The Perils of Certain English Prisoners E-Book

Charles Dickens.

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 212

Beschreibung

A classic collaboration between two literary giants, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners is a gripping adventure story filled with murder, intrigue and strong female characters. Following on from the success of The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, Hesperus presents another collaboration from close friends and literary giants, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Their legendary friendship resulted in a number of joint literary ventures - in this case Collins wrote the second chapter under Dickens' supervision. Inspired by events of the Indian Mutiny in 1857, but wishing to distance himself from the context of India itself, Dickens chose to set his novella in Central America. Fascinating in its use of female heroines, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners is an adventure story. On an island near the English colony of Belize, a silver mine is overrun by pirates, these in turn murder a number of English colonists and take the remaining prisoner. In the diverting narrative that follows, the initiative of intrepid women prisoners enables the captives to escape.

Leseprobe

The Perils of Certain English Prisoners

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction by Melisa Klimaszewski

Note on the Text

The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver, and Jewels.

I. The Island of Silver-Store by Charles Dickens

II. The Prison in the Woods by Wilkie Collins

III. The Rafts on the River by Charles Dickens

Notes

Biographical note

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

This Christmas number is the only one of the eighteen that Dickens compiled to have a title mentioning Englishness. Clearly designed to evoke a protective feeling of solidarity with imperilled countrymen and women, the title is also tantalizingly vague. Which English prisoners are facing danger, and where in the world are they? With no location specified, readers might imagine India, where a violent rebellion against the English then called the ‘Indian Mutiny’ began on 10th May 1857, or the Crimea, where English soldiers had suffered many defeats in battles widely regarded to be managed poorly by military commanders. An average Victorian, then, may have been surprised to encounter a hybrid nautical/jungle adventure set in Central America in this issue’s pages but probably would not have struggled to see the contemporary parallels. One review immediately identifies multiple symbolic counterparts, calling the number ‘less a festive tribute to the season than a celebration of the great qualities displayed by our race in recent emergencies, Crimean and Indian’.1

Indeed, a robust assertion of Englishness as not just a national but a moral identity pervades the number, with others set in stark contrast to an exaggerated, and emphatically white, English purity. There is no avoiding the hatred that is targeted specifically at dark bodies in this story. From making a living ‘table of black man’s back’, to casual references to ‘niggers’, to the villainous Pirate Captain’s Portuguese ‘brown fingers’, this number shamelessly reiterates that threats to the most cherished of English ideals are spearheaded by corrupt people of colour who might not even be fully human. Even the ‘English convicts’ under the command of the Portuguese Pirate Captain seem to have been tainted more by ‘the West India Islands’ than by their criminality, for they are singled out as the crew members who should have been murdering rather than obeying the Pirate Captain.

While the racism of the number’s character portrayal is fairly straightforward, more complicated is the relationship of this story to Collins’ and Dickens’ personal views, particularly in regard to the Indian Rebellion. Multiple factors led to the violent agitation for Indian independence, but the trigger that began the bloodshed in 1857 concerned the greasing of ammunition cartridges (which had to be opened with one’s teeth) with pig and cow fats. An Indian soldier, or sepoy, opening a cartridge was thereby forced to violate orthodox Muslim or Hindu beliefs. The British public was outraged that some women and children were killed in the insurrection, and military forces spent the next year reestablishing power at all costs, sometimes slaughtering entire Indian villages. Dickens explains in a letter to Henry Morley that his aim in this Christmas number is to ‘shadow out’ the bravery of the English, particularly the women, during this time of Rebellion.2 ‘Shadow’, as anyone who has studied the endings of Great Expectations (1861) can attest, is a tricky term. A shadow is a form without detail, a shape that shifts, and a concept that suggests impermanence. In that context, this number does seem to capture shadows of both Collins’ and Dickens’ views of imperial perils.

