ABSTRACT
Nine months after news of the 1857 massacre of English women and children at Cawnpore had begun trickling back to England, Household Words, the journal conducted by Charles Dickens, published an account of the execution of captured Indian rebels. The prisoners were mounted to the open barrels of artillery pieces and blown from cannon under the watchful eyes of English troops, newspapermen and not a few natives. In a piece entitled ‘Blown Away!’ Household Words writer George Craig recorded the events, describing the guns ‘enveloped in thick white clouds of smoke, through the white wreaths of which little particles of crimson color were falling, thick as snow-flakes’ (350). The bits of crimson, of course, were the remains of the sepoys, turned, by the might of British justice, ‘into atoms’. The lingering account given of these proceedings, coupled with the lack of any real deliberation as to their morality, make it clear that, for Dickens and his writers, as well as for many other British men and women in the winter of 1857-58, there was little to feel for Indians but relish in their sufferings.
