Milli mála - 05.07.2016, Page 28

PHILIP V. ALLINGHAM

Milli mála 7/2015

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These maritime backdrops lend the seasonal stories not
merely geographical and class variety, but romantic appeal
and even universality. Here, far from the comforts and con-
veniences of urban civilization, these elemental people of
the type that Wordsworth praised know well the spirit of
Christmas. The successive Christmas Books and Stories con-
tinued to transcend the barriers of class and even of the Vic-
torian era itself by acquainting readers with such lower-
class characters as ticket-porter Trotty Veck and his virtuous
daughter Meg in The Chimes, the passionate and ethically
tried Dorset carrier John Peerybingle in The Cricket on the
Hearth (set far away from the metropolis in a sparsely
populated village), and Dr. Jeddler and his long-suffering
daughters, an eighteenth-century family living in a village
on the edge of a Civil War battlefield in The Battle of Life.
Dickens even gives a voice to those usually silent in middle-
class oriented writing of the period: the “Boots” in The
Holly-Tree Inn (Household Words,1855), the garrulous Mrs.
Lirriper of the Extra Christmas Numbers of All the Year
Round (1863 and 1864), and the ebullient Doctor Marigold
(All the Year Round,1865) being prime examples. In deter-
mining that his middle-class, urban readers should extend
their sympathy to people quite unlike themselves outwardly
but possessing the same human hopes and fears, Dickens
distanced the narrative in space and time from contempo-
rary London in his seasonal offerings from 1843 until 1867.
Three such memorable, anti-urban scenes, captured in the
text and accompanying illustrations, are these: Clarkson
Stanfield’s “Will Fern’s Cottage” (1844, fig. 2), “Peace”
(1846), and “The Lighthouse” (1848, fig. 3). None of these
“painterly” images, however, is germane to the action of the
three novellas in which they appear (The Chimes, The Battle
of Life, and The Haunted Man respectively), and each seems
present only to achieve a picturesque effect, establishing