The fact that Dickens’ son Walter had just departed in July of 1857 for a post in India with the East India Company may have intensified Dickens’ reaction to the Rebellion. In a letter to his friend Angela Burdett-Coutts, after stating that the unfair promotion of commissioned officers over non-commissioned ones makes him feel ‘Demoniacal’, Dickens continues,

And I wish I were Commander in Chief in India. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race with amazement (not in the least regarding them as if they lived in the Strand, London, or at Camden Town), should be to proclaim to them, in their language, that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested; and that I begged them to do me the favor to observe that I was there for that purpose and no other, and was now proceeding, with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth.3

Many admirers of Dickens have found it difficult to reconcile such sentiments with their images of him as a benevolent man, and pondering the complexities of just this single paragraph – including questions of translation, space, and religion – certainly leads one to a more complicated view of an iconic writer. Although Dickens fantasizes about commanding a sort of divinely sanctioned genocide in this letter, and he puts nearly these exact words in Captain Carton’s mouth (see page 24 below), the story in The Perils does not actually enact retributive violence on a massive scale. Critics disagree over the extent to which Collins’ influence should be regarded as a factor that toned down Dickens’ rage.

Collins was no stranger to racist character portrayals himself, and those wishing to identify Collins as less intensely racist must note that the only appearances of the word ‘nigger’ appear in Chapter Two, for which he is the primary author. His views on the Rebellion, however, do seem less extreme than Dickens’ in that we do not have any record of Collins wishing to ‘exterminate’ a people. Collins’ oeuvre also includes sympathetic representations of mixed race characters, and his ‘Sermon for Sepoys’, which appeared in Household Words on 27th February 1858, reminds readers of the long and respectable history of non-Christian religious beliefs, clearly working against mainstream depictions of Indians as ruthless savages.

Ultimately, The Perils is a collaborative work, only understood completely when all of its parts are considered together as a whole, and therefore attempting to understand the chapters as expressions of each individual writer’s personal or political beliefs is likely to result in a skewed reading. The spirit of collaboration was high during the composition of this text, and Dickens and Collins conversed frequently enough for readers to conclude that the two men agreed on the direction of the number. They had collaborated on the previous year’s Christmas number, The Wreck of the Golden Mary, and had also been working together on The Frozen Deep, a play they staged jointly in mostly private venues throughout 1857. For public performances of the play in Manchester, Ellen Ternan was one of the professional actresses who replaced Dickens’ female relatives in the cast, and she became Dickens’ love interest for the rest of his life.

Dickens and Collins found sustenance in their close friendship throughout this period as they collaborated regularly and faced enormous domestic changes. Dickens would split from his wife of more than twenty years to form a lifelong, secret liaison with Ternan. As Dickens was separating from Catherine, Collins was falling in love with the widowed Caroline Graves, acting as a father to her young daughter and sharing a home with her by the end of 1858. Excepting one brief separation, Collins lived with Graves for the rest of his life, but he never believed in the institution of marriage and later established a second home with Martha Rudd. At many of the pivotal moments in these relationships, Collins and Dickens were writing together.

In September of 1857, just a month after the conclusion of the Manchester Frozen Deep performances, the two took another trip northward to collect inspiration for The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices and to facilitate a Dickens/Ternan visit. A humorous collection of stories that feature Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle, Dickens’ and Collins’ respective alter egos, The Lazy Tour shows the men light-heartedly fictionalising their relationship in the October pages of Household Words. They were clearly in sync creatively, and Collins was a paid staff writer, so it is not surprising that the two would collaborate again on that year’s Christmas number. As with all of the Christmas numbers in his journal, Dickens’ name was the only one to appear in print on the title page as the ‘Conductor’, and in his letters, he repeatedly tells friends that he wrote all but the second chapter. One may view such statements as Dickens claiming credit for a majority of the piece or as Dickens consistently insuring that Collins receives credit for the central chapter.

A Sotheby’s catalogue for the sale of The Perils manuscript in 1890 includes ‘the original sketch for the story, consisting of four pages, 8vo, by Wilkie Collins, and a long note by Dickens’ and further describes ‘a long letter from Collins to Dickens […] discussing the Title and also giving many particulars of the proposed plot’. These documents do not appear to have survived with the other Collins manuscripts sold in the auction lot, but there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the catalogue, and its descriptions contradict critical appraisals of this number that presume Dickens to be a bullying creative force rather than an engaged collaborator.

