Milli mála - 2015, Page 34
PHILIP V. ALLINGHAM
Milli mála 7/2015
38
Knowing full well the artistic strengths of Clarkson Stanfield
as a landscape and seascape painter, Dickens seems to have
had this veteran of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic
Wars and subsequently of the merchant marine very much
in mind when he wrote these contextualizing passages
which work against notions of the sublime in nature. For
example, Stanfield’s first appearance in The Haunted Man is
admirably suited to his own personal history (a guard
aboard HMS Namur in the Royal Navy and then a merchant
sailor aboard the East Indiaman Warley) and abilities as a
painter of seascapes. The passage that Dickens wrote spe-
cifically for Stanfield seems to harken back to Scrooge’s
flight to the Cornish coast in the Carol, but the scene con-
jured up here is really part of an extended series of tempo-
ral clauses (“When. . . when...”) that have little to do with
the Old College (perhaps University College, London,
founded in 1826, as opposed to the recently established
Queen’s College) where Professor Redlaw lectures, so that
its purpose in the narrative is not immediately obvious.
When travellers by land were bitter cold, and looked wearily on
gloomy landscapes, rustling and shuddering in the blast. When
mariners at sea, outlying upon icy yards, were tossed and swung
above the howling ocean dreadfully. When lighthouses, on rocks
and headlands, showed solitary and watchful; and benighted sea-
birds breasted on against their ponderous lanterns, and fell dead.12
On the bowsprit of a sailing vessel in Stanfield’s embedded
illustration entitled “The Lighthouse” (fig. 3), left, four sail-
ors (two of them quite young) struggle to reef in the jib-
sheet. Beneath them, in the surf, is an anchor. On a rock
darkly rising from the breakers, an owl-like lighthouse
stands, the small gulls indicating both its size and its dis-
tance from the ship (which we must imagine, for only the
12 Charles Dickens, “Chapter 1: The Gift Bestowed,” The Haunted Man and The
Ghost's Bargain, il. John Leech et al. (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1848), p. 6.