past, such as the tale of the broken
swords in _Master Humphrey's Clock_, or the indefensibly delightful
nightmare of the lady in the stage-coach, which helps to soften the
amiable end of Pickwick. Neither, worst of all, did it prevent him from
dogmatising anywhere and everywhere about the past, of which he knew
nothing; it did not prevent him from telling the bells to tell Trotty
Veck that the Middle Ages were a failure, nor from solemnly declaring
that the best thing that the mediaeval monks ever did was to create the
mean and snobbish quietude of a modern cathedral city. No, it was not
historical reverence that held him back from dealing with the remote
past; but rather something much better--a living interest in the living
century in which he was born. He would have thought himself quite
intellectually capable of writing a novel about the Council of Trent or
the First Crusade. He would have thought himself quite equal to
analysing the psychology of Abelard or giving a bright, satiric sketch
of St. Augustine. It must frankly be confessed that it was not a sense
of his own unworthiness that held him back; I fear it was rather a sense
of St. Augustine's unworthiness. He could not see the point of any
history before the first slow swell of the French Revolution. He could
understand the revolutions of the eighteenth century; all the other
revolutions of history (so many and so splendid) were unmeaning to him.
But the revolutions of the eighteenth century he did understand; and to
them therefore he went back, as all historical novelists go back, in
search of the picturesque. And from this fact an important result
follows.

The result that follows is this: that his only two historical novels are
both tales of revolutions--of eighteenth-century revolutions. These two
eighteenth-century revolutions may seem to differ, and perhaps do
differ in everything except in being revolutions and of the eighteenth
century. The French Revolution, which is the theme of _A Tale of Two
Cities_, was a revolt in favour of all that is now called enlightenment
and liberation. The great Gordon Riot, which is the theme of _Barnaby
Rudge_, was a revolt in favour of something which would now be called
mere ignorant and obscurantist Protestantism. Nevertheless both belonged
more typically to the age out of which Dickens came--the great sceptical
and yet creative eighteenth century of Europe. Whether the mob rose on
the right side or the wrong they