A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [10]
“Did you ask me for my name?”
“Assuredly I did.”
“One Hundred and Five, North Tower.”
“Is that all?”
“One Hundred and Five, North Tower.”
With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor a groan, he bent to work again, until the silence was again broken.
“You are not a shoemaker by trade?” said Mr. Lorry, looking steadfastly at him. . . .
He lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those measured changes on his hands the whole time. His eyes came slowly back, at last, to the face from which they had wandered; when they rested on it, he started, and resumed, in the manner of a sleeper that moment awake, reverting to a subject of last night.
“I asked leave to teach myself, and I got it with much difficulty after a long while, and I have made shoes ever since” (p. 45).
The Doctor’s making and mending of shoes (another detail borrowed from the Philadelphia prison) takes the place of rage and remembering. This therapeutic act, ceaselessly repeated, transforms the angry young inmate who pronounced a curse on the heads of the Darnay family into the gentle old man his daughter finds above the wine-shop in Saint Antoine, and ultimately into a hero of humane charity in the killing fields of the Revolution.
For Doctor Manette, the love of family is the cure for the cruel effects of state secrecy. In the politics of A Tale of Two Cities, however, it is also the best means of preventing the tyranny of state surveillance in the first place. Paradoxically, Dickens’s argument against the police state proceeds from a meditation on “secrecy” itself: not the manufacture of secrets by a paranoid government, but the secret at the core of human personality, the essential privacy of the individual that it is the duty of the modern, liberal state to protect. To make this key point, Dickens stands back from his narrative at the beginning of chapter 3, and speaks in his own voice:
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! . . . My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was al ways in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end (p. 16).
This is a metaphysics of secrecy, a philosophical affirmation of what we might call “the right to privacy.” It is consecrated by the private, wholly nontheatrical marriage of the hero and heroine in Soho, “in a neighbouring church, where no strange eyes looked on,” and it opens up the positive social vision in the novel.
Dickens’s urban social ideal—for a society made up of private families, unharassed by mob or state—glows most sentimentally in A Christmas Carol. The struggling Cratchits serve as Dickens’s essential social unit: a Victorian family gathered together around the hearth, a charmed circle of retreat that is sanctuary against the humiliation and injustice heaped on its individual members in the harsh world “out there.” In this overfamiliar story, Scrooge dominates the public world of “business” but has rejected family ties. He can only look in on the happy Cratchits from their threshold, first in wonder, then in a mortification of envy and regret.
In A Tale of Two Cities, the role of the Cratchits is played by the Manettes and their friends, the battered but unbroken community that reclaims its head from the dungeons of the French police state, and retreats to its quiet suburban idyll at the northern outskirts of London: “a cool spot, staid but cheerful, a wonderful place