Re: question...

Charles Dickens (cdickens@RMPLC.CO.UK)
Wed, 3 Dec 1997 10:16:18 -0100 

My dear Miss Alison,

  What an interesting project you set yourself.  I think an admirable topic.
Some of the critics of your day have made me out to have been little short
of an enemy of the middle classes of mine.  Stuff!  I was very happy to be
middle-class.  I wrote for middle-class readers.   What I wanted was wanted
by members of the middle classes as least as much as by members of other
classes, probably more.  Nor, unlike many of today's commentators, did I
underestimate the middle classes, their capacity for generosity and decency,
their capacity to learn.  Middle-class blindess and selfishness, to be sure,
were threats to the health of the nation, but middle-class perspicacity and
open-handedness were the remedy.
  I wrote "A Tale of Two Cities" as a warning to the British middle classes.
The people of France had been impoverished and made miserable by a selfish
and complacent aristocracy.  Goaded beyond endurance, they took a terrible
revenge. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the poor in Britain were
suffering.  What was to stop them rising in revolt?  The conscience of the
middle classes, that's what, and actions growing out of the working of that
conscience.  Perhaps it was a drowsy conscience when I wrote, but I wrote
because I hoped it could be awakened.
  And there were enough compassionate fair-minded middle-class readers to
understand what I wrote.  In Mr Lorry, I tried to present a representative
member of the British middle classes, immersed in business, not pretending
to understand the heart, or the great convulsions of history, but rising to
the occasion when understanding became essential.
  I do hope I have supplied you with some useful thoughts, and I wish you
luck with your paper.


Faithfully yours,


Charles Dickens
________________________________________________________________________________


>       Hi, I am considering writing a paper for my Victorian Literature
>class on some aspect of A Tale of Two Cities.  My idea is to discuss why it
>appealed to Middle-class Victorians.  Do you think this is a strong topic?
>If so, do you have any revelant ideas?
>       Thank you,
>       Alison
>
>

======================
Charles Dickens
charles_dickens@rmplc.co.uk
Author