Twitch: The Foundling’s Quest is a Dickensian novel made relevant to readers of the 21st century. In the mid-19th century, Malcolm, who is afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome and fostered at an impoverished Surrey farm, is returned to the London Foundling Hospital. Later, he is apprenticed to a wheelwright in Staffordshire but leaves to join his bewitching foster sister Lydia on a coffin ship carrying Irish famine emigrants over the Atlantic Ocean to the horrors of quarantine at Grosse Ile in colonial Canada.
Finally, in the burgeoning economy of Bytown, he becomes independently wealthy. However, his heart’s desire, the love he has for his foster sister, is frustrated when they reach Canada and she reveals to him that it can never be because she contracted syphilis while they were apart. Lydia becomes his antagonist until she is on her deathbed. Their reconciliation fulfills a childhood promise.
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The novel was inspired by Ralph’s lifelong love of Charles Dickens. His Ph.D. dissertation and article in Literature and Fiction on the representation of epidemics in Dickens’s work informed the setting and characterization in Twitch. Dickens’s support of the underdog is also part of this world, a personal goal for Ralph — in 2003, he was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee medal for helping the homeless. Twitch: The Foundling’s Quest will appeal to readers of Sarah Waters, Emma Donoghue, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Andrea Barrett. Ralph has two published novels, Concession Street Secrets (2019) and Bright Deep (2013), as well as short stories and poetry. In 2016, he graduated from the Stanford Certificate Program in Novel Writing.
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