Especially to a reader who is not familiar with each author’s individual works, without the headings designating authorship, it is easy to read the number and hear one authorial voice. Each man was a strong author in his own right, and each was willing to position himself narratively as an illiterate man forced to place the story into the hands of a more educated woman. The narrative voice does not shift radically for the middle section, nor does the tone or style vary so profoundly as to cause confusion. The pacing of the second chapter is rapid, consistent with many of Collins’ novels, but the suspenseful events of that portion also coincide with the moments when readers would naturally expect to find the plot’s climax. The themes that one encounters – innocent children, cross-class romantic desire, imperial violence, heroic women, inventive escapes – arise in future works by both Collins and Dickens. Captain Carton’s name famously reappears in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and the heroine of Collins’ phenomenally popular The Woman in White (1859–60) is another Marian. Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860–1) features a working-class man pining for a woman who has been raised to regard herself as his social superior, and The Moonstone (1868) shows Collins continuing to question the moral soundness of British imperial wealth acquired in India. We will never know how much the social time Collins and Dickens shared, or the personal jokes they enjoyed as confidants, influenced each writer’s individual publications, but their frequent collaborations and the apparent cross-pollination of themes suggest a persistent conversation amongst their works.

A present-day reader might be surprised that the special Christmas issue of Dickens’ journal does not mention Christmas directly or illustrate that holiday’s celebrations. An eccentric pirate with scented handkerchiefs, or a heroine who knows her way around a pile of broadswords and muskets, may not sound like typical Christmas fare, but Dickens was pleased with this number’s emotional arc. Despite his nationalistic goals, it was not the treachery of the pirates or the bravery of their English victims that moved him most intensely, but rather Gill Davis’ affection for Marion Maryon. In a dramatic letter to Lady Duff Gordon, Dickens explains that overwhelming sentiment kept him from being able to face the proof pages until the very last moment: ‘It was only when the Steam Engine roared for the sheets, that I could find it in my heart to look at them with a pen in my hand dipped in any thing but tears!’4 Fortunately, Dickens did manage to correct the proofs with actual ink, putting the finishing touches on a Christmas number that continues to reach an eager audience.

– Melisa Klimaszewski, 2012

NOTE ON THE TEXT

The Perils of Certain English Prisoners was originally published on 7th December 1857 as a special issue or number of Household Words, the weekly journal that Charles Dickens founded in 1850 and for which he served as chief editor. The original publication did not identify Wilkie Collins as a co-writer, stating only that the number was ‘Conducted by Charles Dickens’. This edition identifies the portion for which Wilkie Collins is the main author.

Attribution is a difficult practice in regard to any collaborative text. For The Perils, a Sotheby’s catalogue lists the manuscript for sale at an 1890 auction along with other Collins manuscripts, and its whereabouts, if it survives, are not presently known. It is impossible to determine the level of influence Collins and Dickens had on one another’s prose or the degree to which they discussed and agreed upon textual details during the great amount of time they spent together. We also do not know the extent to which Dickens revised the entire text at the galley proof stage before it appeared in Household Words, the pages of which he edited meticulously each week.

The Sotheby’s catalogue describes ‘the original sketch for the story’ in Collins’ hand, a letter from Collins to Dickens with plot details, and corrections throughout in both men’s hands. Therefore, it is prudent for readers to keep in mind that the text as a whole is a collaboration even though the surviving correspondence of Collins and Dickens, Collins’ notations on the manuscript, and subsequent reprintings of portions of the text under a single author’s name make it possible to say with confidence that Dickens is the primary author of Chapters I and III while Collins is the primary author of Chapter II.

In 1858, an authorized collection titled Novels and Tales Reprinted from Household Words (Volume 7), published in Germany by Bernhard Tauchnitz, included the full text of The Perils with only Dickens identified as Conductor. Chapman and Hall issued a one-volume edition of the Household Words Christmas numbers in 1859 that included the full text of The Perils with no attribution of Chapter II to Collins, and future collections of the Household Words numbers continued that practice. An 1890 Chapman and Hall edition of The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices and Other Stories included The Perils as well as No Thoroughfare with both Collins and Dickens identified as authors on the title page.

