Carnival Time in Britany [Text]

This is the article that immediately follows The Moonstone in All the Year Round, entitled "Carnival Time in Britany". John Drew and Tony Williams, the editors of Dickens Journals Online, identify “Carnival Time in Britany” as a piece of travel-writing related to the subjects of “Christmas, New Year, Holidays and Seasonal Celebrations”, “France, Description and Travel”, “France, Social Life and Customs”, and “Travel, Tourism, Hotels, Resorts”. They ascribe the role of the author to Marguerite Agnes Power, a correspondent of Dickens’s, although Power’s name never actually appears alongside the article itself, as far as I can tell. This article adds to a tradition of story in the 8 August 1868 edition of The Moonstone, through the narrative style. “Carnival Time in Britany” is reminiscent of Collins’ fiction, and picks up on the promise of adventure in the last line of the British Moonstone. There is already a sense of adventure in the first line of the article, when the narrator enters “old quaint” French city of Nantes “escorted by a motley caravan of peasants”. This, and other, vivid images of exotic people and places in "Carnival Time in Britany" complement similar images in The Moonstone, without a moral undercurrent, as in Harper’s Weekly.