Amongst the papers held by Thomas Atkinson’s direct descendant Paul Dahlquist in Hawaii is one remarkable document about a final book he had intended to publish. The document is a draft contract in Thomas’ own handwriting, dated 1861, for a book to be entitled The Exiles of Siberia. He spells out his structure of the book, noting it would contain “about six hundred pages and (give) an account of the Russian political exiles, the Polish and the criminals sent to work in the mines. Also an account of the mode in which they are employed in the gold mines and their colonization, with illustrations by the said T W Atkinson”.
Both emperors, father and son, must have been impressed by Thomas too because each gave him a valuable jewel-encrusted ring, one of which is still retained by the family. We know he met Tsar Alexander and it is very likely he also met Nicholas before he died in 1855. Lucy also mentions being in the same room as Tsar Nicholas, possibly when he came to visit her employer in St Petersburg, General Mikhail Nikolaevitch Muravyev.
The idea that Thomas could have written about the Decembrists in his books would have been unthinkable in the light of the special privileges they had given him that allowed him to travel so extensively throughout Siberia and Central Asia.
It was the connection with the Muravyev family that gave Thomas and Lucy such remarkable – possibly unprecedented – access to the Decembrist exiles in Siberia. At least five members of the family had taken part in the attempted coup in December 1825. One of them, Sergei Muravyev-Apostol, was one of the five Decembrists who were hanged on the orders of the new Tsar, Nicholas I.
Later, in Eastern Siberia, the Atkinsons were to meet more of the Decembrist exiles, including the artist Nikolai Bestuzhev and his brother Mikhail at their home in Selenginsk. Whilst in Irkutsk, Thomas even gave some of his precious Winsor and Newton watercolour paints to Prince Sergei Volkonsky, another of the exiles.
By the time Lucy published her book in 1863, she was free of the political constraints that had bound her husband. The emancipation of the serfs in Russia had taken place and most of the surviving Decembrist exiles – but not the Poles or criminals – had been allowed to return to European Russia. Indeed, some of them had actually come to London to meet her. Thus we find many stories about the Decembrists in her book.
This is not the place to go into a full discussion of Thomas and Lucy’s connections with the Decembrist exiles, but we cannot over-estimate the importance of their meetings. One or two other travellers, including Charles Cottrell and Samuel Hill, also met some of the exiles, but none experienced the level of intimacy over such a long period of time that was conferred on Thomas and Lucy, due to the latter’s employment in the household of General Muravyev in St Petersburg. The intriguing question is did Thomas ever paint any of the Decembrists? The fact that he mentions that his proposed book was to contain illustrations strongly suggests this to be the case. If so, where are these illustrations now?
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This is a very interesting subject. Thanks Nick and how lovely to see the ring.