There are very few things Charles Dickens needs to ask forgiveness for. Yes, there are the skeletons in his vast cupboard of life - the mistress, the unloved wife, the deceptions and self-deceptions, the egotism, the touch of pompousness and self-satisfaction - but then who am I, on all counts to cast the first stone?

I may contend that being Indian there is one count on which a pebble would be appropriate and tempting, and those are his two letters about the Indian mutiny. He wrote the first one very soon after the news of the slaughter of British women and children by the sepoy mercenaries of the East India Company and by the feudals of Cawnpore. He was probably not primed by the British newspapers to react to the mass hangings in revenge of Indians, innocent and complicit, by the Company Bahadur.