A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [216]
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives.The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
MARK TWAIN
I have always been a great admirer of Dickens, and his ‘Tale of Two Cities’ I read at least every two years.
—from Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field (1922)
CHARLES DICKENS
I set myself the little task of making a picturesque story, rising in every chapter, with characters true to nature, but whom the story should express more than they should express themselves by dialogue. I mean in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written (in place of the odious stuff that is written under that pretence), pounding the characters in its own mortar, and beating their interest out of them. If you could have read the story all at once, I hope you wouldn’t have stopped halfway.
—from a letter to John Forster (August 29, 1859)
SIR JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN
It would not, indeed, be matter of much difficulty to frame from such a book as the Tale of Two Cities regular recipes for grotesque and pathetic writing, by which any required quantity of the article might be produced with infallible certainty. The production of pathos is the simpler operation of the two. With a little practice and a good deal of determination, it would really be easy to harrow up people’s feelings as to poke the fire. The whole art is to take a melancholy subject, and rub the reader’s nose in it, and this does not require any particular amount either of skill or knowledge. Every one knows, for example, that death is a solemn and affecting thing. If, therefore, it is wished to make a pathetic impression on the reader, the proper course is to introduce a death-bed scene, and to rivet attention to it by specifying all its details. Almost any subject will do, because the pathetic power of the scene lies in the fact of the death; and the artifice employed consists simply in enabling the notion of death to be reiterated at short intervals by introducing a variety of irrelevant trifles which suspend attention for the moment, and allow it after an interval to revert to death with the additional impulse derived from the momentary contrast. The process of doing this to almost any conceivable extent is so simple that it becomes, with practice, almost mechanical. To describe light and shade of the room in which the body lies, the state of the bedclothes, the conversation of the servants, the sound of the undertaker’s footsteps, the noise of driving the coffin-screws, and any number of other minutiae, is in effect a device for working on the feelings by repeating at intervals, Death—death—death—death—death, just as feeling of another class might be worked upon by continually calling a man a liar or a thief. It is an old remark, that if dirt enough is thrown some of it will stick; and Mr. Dickens’s career shows that the same is true of pathos. . . .
The moral tone of the Tale of Two Cities is not more wholesome than that of its predecessors, nor does it display any nearer approach to a solid