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Reading lots of Dickens. Barnaby Rudge: the last Catholic pogrom - No Popery, the Gordon Riots in London - 1780, twenty years before Newman was born. He must have known people who had set fire to the houses, or taken in victims and refugees. Lord George Gordon who led the mob died as late as 1793. Old Curiosity Shop, Nicholas Nickleby - this too, is part of Newman's background, this gallery of living gargoyles, ghouls and monsters. Might account, perhaps, even for some of Newman's pessimism about the world and human nature, which some attribute merely to his own melancholy disposition? That nineteenth century!! (en) |
