Milli mála - 05.07.2016, Page 53

SEASONAL TALES, FAR-FLUNG SETTINGS

Milli mála 7/2015

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ness of the young Englishman George Vendale. Phrases
such as “that tremendous desolation” and “dismal galleries”
(p. 263) reinforce the perilous nature of the journey, con-
stantly threatened by the dangers of snow-blindness and
avalanche amidst the blizzard called the Tourmente.
Not surprisingly, the suspenseful struggle between the
Englishman and the devious foreigner set against the peri-
lous natural backdrop has been the subject of illustration in
the Illustrated Library, British Household, and Charles
Dickens’s Library Editions (fig. 9, 10, and 11). Although one
certainly receives some sense of these integrated and inte-
gral backdrops in Dickens’s collaborative novellas, the
foregrounding of such diverse locales becomes possible in
the illustrated versions of the texts, the illustrations of 1868
probably reflecting little authorial intent but constituting in-
formed interpretations of highly telling moments in the two
Christmas stories, F. A. Fraser’s “The Perils of Certain English
Prisoners” and Charles Green’s “No Thoroughfare.” George
Vendale’s olive-skinned and markedly non-Anglo-Saxon
opponent in the Dalziel series of No Thoroughfare illustra-
tions, a Swiss who has the advantage of having grown up
in the perilous region, appears to be in the ascendant in
each of these illustrations which offer the reader no clue as
to whether Vendale will survive, keeping the reader in sus-
pense by showing the heavier man on top, pressing the
hapless Englishman into the snow on the very edge of the
precipice. In this Darwinian struggle, albeit far removed
from the tropical jungle, Natural Selection would seem to
favour the man better adapted to the climate by virtue of
experience and race, but, despite his having been drugged,
the Englishman, by virtue of his nobler motivation, survives
while his assailant (improbably) does not – further testi-
mony, should the late Victorian reader require it, of Great
Britain’s special place among the nations in the eyes of
Providence.