Lord of the Flies: The Classic That Almost Never Was
- dthholland
- 4 minutes ago
- 5 min read
When Lord of the Flies first arrived on bookshop shelves on 17 September 1954, it did so with little fanfare and modest expectations. Yet William Golding’s unsettling tale of shipwrecked English schoolboys tearing away the thin skin of civilisation has since become a defining work of twentieth, century literature, taught, debated and adapted in countless forms. This remarkable survival story, however, extends beyond the boys on the island: the novel itself very nearly never saw the light of day.
A Teacher and a Veteran: Writing What He Knew
Golding once described himself as “a storyteller through and through”, but the raw material for his most famous story came directly from life. Before turning to full-time writing, he spent years as a grammar school teacher in Salisbury, instructing young boys by day and scribbling fiction during lulls in the classroom.
More crucially, his wartime service reshaped him profoundly. As a Royal Naval officer during the Second World War, commanding a small landing craft fitted with rocket launchers during the D-Day landings and other coastal operations. These experiences destroyed any lingering faith in the innate goodness of mankind. He emerged from the war convinced that human nature harboured a deep well of darkness, a belief he would translate into his fiction.
The literary advice write what you know often drifts into cliché, but in Golding’s hands it became a fierce moral purpose: a novel that stripped away the polite façades of childhood and Empire to expose something feral lurking beneath.
An Unlikely Reworking of a Victorian Adventure
At its heart, Lord of the Flies is a grim inversion of The Coral Island (1857), the Victorian boys’ adventure by R.M. Ballantyne. In Ballantyne’s classic, a gang of proper British schoolboys, shipwrecked far from home, reimpose Christian order and jolly good sense on a savage wilderness. Golding, with the horror of the war fresh in mind, found this portrayal naive to the point of dangerous fantasy.
His version instead asked: what if there was no civilising instinct strong enough to suppress man’s basest urges? He handwrote much of the early manuscript on old school exercise books, sometimes during lessons, while pupils dutifully pretended to study. Ever the resourceful schoolmaster, Golding even tasked some boys with counting the words per page.
Rejection After Rejection: A Manuscript Nobody Wanted
In 1953, the rough manuscript, then titled Strangers from Within, began its weary pilgrimage through Britain’s publishers. Nine houses rejected it outright, each unable to see its worth or unsure how to market such a bleak, unsettling tale.
A stroke of luck — and a perceptive young editor — saved it from oblivion. Golding submitted his manuscript, tea stains and all, to Faber and Faber, a firm known for poetry and literary risk-taking. The manuscript landed on the desk of Charles Monteith, a junior editor not long in the job.
Monteith was not immediately impressed. He later described its sorry state for the BBC’s Bookmark: “A large yellowing manuscript with pages curling up, one or two wine glass rings, coffee drops, and bound in rather depressing hairy brown cardboard.” Worse, a professional reader at Faber had scrawled a blunt dismissal on her report: Rubbish and dull. Pointless.
Charles Monteith’s Second Look
Against the odds, Monteith resisted tossing it aside. Pushing beyond the slow opening pages, he was caught by Golding’s raw, unsettling vision. Monteith persuaded his seniors at Faber to take a gamble — but not without significant editorial surgery.
He guided Golding through revisions that pared back overt religious elements and tightened the narrative. Gone was the original title, replaced by Lord of the Flies — a biblical allusion to Beelzebub, the demon prince. According to biographer John Carey, Monteith’s edits transformed Golding’s manuscript from a heavy-handed Christian allegory into a secular, psychological fable with universal resonance.
The Shadow of War and the Nazi Within
Golding never made any secret of how deeply the war shaped his view of humankind. In a 1980 episode of The South Bank Show, he explained how discovering the atrocities of the Nazi regime altered him forever:
“Bit by bit, we discovered what the Nazis had been doing. Here was this highly civilised race of people who were doing impossible things. I remember saying to myself: ‘Yes, well, I have a Nazi inside me; given the right circumstances, I could have been a Nazi.’”
This brutal self-awareness pulses through Lord of the Flies. It is no romantic castaway story but a blunt message: civilisation is a fragile veneer, and when it cracks, barbarity is never far behind.
Slow Burn to Bestseller
Upon its UK publication in 1954, Lord of the Flies received respectful reviews but did not sell in large numbers. Its grim themes puzzled many readers still recovering from war.
Everything changed with the American edition and the paperback release in 1959, which found a huge audience among students and the literary-minded counterculture. By the early 1960s, Golding’s bleak vision of boys turning feral became required reading, and the royalties allowed him to abandon teaching at last.
As he confessed later: “I didn’t like the systematic side of teaching; I’m not a very systematic person.”
A Book That Spawned Generations of Stories
Lord of the Flies found fans in surprising places. A young Stephen King borrowed it from a mobile library after asking for “a book about the way kids really are”. King later acknowledged its influence, even naming his fictional Castle Rock after the boys’ mountain fortress.
Its shadow stretches long over popular culture: from Alex Garland’s The Beach to the modern TV series Yellowjackets and countless classroom debates. It has twice been adapted for the cinema — in 1963 and 1990 — and a new BBC television version, scripted by Jack Thorne, is currently in production in Malaysia.
A Lifetime of Stories and a Nobel Prize
Golding refused to rest on his early fame. He produced a string of ambitious novels: The Inheritors, imagining the end of Neanderthal life; Pincher Martin, an existential ordeal on a barren rock; The Spire, exploring madness and religious obsession in medieval England. In 1983, his unique blend of realism and myth earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature for illuminating “the human condition in the world of today”.
Asked once to reveal his secret, Golding gave an answer as plain as it was timeless: “What matters to me is that there shall be a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.”
The Story That Refuses to Die
Today, Lord of the Flies is more than just a classroom text. It is a reminder — scribbled in school notebooks, rescued from a dusty slush pile — that civilisation is a fragile mask. Golding’s warning still echoes: what happened to those boys on the island could happen anywhere, to anyone.
Sources:
BBC Bookmark Archive
The Dreams of William Golding (Arena, 2012)
John Carey, William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies
The South Bank Show interview, 1980
