ABSTRACT
Dickens's two historical novels Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities have risen since the publication in 1962 of the English translation of Lukacs's The Historical Novel, with its criticism of their 'petty bourgeois humanism and idealism'. Barnaby and Grip are not only central grotesques but also central truth-tellers in the novel, the possessors of a fractured visionary authority that is vindicated and realised by the historical events they obscurely foretell. This pattern of relationships between Barnaby and the 'normal' characters of the novel - Willett and Chester, for example - introduces the theme of handy-dandy in the novel, in which Barnaby's role is again prominent. Thus the revolution is constantly connected with dreams, phantoms, and psychological anomalies. As in Barnaby Rudge, madness appears to govern the passions of the crowd: The mad joy over the prisoners who were saved, had astounded him scarcely less than the mad ferocity against those who were cut to pieces.
