Milli mála - 05.07.2016, Page 35

SEASONAL TALES, FAR-FLUNG SETTINGS

Milli mála 7/2015

39
bowsprit and its five supporting stays are visible). The peri-
lous scene is not allegorical, but a visual realisation of a
passage at the bottom of the (left) facing page: “When
mariners at sea . . . .”13 Perhaps Stanfield’s point is that, as
opposed to these young sailors who brave the deep for
middle-aged merchants or in service of their nation, Red-
law, now middle-aged, has enjoyed a comparatively tran-
quil existence, despite a mysterious trauma in the past that
has embittered him. Dickens moves the shipwrecked sailor
from the background of The Cricket on the Hearth, for Ed-
ward Plummer is little more than a plot contrivance, to the
foreground in the Christmas Stories The Wreck of the
‘Golden Mary’ (Household Words, 1856) and A Message from
the Sea (All the Year Round, 1860).
In the decades following the Christmas Books in his own
weekly periodicals every December, Dickens continued to
introduce readers to settings and characters well outside
their ken, although, in the main, Dickens continued to
make his central characters in these framed-tales members
of the burgeoning middle classes in A Round of Stories by
the Christmas Fire (Household Words, 1852) and its succes-
sors. But behind these essentially middle-class tale-tellers
and protagonists one often finds Dickensian landscapes
that broaden the reader’s knowledge and sympathies, so
that, for example, in “The Tale of Richard Doubledick” in
The Seven Poor Travellers (Household Words, 1854) the
author takes his readers back two generations to the battle-
fields of the Napoleonic Wars upon which Great Britain
shaped its destiny economically and socially for the rest of
the century. The timing of the story’s publication is perhaps
its most significant aspect, as appearing at Christmas time
1854 it likely represents Dickens’s support of the Anglo-
French alliance, despite its singular lack of success in that
autumn of coordinating its naval and land-based operations
in the opening campaigns of the Crimean War. In A Christ-

13 Ibid.