| This study of Charles Dickens's two historical novels, A Tale of Two Cities and Barnaby Rudge, focuses on Dickens's treatment of the crowd, using Mikhail Bakhtin's work on carnival literature. Chapter one examines the first half of Barnaby Rudge, in which Dickens constructs a metaphor for public rebellion in the strained relationships of three father-son pairs. Elias Canetti's work, Crowds and Power, assists the analysis of Barnaby Rudge's private and domestic conflicts as a metaphor for the public and social conflict that erupts in the second half of the novel, while Bakhtin's work on carnival provides the theoretical means to discuss the narrative structure in terms of ambivalent laughter. Chapter two discusses Barnaby Rudge's treatment of the Gordon Riots in relation to the domestic metaphor of the novel's first half, the carnival crowd and Dickens's ambivalence toward it. Chapter three considers the revolutionary crowd in A Tale of Two Cities in terms of its carnival aspect, its relation to the crowd in Barnaby Rudge, its sources in Carlyle, and finally, it considers how Dickens overcomes his obviously ambivalent attitude towards the crowd in A Tale of Two Cities. |
