A cinematic Reconstruction-era drama of violence and fraught moral
reckoning
In Dawson's Fall, a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson's
great-grandparents, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and
malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson's tale
weaves her family's journal entries and letters with a novelist's
narrative grace, and spans the life of her tragic hero, Frank Dawson, as
he attempts to navigate the country's new political, social, and moral
landscape.
Dawson, a man of fierce opinions, came to this country as a young
Englishman to fight for the Confederacy in a war he understood as a
conflict over states' rights. He later became the editor of the
Charleston News and Courier, finding a platform of real influence in
the editorial column and emerging as a voice of the New South. With his
wife and two children, he tried to lead a life that adhered to his
staunch principles: equal rights, rule of law, and nonviolence, unswayed
by the caprices of popular opinion. But he couldn't control the
political whims of his readers. As he wrangled diligently in his columns
with questions of citizenship, equality, justice, and slavery, his
newspaper rapidly lost readership, and he was plagued by financial
worries. Nor could Dawson control the whims of the heart: his Swiss
governess became embroiled in a tense affair with a drunkard doctor,
which threatened to stain his family's reputation. In the end, Dawson--a
man in many ways representative of the country at this time--was felled
by the very violence he vehemently opposed.
