The first draft, along with Golding’s letters and diaries, will go on display at the University of Exeter this month to commemorate the book’s 70th publication anniversary.
Who would people be without the civilising effects of society? William Golding imagined it to be a dystopian survivalism. In his 1954 debut novel Lord of the Flies, the British novelist wrote of a group of pre-adolescent school boys stranded on an uninhabited island after a plane crash and their slow descent into chaos. The theme was such a shock that the manuscript met with several rejections. It took an intrepid junior editor to recognise its genius and publish it after editorial interventions. The first half of the novel, a detailed account of the boys’ evacuation during a nuclear war and the plane’s accident, was reworked in its entirety, so much so that Golding is known to have said at the end of the exercise that he could “hardly bear to look at it.” The end product turned out to be an enduring classic that launched Golding’s Booker Prize-winning career.
The first draft, along with Golding’s letters and diaries, will go on display at the University of Exeter this month to commemorate the book’s 70th publication anniversary. Golding’s novel had been a response of sorts to Scottish author R M Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, which had a similar premise but where the children were rescued by their faith and cultural resilience. But Golding believed that the alternative was the most likely possibility — anarchy that led to a corruption of empathy and moral values, no matter the age of the besieged.
This imagination of children as agents of disruption had been one of the deterrents to its publication. But Golding knew, in the unerring way that writers and observers of human behaviour sometimes do, that just like adults, there is no one way for a child to be, that they, too, have a capacity for deviance. As the poet Kamala Das wrote in the poem, ‘Punishment in Kindergarten’: “Children are funny things, they laugh/ In mirth at others’ tears…”
