ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the assumption that among Victorian children there are a number of imagined spaces, all of which have a physical and widely known geographical counterpart. There are also a few imagined spaces that may have a physical geographical counterpart, but the imagined space is for most children the actual space, and the actual space probably is totally unknown (or at least irrelevant). Examples of the first set for children are numerous: the Canadian woods, the American west, Australian sheep-stations, the African veldt and jungle and desert, India and the Himalayas. The reason that these imagined spaces closely resemble their real counterparts is because children had significant contact with them in their daily lives through stories of family members, friends and neighbors who had been to Australia, for example, or who had family members there now who were writing letters home. Adventure discourse emphasized the specific unique geography, local customs, slang and sociology of such spaces, so readers of adventure magazine fiction knew what a bushranger was, and were persuaded that they understood the customs of Himalayan Muslims and the evil nature of the western coyote. On the other hand, this chapter argues that the South Seas as a geographical space was pretty much terra incognita for lower middle-class and working-class Victorian England, and that fact left Victorian children free to create the South Seas as a kind of Neverland. This chapter will focus on the nature of the South Seas that manifested in children’s imagination, speculate on what sources might have helped create the imaginary world, and finally, discuss why the imagined world of the South Seas was important.