In 1867, Dickens selected some of his own stories from several of the Household Words Christmas numbers for republication but did not include The Perils. After his death, the Charles Dickens Edition of his works included only Chapter I and Chapter III of The Perils, an editorial choice repeated in the 1898 Gadshill Edition of Dickens’ oeuvre and other later collections. The Everyman edition of The Christmas Stories, edited by Ruth Glancy and published in 1996, prints The Perils in its entirety with Collins identified as the second chapter’s author.

My editorial practices preserve the text’s original punctuation and capitalisation with a minimum of modernisation. I have retained inconsistent capitalisation because Dickens and his colleagues so often used capitalisation for emphasis or for other intentional reasons. Except in cases of obvious printer errors, or instances where an apparent error obscures meaning, I have retained the text’s original punctuation, which includes what may seem like excessive commas to today’s readers and semi-colons where today’s practices would call for commas. Nineteenth-century spellings (such as ‘chace’) and usages (such as ‘eat’ instead of ‘ate’) have been retained, but inconsistencies within the text (such as appearances of ‘honour’ as well as ‘honor’) have been made consistent with present-day usage. The most standardisation appears in regard to hyphens. I have modernised hyphenated as well as compound words (such as to-morrow, cocoa-nut, and sea shore) that are now understood as single words, and I follow Oxford’s guidelines regarding compound words that take hyphens when attributive.

These practices are consistent with other collaborative Dickens works now in print from Hesperus.

The Perils of Certain English Prisoners

and Their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver, and Jewels

THE EXTRA CHRISTMAS NUMBER OF HOUSEHOLD WORDS

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS

CONTAINING THE AMOUNT OF ONE NUMBER AND A HALF

CHRISTMAS, 1857

CHAPTER I

THE ISLAND OF SILVER-STORE

[by Charles Dickens]

It was in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and forty-four, that I, Gill Davis to command, His Mark,5 having then the honour to be a private in the Royal Marines, stood a-leaning over the bulwarks of the armed sloop Christopher Columbus, in the South American waters off the Mosquito shore.6

My lady remarks to me, before I go any further, that there is no such Christian name as Gill, and that her confident opinion is, that the name given to me in the baptism wherein I was made, &c., was Gilbert. She is certain to be right, but I never heard of it. I was a foundling child, picked up somewhere or another, and I always understood my Christian name to be Gill. It is true that I was called Gills when employed at Snorridge Bottom7 betwixt Chatham and Maidstone to frighten birds; but that had nothing to do with the Baptism wherein I was made,&c., and wherein a number of things were promised for me by somebody, who let me alone ever afterwards as to performing any of them, and who, I consider, must have been the Beadle.8 Such name of Gills was entirely owing to my cheeks, or gills, which at that time of my life were of a raspy description.

My lady stops me again, before I go any further, by laughing exactly in her old way and waving the feather of her pen at me. That action on her part, calls to my mind as I look at her hand with the rings on it – Well! I won’t! To be sure it will come in, in its own place. But it’s always strange to me, noticing the quiet hand, and noticing it (as I have done, you know, so many times) a-fondling children and grandchildren asleep, to think that when blood and honour were up – there! I won’t! not at present! – Scratch it out.

She won’t scratch it out, and quite honourable; because we have made an understanding that everything is to be taken down, and that nothing that is once taken down shall be scratched out. I have the great misfortune not to be able to read and write, and I am speaking my true and faithful account of those Adventures, and my lady is writing it, word for word.

I say, there I was, a-leaning over the bulwarks of the sloop Christopher Columbus in the South American waters off the Mosquito shore: a subject of his Gracious Majesty King George of England, and a private in the Royal Marines.

In those climates, you don’t want to do much. I was doing nothing. I was thinking of the shepherd (my father, I wonder?) on the hillsides by Snorridge Bottom, with a long staff, and with a rough white coat in all weathers all the year round,9 who used to let me lie in a corner of his hut by night, and who used to let me go about with him and his sheep by day when I could get nothing else to do, and who used to give me so little of his victuals and so much of his staff, that I ran away from him – which was what he wanted all along, I expect – to be knocked about the world in preference to Snorridge Bottom. I had been knocked about the world for nine-and-twenty years in all, when I stood looking along those bright blue South American waters. Looking after the shepherd, I may say. Watching him in a half-waking dream, with my eyes half-shut, as he, and his flock of sheep, and his two dogs, seemed to move away from the ship’s side, far away over the blue water, and go right down into the sky.

