Milli mála - 05.07.2016, Síða 43
SEASONAL TALES, FAR-FLUNG SETTINGS
Milli mála 7/2015
47
Although undoubtedly bewildered by the [treatment of India in]
the Great Exhibition, Dickens became increasingly interested in
India in the 1850s. Part of his curiosity may be attributed to the
fact that his son, Walter – whose career as a cadet in the East
India army was decided upon by his father when the boy was
eight years old – had recently completed his training at Addis-
combe and set sail for India on 20 July 1857. Although his original
regiment the 26th Regiment of Bengal Infantry had been dis-
banded by the time he reached India, Walter was to fight at both
Cawnpore and Lucknow during the uprising as a member of the
42nd Highlanders.16
Promoted to lieutenant before his eighteenth birthday, Wal-
ter died in India just as his brother Frank shipped out to
join the Bengal Mounted Police. Knowing that Walter was
destined for military service abroad, even three years be-
fore the Sepoy Rebellion, Dickens would have had his an-
xieties about Walter’s fate. By his own admission, The Perils
of Certain English Prisoners is a defamiliarised and fiction-
ised version of the Sepoy Mutiny, as one may readily see in
his letter to Mrs. Watson on 7 December 1857, as he and
Wilkie Collins were going to press with the Christmas story:
I have been very busy with the Xmas Number of Household
Words, in which I have endeavoured to commemorate the fore-
most of the great English qualities shewn in India, without laying
the scene there, or making any vulgar association with real events
or calamities.17
The writer’s description of the initial physical setting of The
Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and Their Treasure in
Women, Children, Silver, and Jewels in the Extra Christmas
Number of Household Words (which Dickens and Collins
wrote collaboratively just after letters arrived from Walter in
16 Grace Moore, Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race, and Colonialism in
the Works of Charles Dickens (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), p. 104.
17 Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Graham Storey and Kathleen
Tillotson, The Pilgrim edition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), Vol. 7, p. 487.