Re: Dickens
Charles Dickens (cdickens@RMPLC.CO.UK)
Tue, 28 Apr 1998 15:17:19 -0100
My dear Cody Trepte,
You are mistaken. My book "Barnaby Rudge" is set in the 1780s, at the
time of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London. But this error apart,
your question is to my mind a good one, provocative and stimulating. My age
was one of enormous change, and of enormous problems precipitated by this
change. It was these things that chiefly interested me, and that is why I
wrote chiefly on my own age. "A Tale of Two Cities," however, is a novel
about the age in which the roots of my own are to be found. For we
Victorians, the French Revolution was a defining moment in history, just as
for you in the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution is a defining
moment. And just as you, for much of the twentieth century, feared that
something like the Russian Revolution might come to pass in your own
country, so we too feared a repeat of the French Revolution. As much as
anything else, my novel was written as a warning about what might happen in
England, if the sufferings of the dispossessed weren't heeded.
"Barnaby Rudge," written nearly twenty years earlier, I like to think of
as my first attempt at uttering such a warning. It is set during the same
error, and shows how the passions of the mob can so easily overturn civil
society.
Faithfully yours,
Charles Dickens
________________________________________________________________________________
> I have just finnished reading A Tale of Two Cities, and I was wondering
why this was the only novel you wrote that was not set in Victorian England.
Did this time period intrest you?
>
> Thank you,
> Cody Trepte
>
>
======================
Charles Dickens
charles_dickens@rmplc.co.uk
Author