In this podcast, Professor Jon Mee is joined by three of his MA students to discuss Dickens’ historical novels, the historical events that feature in these novels, the influence of Dickens’ friend and historian Thomas Carlyle, and the role and representation of the mass crowd and the City.

It is interesting that he only wrote two historical novels. I think Barnaby Rudge, the early one, was very much to do with his desire to be seen as a serious professional author because historical novels were seen as having more gravity than popular romance or the kind of thing he spent his early career producing. I think that had something to do with it. What does link the two novels together though is the crowd action –revolutionary crowd action. Barnaby Rudge is focussed on a much less familiar example – that’s the Gordon Riots of 1780 in London when large parts of the city were lost to rioters. The French Revolution is a much more obvious example.

Professor Jon Mee