Milli mála - 05.07.2016, Síða 24

PHILIP V. ALLINGHAM

Milli mála 7/2015

28
edifices, streets, and bridges), particularly with London
from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to his death in 1870 –
to that reader a quintessentially Dickensian scene would be
a London scene such as Marcus Stone’s “The Bibliomania of
the Golden Dustman” for Book 3, Chapter 5, of Our Mutual
Friend (April 1865). However, beginning with The Christmas
Books (1843–48), and continuing with their successors col-
lectively known as The Christmas Stories, Dickens often in-
corporated and occasionally exploited backdrops that were
neither specifically urban nor, indeed, English, to lend
these seasonal offerings the allure of the unfamiliar and
even, as in his principal collaborations with Wilkie Collins,
The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (Household Words,
1857) and No Thoroughfare (All the Year Round, 1867), the
exotic. The common reader on either side of the Atlantic
would probably not have had a common experience of the
Christmas Stories, as these appeared complete, with contri-
butions by other writers such as Wilkie Collins and Eliza-
beth Gaskell, in Household Words and All the Year Round in
Britain, but in America first appeared in a separate volume
in the Ticknor and Fields Diamond edition (1867) and sub-
sequently in an 1876 volume of The Household Edition, il-
lustrated by E. A. Abbey.

Dickens detached most of his contributions to several of the
Christmas numbers from their original contexts in order to allow
these writings to be collected in the Diamond edition of his
works, published in the United States at the time of his second
American visit.1
Perhaps the presence of such foreign settings from 1857
onwards reflects the anxieties of Charles Dickens about his
own five “Sons of Empire” – Walter (1841–1863), Francis
(1844–1886), Alfred (1845–1912), Sydney (1847–1872), and
Edward (1852–1902), of whom two – Walter and Sydney –

1 Deborah A. Thomas, Dickens and The Short Story (Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania
Press, 1982), p. 103.