Milli mála - 2015, Blaðsíða 39

SEASONAL TALES, FAR-FLUNG SETTINGS

Milli mála 7/2015

43
French cooperation in the Coalition to counteract Prussian-
Austrian neutrality, which in turn compelled the former ad-
versaries to coordinate their military operations. Public sen-
timent being mixed about the advisability of aligning French
and British interests, Dickens’s story emphasized the neces-
sity for laying past antipathies to rest and “moving forward,”
although he does not directly allude to the common enemy
(imperial but Christian Russia) or the common cause (the
defense of a non-Christian power, The Sick Man of Europe).
Modern readers can be forgiven for missing the story’s mid-
Victorian political context: war was declared in March 1854,
and the ineffectiveness of the allied naval bombardment of
Sevastopol in the fall of 1854 had underscored serious
problems in the politically-dictated and utterly cumbersome
shared command structure. At the very time that Dickens
published a story which seems to urge greater cooperation
between the superpowers, Lord Aberdeen’s ministry was
about to fall as a result of the failure of a land-based oper-
ation against Sevastopol. In this ill-fated and utterly mis-
managed conflict, 23,000 British soldiers perished – and the
infamous Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava on 25
October 1854 under Lord Cardigan had undermined both
the honour and credibility of Britain’s much-vaunted mili-
tary might.
However, no illustrations cued such a reading of the
1854 Extra Christmas Number in Household Words. Rather,
published in Dickens’s unillustrated weekly periodicals,
such seasonal offerings appealed only through the text to
the sense of the picturesque, and were not issued with il-
lustration until Dickens had made his last such offering, No
Thoroughfare (1867). Indeed, the successive barrack room
and battlefield scenes in the 1854 inset tale in the British Il-
lustrated Library, Household, and Charles Dickens Library
Editions construct Britain’s nineteenth-century, imperial
“manifest destiny” as a predominantly aggressive and mas-
culine enterprise.