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proceeded they should feel disposed to give expression to any little emotion awakened by the story, he begged they would do so in the most natural way possible, and without the least apprehension of disturbing him.—(laughter). Nothing could be more agreeable to him than to receive any assurance that they were interested, and nothing could be more in accordance with his wishes than that they should make themselves as like as possible to a small group of friends assembled to hear a tale told, and that they should at once forget everything ceremonious or formal in the manner of their coming together.—(applause) (Dexter, “For One Night Only: An Account of the Famous Readings”).

Dickens loved the theater, but he desires a nontheatrical atmosphere for his readings. He renounces spectacle in favor of intimacy: “a small group of friends assembled to hear a tale told.” He insists on informality, and welcomes “emotion.” In short, Dickens wants to be family, just as Sydney Carton wants desperately to belong to the Manette household. Carton articulates this desire in a long, maudlin speech to Darnay in which he perhaps makes more sense as Dickens than he does as Sydney Carton: “If you could endure to have such a worthless fellow, and a fellow of such indifferent reputation, coming and going at odd times, I should ask that I might be permitted to come and go as a privileged person here” (p. 205). Reading Dickens’s own deep-driving need for love from his public into the novel, we understand the necessity of Sydney Carton’s going to the scaffold for Charles Darnay. After all, what wouldn’t Dickens do for his beloved readers?

Charles Dickens’s novels represented him, the popular author of his age, as the perfect mediator between the public world and the private sanctum of the family. His character-filled social panoramas granted him admission as a “privileged person” to the domestic arena idealized by the Victorians, as a benevolent emissary (never a spy) from the outside world, an educator and entertainer who takes his place at the fireside, informally and without ceremony. By this means, Dickens’s novels participated in that great reconciliation of the classes he looked to in his speech to the Administrative Reform Association. His social vision embraced multitudes; but instead of producing that vision theatrically, with theatricality’s ever-present potential for riots and rolling heads, he transmitted it in prose read by all levels of English society in unprecedented numbers. Dickens gave birth to that “privileged” medium of Victorian culture, the social novel: It promoted reflection and political reform, while recognizing, in the private act of reading, a solemn proof that “every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” Out of this recognition comes Dickens’s implicit argument for the natural limits of state power in A Tale of Two Cities, limits so grotesquely exceeded by the French nation both before their revolution, and during it.

Gillen D’Arcy Wood was born in Australia, where he received a master’s degree in English and a diploma of music from Melbourne University, before moving to New York in 1992. He took his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2000, and is now Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a Ful bright scholar and the recipient of multiple Mellon Fellowships and other awards. He is the author of a book on the intersections of Romantic literature and art, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860 (Palgrave, 2001), and numerous articles and reviews on nineteenth-century British and French literature.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

When I was acting, with my children and friends, in Mr. Wilkie Collins’s drama of The Frozen Deep, I first conceived the main idea of this story. A strong desire was upon me then, to embody it in my own person; and I traced out in my fancy, the state of mind of which it would necessitate the presentation to an observant spectator, with particular care and interest.

As