Milli mála - 05.07.2016, Blaðsíða 40

PHILIP V. ALLINGHAM

Milli mála 7/2015

44
Dickens’s notions of masculinity and empire-building in-
form his conception of the role of women in the great im-
perial enterprise in that in his fiction they consistently play
a subordinate role. To David Copperfield’s Em’ly Peggotty
and Martha we might add Sophy Marigold as one of Dick-
ens’s Daughters of Empire. Possibly as a result of the Bhu-
tan War, which concluded with the Treaty of Sinchula on 11
November 1865 (rather than as a result of the Second
Opium or “Arrow” War, 1856-60), Dickens even has a
“daughter of Empire,” Sophy Marigold, accompany her hus-
band, a clerk in a merchant house, to “China” (probably
Hong Kong) in the Extra Christmas Number of All the Year
Round for 1865:

He was a-going out to China as clerk in a merchant’s house,
which his father had been before him. He was in circumstances to
keep a wife, and he wanted her to marry him and go along with
him. She persisted, no. . . . she could never disappoint her be-
loved, good, noble, generous, and I-don’t-know-what-all father . .
. . 15
She will not be a colonizer, but merely a house-keeper, and
in any event must look after her father, just as David Cop-
perfield’s Little Em’ly will perform domestic duties for her
uncle, Dan’l Peggotty, in Australia. Thus, Dickens’s notions
of domestic order preclude women being anything other
than tenders of the domestic hearth for the builders of Em-
pire. “Dr. Marigold’s Prescriptions” do not include a female
Cecil Rhodes or Chinese Gordon. American Household Edi-
tion illustrator E. A. Abbey, on the other hand, in his il-
lustration for “The Tale of Richard Doubledick” focuses on
the home front, the awkward moment when the protago-
nist, now a thorough veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, must
console the grieving mother of his friend and mentor. The il-

15 Charles Dickens, “Dr. Marigold,” il. E. G. Dalziel, Christmas Stories, British House-
hold edition (London: Chapman and Hall, 1879), p. 180.