overseas Britain cared about, although three-quarters of that was ruled by native
princes and the rest by the East India Company.
But new forces were at work and during the nineteenth century Britain vastly
extended its overseas territories, forming the New Zealand Colonisation Company,
consolidating its control of India, and acquiring the whole of Burma and huge areas of
Africa including Uganda, Nigeria and Zanzibar. The Empire over which Queen Victoria
reigned in 1897 was four times greater than at her accession sixty years earlier.
Improvements in communications by railways, steamships and the electric telegraph,
together with the availability of cheaper newspapers made the British public more aware
of affairs overseas, and newspaper reports from Special Correspondents, such as
W.H.Russell of The Times helped to sharpen the public consciousness of such events as
the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Indian Mutiny, the Zulu War, and the Relief of
Mafeking during the second Boer War.
The eighteenth-century explorations of Captain Cook and Mungo Park, the
wanderings of Charles Waterton in South America, the dramatic encounter of Livingstone
with Stanley in Africa in 1871, and the travels of such men as Sir Richard Burton, all
intensified interest in adventures in exotic places. When the domestic economic
situation seemed to offer only the grim alternatives of unemployment or dreary factory
work, many began to look overseas. As well as searching for opportunities of trading
with British colonies, hundreds of thousands of Britons emigrated to America, Australia,
Canada and South Africa, because there was more scope for enterprise and even
excitement there. In the process, links between Britain and its great Empire overseas were
gradually extended and strengthened.
Many Victorian children, particularly boys, shared their parents’ interests in the
Empire, expecting to work there when they left school, in commerce, the armed forces or
as public servants. (Girls would expect to become the loyal companions and helpmates of
their husbands according to the conventions of the age, of course.) The United Services
College at Westward Ho! in Devon, was actually founded to help prepare boys to serve in
such countries as India, and it is no coincidence that Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), ‘the
poet of imperialism’, was a pupil there. Thus the British public’s interest in thrilling
deeds in faraway places, normally within the hegemony of British imperialism, helped
create a cultural climate in which boys and girls wanted to read adventure stories in
which the heroes and (less often) the heroines were young people like themselves.
Like Captain Marryat, many of the writers who contributed to the proliferation of
adventure stories from the middle of the nineteenth century, had also enjoyed exciting
lives before settling down to writing. Captain Mayne Reid (1818–1883), after an
adventurous life which included serving with distinction in the American War against
Mexico, began to produce such stories as The Desert Home (1851). R.M. Ballantyne
(1825–1894), after years working for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada, wrote a
whole series of adventure stories, such as Snowflakes and Sunbeams: or the Young Fur
Traders (1858) and his popular ‘Robinsonnade’, The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific
Ocean (1858). W.H.G.Kingston (1814– 1880), the third of Marryat’s mid-nineteenth-
century successors, tended to specialise in sea stories, such as Peter the Whaler: His
Early Life and Adventures in the Arctic Regions (1851). Many children, of course,
TYPES AND GENRES 325