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Until recently, Dickens criticism has often operated with an idea of his writing privileging inter-personal relations, especially focused on the family, as a safe haven against the vicissitudes of historical change and the prison-house of society (Bowen and Patten 2006, 7). Such judgements may seem to have a particular purchase in relation to his historical novels, both of which narrate eruptions of mass political action; the Gordon Riots of 1780 in Barnaby Rudge (1841) and the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities (1859). In his classic study of the historical novel, Georg Lukàcs argued that these texts take on "the character of modern privateness in regard to history' (1969, 292). The plots The plots of both novels do focus on the survival of a family group despite the turbulence of events around them: in Barnaby Rudge, the family of the locksmith Gabriel Vardon provides a refuge for those who survive; A Tale of Two Cities, of course, famously ends with Sidney Carton's vision of an afterlife in "a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence' (Dickens 2000, 390).¹ Plenty of people who have never read A Tale of Two Cities know the famous lines from its denouement: "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known' (390). They aremostly read as self-sacrifice, as the initially craven Carton places "affective' family values above even his own fate.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137291547_11

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