Milli mála - 2015, Síða 26
PHILIP V. ALLINGHAM
Milli mála 7/2015
30
narratives, casting an imaginative shading over the other-
wise commonplace. He was occasionally even interested, as
were the mainstream Romantics of the preceding genera-
tion, in earlier times, as when, for example, in A Christmas
Carol as The Spirit of Christmas Past he transports his read-
ers of 1843 back to a simpler time, the semi-rural England
that existed before railways and factories. And when in
Stave Three the Spirit of Christmas Present conducts
Scrooge to the Eddystone Light off the Cornish coast and
the “place where Miners live”3 – indeed, Dickens and For-
ster had travelled there just that past summer, taking time to
inspect the tin mines and experience first-hand the appal-
ling conditions in which the miners, many of them mere
children, labored underground – Dickens is compelling his
primarily urban readership to consider its roots and to iden-
tify themselves with the denizens of the provinces. In the
cliff-face fishing village of Steepways, North Devon, which
serves as the unusual setting of A Message from the Sea
(1860), Dickens reveals that the past is still very much alive,
for in such out-of-the-way places “The old pack-saddle, long
laid aside in most parts of England as one of the append-
ages of its infancy, flourished here intact.”4 He is also, like
the shaper of a magic lantern show, exploiting the pictur-
esque qualities of non-urban settings, broadening the
story’s action not merely geographically but culturally to in-
clude the “other” nation, that disadvantaged nation which
Disraeli articulated for those same readers in Sibyl (1845). In
the Carol passage from Stave Three, “The Second of the
Three Spirits,” conjuring up Wordsworth’s feelings about
the noble peasantry, Dickens implies that those who live
3 Charles Dickens, “Stave 3,” A Christmas Carol; Being a Ghost Story in Prose, il.
John Leech (London: Chapman & Hall, 1843), p. 102.
4 Charles Dickens, “Chapter 1: The Village,” A Message from the Sea (1860),
Christmas Stories from “Household Words” and “All the Year Round,” il. Edgar
Dalziel (The Household Edition. Vol. 21. London: Chapman & Hall, 1879. Rpt.
1892), p. 86.