At Home in the Empire: Domesticity and Masculine Identity in Almayer’s Folly and “The Beach of Falesá"

The child narrator Jim Hawkins, watching the workings of real sailors at the docks in Bristol, indulges in a “delightful dream” of actuality: he really will take a voyage to an unknown island in the sea in a schooner, sailing to seek buried treasure with “a piping boatswain” and “pig-tailed singing sea-men”. The wild pirate, Gunn, meanwhile, although he becomes a church singer and presumably tastes cheese again, achieves little change in social standing: he merely dissipates his fortune and must fall back upon the support and goodwill of the upper classes. When viewed through the distances of historical time and biological aging, are nineteenth-century texts for young people that come across as critically problematic, the products of cantankerous or difficult writers who ask readers and scholars to reconcile seemingly contradictory ideals and behaviors. This is certainly the case with Robert Louis Stevenson’s famed Treasure Island, Edith Nesbit’s fantastical The Phoenix and the Carpet and Yonge’s own The Trial.