From Silver-Store to "all over the world": The Transimperial Entanglements of "The Perils of Certain English Prisoners"

Abstract:This essay situates Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins's "The Perils of Certain English Prisoners" (1857), which critics have traditionally read as a reaction to the so-called Indian Mutiny, in a wider imperial context by foregrounding its setting of the Mosquito Coast in 1744. Reading the silver trade, which connects the setting of 1744 to the publication date of 1857, and connecting Britain to South America and China, this essay argues that "The Perils" enacts transimperial entanglements, presenting the British Empire as imbued with an expanded temporality and terrestrial reach that extends beyond its formal political boundaries. In "The Perils," Dickens and Collins locate 1857 and India in a genealogy of empire rather than treating the Mutiny as a significant but topical moment. In doing so, they forge connections with a fictional past of British ascendency in the silver trade, overlaying the historical mahogany and opium trades, to project a British-dominated imperial future, while simultaneously displacing and erasing Indigenous peoples in the transformation of the landscape for British benefit.