Abstract
How does Dickens understand the events of the French Revolution? Given that the events are so much contested ground, such that what happens, and how and why it happens, are melded into often starkly contrasting and deeply ideologically inflected interpretations of the period, we should not think that Dickens’s position is likely to be either simple or naive.
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Notes
Richard Price, Political Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 195–6.
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 108, emphasis added.
See Dickens’s ‘The Flight’, in Dickens on France, ed. John Edmondson (Oxford: Signal, 2006), p. 9.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 195.
See Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Does Dickens Have a Philosophy of History? The Case of Barnaby Rudge’, DSA, 30 (2001), 59–74.
See Gary Kates, ‘From Liberalism to Radicalism: Tom Paine’s Rights of Man’, in Journal of the History of Ideas, 50 (1989), 569–87;
and Richard Whatmore, ‘“A Gigantic Manliness”: Paine’s Republicanism in the 1790s’, in Economy, Polity and Society, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 135–57.
See James Gillray, New Morality (London, 1798).
Arthur Young, Arthur Young’s Travels in France during the years 1787, 1788, 1789, ed. Miss Betham-Edwards (London: George Bell, 1906) p. 103. The relevant scene in TTC is II, vii, 114.
See John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), p. 449,
which repeats the story of Lewis Goldsmith being at dinner with Mercier from Alfred Owen Aldridge, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine (London: Cresset Press, 1960), p. 266. The suggestion of earlier connections via Holcroft comes from the mentions of Mercier in William Godwin’s Diaries in the early 1790s, with Holcroft marrying one of Mercier’s daughters. Paine was also in London at the time and certainly met Godwin.
The role of the private affections (or, more accurately, the absence of a role in moral judgement for them) is a central theme in Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (London, 1793) for which Godwin was roundly attacked, especially after 1797. His concessionary defence is in his Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1802).
Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London: Hutcheson, 1979), p. 118.
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© 2009 Mark Philp
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Philp, M. (2009). The New Philosophy: The Substance and the Shadow in A Tale of Two Cities. In: Jones, C., McDonagh, J., Mee, J. (eds) Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230273894_2
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