventure Fiction?: Reassessing Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes and R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island

In “The Birth of the Boy’s Story and the Transition from Robinsonnades to the Adventure Story,” Dennis Butts gives a brief account of the process by which the adult adventure story of the eighteenth century becomes the boy’s adventure story of the late nineteenth century.

The crucial moment in this development is in the transition from Marryat to Ballantyne because, although Marryat addresses a child audience, it is with a very didactic voice and the children remain under adult authority. In The Coral Island, however, as Butts observes, the “story is essentially about and for boys. Adults only play minor roles, and there are no parents or older guardians.” Moreover, “the strongest emphasis is on the boy’s enjoyment” as they “endure dangers not so much in order to survive as for fun!” (453). In other words, by adding childhood autonomy and “fun,” Ballantyne invented the boy’s adventure story. The problem with this account is that it neglects to mention a mediating text. Between Masterman Ready (1841) and The Coral Island (1857) there exists Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes (1852). I cannot blame Butts for neglecting to mention Traill since I did the same thing in Playing with Books: A Study of the Reader as Child. In my own brief account of the rise of the boy’s adventure story I went directly from Marryat to Ballantyne, mainly because I thought that Traill’s book was too much an anomaly. In this article I want to reconsider that decision by putting her back where she belongs and by playing with the intriguing possibility that the real inventor of the British boy’s adventure story was a Canadian woman.¹

Of course, such an argument depends on the assumption of influence, and I have no direct evidence that Ballantyne ever read Canadian Crusoes, but there are many reasons for thinking he did. In his introduction to the edition I am using, Rupert Schieder observes that it “was reviewed in several publications” (xxxi) and his subsequent account of its publication history suggests it was fairly successful. Given his own experiences, there is reason to believe Ballantyne would be interested in a novel about Canada. In 1841 he was apprenticed to the Hudson Bay Fur Company and his experiences became the subject of his first publication, the autobiographical Hudson Bay; or, Every-Day Life in the Wilds of North America (1848). Subsequently, he used these same experiences as the subject of his first adventure novel, The Young Fur Traders (1856). But it is only when he decides to write his own robinsonade, that evidence of influence becomes most compelling. In The Coral Island Ballantyne borrows a number of motifs and rhetorical devices from the Canadian Crusoes whose similarities cannot be simply explained by the fact that they are writing in the same genre but, rather, by the fact that they are trying to write novels for children. These similarities will be the subject of my analysis, though, as my argument proceeds, it will become clear that the differences are considerably more interesting.

But first, I would like to consider why I thought that Canadian Crusoes was an anomaly that should be left out of an account of the rise of the boy’s adventure story. As Martin Green has pointed out in Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, the boy’s adventure story is an imperialistic fantasy that demonizes the Native Other in support of the colonial project. This fantasy projects a protagonist who exemplifies a particular ideal of “manliness,” a British adolescent who leaves home to take up his duty as future manager of the Empire and with whom the child reader is asked to identify. This formula is typically seen as diametrically opposed to the girl’s domestic novel in which a girl’s moral duty is defined by the requirement to stay home. What is so fascinating about Canadian Crusoes is how it seems to combine elements of both of these formulas. Hector is the typical British adolescent (he...