Resources

In Free Fall, Sammy Mountjoy meets Taffy at a meeting for the Communist Party in the late 1930s. Despite being engaged to Beatrice Ifor, Sammy is […]

The little Oa is a tree root carried by Liku in The Inheritors.

Sim Goodchild owns the book shop in Greenfield, London. He is a peripheral character in the first two sections of Darkness Visible, but he becomes […]

Golding visited Australia in 1975, and he was fascinated by the country, describing it as a place of ‘clear light and clean emptiness’. He was […]

Toni is the enigmatic twin sister of Sophy, who narrates the second section of Darkness Visible. The twins have a difficult relationship with their father, and […]

The theme of social class, and its effects, appears in many of Golding’s novels, including ‘The Sea Trilogy’ and Lord of the Flies.

Reverend Robert James Colley appears in the first book of Golding’s Sea Trilogy, Rites of Passage, and is often mentioned in the following two volumes. He […]

Nick Shales appears in the final part of Free Fall in a memory from the protagonist Sammy Mountjoy. According to Sammy, Shales was ‘the best teacher I […]

On the original manuscript of The Inheritors, Golding wrote that the ‘centre symbol is the waterfall, the time stream, the fall, the second law of thermodynamics’. […]

Fa is a member of ‘The People’ in The Inheritors. Although not explicitly stated, it is likely that she is the mother of Liku, and is […]

As many of Golding’s novels feature aspects of survival, hunger is a recurrent theme.

Lord of the Flies The island is the home of a number of animals, most notably pigs, who become the target of the boys’ hunts. Ralph, […]