Evoking Charles Dickens's St. Evrémonde and Gaspard in Edith Nesbit's "The Violet Car": "Drive Him Fast to His Tomb"

Nesbit's four-decade career produced more than forty novels for children, short stories, poems, plays, essays, Fabian political treatises, and even adaptations of Shakespeare for young readers. As a devotee of Charles Dickens work, she knew it virtually by heart and gleaned his themes and characters for inspiration and patterns in her own work. In "The Violet Car," rarely anthologized, she borrows "cast and canvas" as well as "social contexts." In addition to paying literary homage to Dickens, Nesbit creates larger reverberations in her ghost story of a father's brutal revenge, one that though successful overall destroys the noble avenger in the end. And like his Gallic counterpart across the way in France, real peace will only come to Mr. Eldridge when he is joined in death with his martyred child, a victim of the Second Industrial Revolution and its murderous symbol of affluence, the modern motor car. [147 words]