Milli mála - 05.07.2016, Blaðsíða 47

SEASONAL TALES, FAR-FLUNG SETTINGS

Milli mála 7/2015

51
upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested . . . to blot
it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth.”20
For readers of the Christmas Stories in volume form,
whether the Illustrated Library or Household editions,

illustration provides not only a revealing insight into the artists
who produce it but into the minds of the public that absorbed it.
The illustrator’s picture is not always a delineation of how things
actually looked or how they might have looked – but how a mass
audience expected things to look. The visual image is an important
index to the expectations and satisfactions of its audience.21
For instance, the physical setting of the captivity-and-escape
narrative The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857),
Dickens’s most immediate and somewhat racist reaction to
the Sepoy Mutiny, features two prominent locales: the out-
post of Empire, the garrison town on the sandy shores of
Silver-Store Island (based on Belize) and its nearby anti-
thesis, the Darwinian jungle of the mixed-race pirates on the
Honduran mainland opposite, a juxtaposition that antici-
pates the settings and themes of such Conrad stories as “An
Outpost of Progress” (1897) and Heart of Darkness (1899).
Dalziel’s 1877 illustration reconfigures the key elements of
the mid-50s story two decades after its initial publication for
a readership acutely aware of the burdens of Empire.
In the British Household Edition, Edward Dalziel has
provided a single illustration (fig. 8) to encapsulate the
chief elements of the story: a “Sambo” (a racist slur, but here
signifying a company employee of mixed aboriginal and na-
tive or negro background), palm trees and a sandy beach,
and two uniformed British officers. Since the reader en-
counters the text a page before the illustration “‘O Christian
George King sar berry sorry!’ says that Sambo vagabond,”

20 Charles Dickens, “To Angela Burdett Coutts” (27 June 1857), The Letters of Charles
Dickens, ed. Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson, The Pilgrim edition (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1965), Vol. 7, p. 459.
21 Henry Pitz, The Brandywine Tradition (New York: Weathervane, 1968), p. 238.