Milli mála - 05.07.2016, Blaðsíða 46

PHILIP V. ALLINGHAM

Milli mála 7/2015

50
made in the fallen stones. Through this, the only passage left into
the Palace, or out of it, we followed the Indians into a great hall,
nearly one half of which was still covered by the remains of the
roof. In the unsheltered half: surrounded by broken stones and
with a carved human head, five times the size of life, leaning
against it: rose the straight, naked trunk of a beautiful tree that
shot up high above the ruins, and dropped its enormous branches
from the very top of it, bending down towards us, in curves like
plumes of immense green feathers.19
The immense scale of the devastated city that dwarfs the
European captives is in sharp contrast to the more human
scale of the reasonable, organised, specifically Christian
and family-oriented garrison town; indeed, the only admir-
able feature of the ruined palace is a natural one, namely,
the enormous and picturesque jungle tree. Everything about
the place seems designed to intimidate and depress the cap-
tives, so that the Collinsian part of the story seems most di-
rectly related to the experiences of the English and Anglo-
Indian prisoners in the Sepoy Mutiny.
The settings of the illustrations of the story as remedi-
ated in the Illustrated Library Edition (1868), the Household
Edition (1877), and the Charles Dickens Library Edition
(1910) reflect the expanding consciousness of Dickens’s
readers with respect to the wider world beyond Britain’s
shores, and made them aware of Britain’s place within that
larger, imperial landscape, so to speak. Dickens’s reaction
to the Cawnpore massacre on 27 June and the subsequent
murder of captured British women and children in Bibighar
may strike the modern reader as xenophobic and racist;
clearly he was incensed at such treatment of non-
combatants when he wrote to Angela Burdett Coutts on 4
October 1857 that, were he in command of British forces in
India, he “should do [his] utmost to exterminate the Race

19 Wilkie Collins, “Chapter 2: The Prison in the Woods,” The Perils of Certain English
Prisoners, and Their Treasure in Women, Silver, and Jewels, Household Words, Ex-
tra Christmas Number (7 December 1857), vol. 16, p. 22. [The material written by
Collins does not appear in later volume editions.]