• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1471 0

becomes a problematic ideology when it is embodied by a she-demon like Madame Defarge. She represents how apparently modern, progressive social forces of “liberation” can be hijacked by primal energies of bloodlust and tribal revenge. To the early-twenty-first century reader, she is a chillingly familiar figure, a prototype for the warrior ideologues of our own history, from Pol Pot to Osama Bin Laden: Unappeasable and merciless, her response to legitimate grievance is an entirely illegitimate appetite for blood and destruction. Even when the devastating crimes wrought on her family by Charles Darnay’s uncle are revealed at the end of the novel, we cannot admire or pity her. Our knowledge of her suffering cannot erase the image of what she has allowed herself to become as a consequence, because we have, in the figure of Doctor Manette, an example of how the resentment of terrible wrongs may be conquered by strength of moral will.

The most deeply English character in the novel, its true Burkean patriot, is Miss Pross: “For gracious sake, don’t talk about Liberty; we have quite enough of that” (p.287). She does not speak French in Paris; instead she speaks English more emphatically. So it is given to Miss Pross as the personification of commonsense, conservative En glishness to vanquish the threat of French extremism embodied in Madame Defarge. Because of her heroic stand against the Terror Incarnate, Doctor Manette and his son-in-law are ultimately saved, and the family is reconstituted in the suburban bosom of Soho. This conventional comedic reunion, however, is not achieved without the sacrifice of one unofficial member of the Manette family.

Which brings us to Sydney Carton, the black sheep of the Soho circle. Carton is one of Dickens’s prize delinquents, an enigmatic, ironical, and darkly appealing character to whom he gives the novel’s final words, the most famous exit line in English fiction. For some, Carton’s instant redemption on the scaffold strains credibility. The substitution of one character for another under the guillotine was a stock plot twist in French Revolution melodramas; only Carton’s ringing words save the moment from bathos. But the logic of the substitution runs deeper. Carton is granted the novel’s defining moral act not because he is Darnay’s double, but because he is Dickens’s.

In his preface, Dickens reveals that he “first conceived the main idea of this story” while acting in Wilkie Collins’s 1857 melodrama, The Frozen Deep (which Dickens coauthored). The fact that Dickens played the role of Richard Wardour, who first swears enmity to his rival for the love of the heroine only to give up his life for him in the end, strongly suggests that Dickens’s identification with Carton is at the heart of the novel. The question of why this is so remains, however, and the answer lies as deeply buried in Dickens’s psyche as Doctor Manette in the dungeons of the Bastille.

As his lifelong passion for amateur theatricals shows, novel writing was never enough for Charles Dickens. He began his career as a journalist writing sketches of city life, and he never gave up his role as an intimate commentator on the daily London scene. In 1850 he launched his own weekly magazine, Household Words; the magazine’s name, drawn from Shakespeare’s Henry V (act 4, scene 3: “Then shall our names, / Familiar in his mouth as household words, / . . . Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red”) advertised Dickens’s ambition not merely for fame, but his need to belong quite literally to the household itself. Then, in 1858, he embarked on the last great installment of his public career, as a reader of his works before large audiences. Dickens’s public readings, begun only months before he started work on A Tale of Two Cities, were an entirely unprecedented cultural phenomenon, inaugurating our modern age of literary publicity. Dickens was sincerely surprised that the readings had the effect of increasing sales of his books; his real purpose is clear from his opening remarks to his audiences. He encouraged them that

if as he