Milli mála - 05.07.2016, Blaðsíða 25

SEASONAL TALES, FAR-FLUNG SETTINGS

Milli mála 7/2015

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died in India, serving in the military, while still in their
twenties. Walter left for India in 1857 at the age of sixteen,
and, after seeing action, was promoted to the rank of lieu-
tenant on 18 February 1861. The first of Dickens’s sons to
die, Walter (his second son but fourth child), expired sud-
denly on New Year’s Eve, of an aneurism of the aorta, al-
though his father did not learn of the young officer’s death
in Calcutta until 7 February, 1864, Dickens’s 52nd birthday.
The fifth son, Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens, joined the
Royal Navy at the age of fourteen, in 1860, and was buried
at sea in 1872 after dying aboard H. M. S. Topaze. Alfred,
educated at a military academy, failed to pass the army en-
trance examination, and emigrated to Australia in 1865,
aged nineteen; his brother Edward joined him in 1869, aged
seventeen. Francis, having studied in Germany to be a phy-
sician, gave up that possible career path, and in 1864, at the
age of twenty, began a seven-year term in the Bengal
Mounted Police; at the age of thirty, he became a Sub-
Inspector in the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police (1874–
1886). (Edward’s emigration, of course, post-dates the last
of Dickens’s Christmas Stories, 1867’s No Thoroughfare.)
The fact remains that only Dickens’s “successful” sons,
Henry Fielding (1849–1933) and Charles Culliford (1837–
1896), remained in England. As Grace Moore remarks of
Dickens’s decision to commit his ‘slow’ son Walter to a ca-
reer in the Indian service when the boy was just eight, Brit-
ish society in general had tended to regard “the colonies as
a place to get rid of troublesome younger sons.”2
While Dickens was, particularly in his journalistic en-
terprises, very much the commercially-minded mid-Victorian
businessman grounded in socio-economic realities, he was
also a third-generation Romantic who regarded a foreign
setting as an opportunity to defamiliarise his characters and

2 Grace Moore, Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in
the Works of Charles Dickens (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), p. 104.