‘It’s rising out of the water, steady,’ a voice said close to me. I had been thinking on so, that it like woke me with a start, though it was no stranger voice than the voice of Harry Charker, my own comrade.

‘What’s rising out of the water, steady?’ I asked my comrade.

‘What?’ says he. ‘The Island.’

‘O! The Island!’ says I, turning my eyes towards it. ‘True. I forgot the Island.’

‘Forgot the port you’re going to? That’s odd, an’t it?’

‘It is odd,’ says I.

‘And odd,’ he said, slowly considering with himself, ‘an’t even. Is it, Gill?’

He had always a remark just like that to make, and seldom another. As soon as he had brought a thing round to what it was not, he was satisfied. He was one of the best of men, and, in a certain sort of a way, one with the least to say for himself. I qualify it, because, besides being able to read and write like a quartermaster,10 he had always one most excellent idea in his mind. That was, Duty. Upon my soul, I don’t believe, though I admire learning beyond everything, that he could have got a better idea out of all the books in the world, if he had learnt them every word, and been the cleverest of scholars.

My comrade and I had been quartered in Jamaica, and from there we had been drafted off to the British settlement of Belize, lying away West and North of the Mosquito coast.11 At Belize there had been great alarm of one cruel gang of pirates (there were always more pirates than enough in those Caribbean Seas), and as they got the better of our English cruisers by running into out-of-the-way creeks and shallows, and taking the land when they were hotly pressed, the governor of Belize had received orders from home to keep a sharp lookout for them along shore. Now, there was an armed sloop came once a year from Port Royal, Jamaica, to the Island, laden with all manner of necessaries, to eat and to drink, and to wear, and to use in various ways; and it was aboard of that sloop which had touched at Belize, that I was a-standing, leaning over the bulwarks.

The Island was occupied by a very small English colony. It had been given the name of Silver-Store. The reason of its being so called, was, that the English colony owned and worked a silver mine over on the mainland, in Honduras, and used this island as a safe and convenient place to store their silver in, until it was annually fetched away by the sloop. It was brought down from the mine to the coast on the backs of mules, attended by friendly Indians and guarded by white men; from thence, it was conveyed over to Silver-Store, when the weather was fair, in the canoes of that country; from Silver-Store, it was carried to Jamaica by the armed sloop once a year, as I have already mentioned; from Jamaica, it went, of course, all over the world.

How I came to be aboard the armed sloop, is easily told. Four-and-twenty marines under command of a lieutenant – that officer’s name was Linderwood – had been told off at Belize, to proceed to Silver-Store, in aid of boats and seamen stationed there for the chace of the Pirates. The island was considered a good post of observation against the pirates, both by land and sea; neither the pirate ship nor yet her boats had been seen by any of us, but they had been so much heard of, that the reinforcement was sent. Of that party, I was one. It included a corporal and a serjeant. Charker was corporal, and the serjeant’s name was Drooce. He was the most tyrannical non-commissioned officer12 in His Majesty’s service.

The night came on, soon after I had had the foregoing words with Charker. All the wonderful bright colors went out of the sea and sky, in a few minutes, and all the stars in the Heavens seemed to shine out together, and to look down at themselves in the sea, over one another’s shoulders, millions deep. Next morning, we cast anchor off the Island. There was a snug harbor within a little reef; there was a sandy beach; there were coconut trees with high straight stems, quite bare, and foliage at the top like plumes of magnificent green feathers; there were all the objects that are usually seen in those parts, and I am not going to describe them, having something else to tell about.

Great rejoicings, to be sure, were made on our arrival. All the flags in the place were hoisted, all the guns in the place were fired, and all the people in the place came down to look at us. One of those Sambo fellows – they call those natives Sambos, when they are half-negro and half-Indian13