Seasonal Tales, Far-flung Settings: The Unfamiliar Landscapes of The Christmas Books and Stories (1843–1867)

Abstract

Modern readers of literature in English tend to identify a single great novelist with London as a world city: Charles Dickens. However, from the 1840s onward, as he entered his middle period, Dickens became more interested in foreign shores and settings far removed from London: first, as he travelled abroad, to America and Italy, and then as his sons matured into young men who would assist Great Britain in the business of Empire. Beginning with The Christmas Books (1843–48), and continuing with their successors collectively known as The Christmas Stories, Dickens often incorporated and occasionally exploited backdrops that were neither specifically urban nor, indeed, English, to lend these seasonal offerings the allure of the unfamiliar and even, as in his principal collaborations with Wilkie Collins, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (Household Words, 1857) and No Thoroughfare (All the Year Round, 1867), the exotic. Perhaps the presence of such foreign settings from 1857 onwards reflects the anxieties of Charles Dickens about his own five “Sons of Empire” – Walter, Francis, Alfred, Sydney, and Edward (of whom two died in India, serving in the military, while still in their twenties). Moreover, external political, social, and military events at mid-century that shook the confidence of the English in their ability to manage a far-flung empire and to compete successfully with the other great European powers – the Crimean War and the Sepoy Mutiny, in particular – are reflected in his “somethings for Christmas” directed at his broadest reading public, the consumers of Household Words and All the Year Round. Later, illustrated editions (which, of course, do not necessarily reflect the author’s original intentions) emphasize these settings beyond the seas, sometimes merely complementing Dickens’s story in volume form, but sometimes adjusting the seasonal tale for readers in the last third of the nineteenth century in England and America.

Key-words: Charles Dickens’s sons, Sepoy Mutiny, Crimean War, Christmas Books, Christmas Stories