A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [3]
1850 Realism becomes a conscious agenda among artists working in media such as painting, literature, and theater. Dickens es tablishes his weekly magazine Household Words , which is suc
ceeded by the end of the decade by his publication All the Year Round .
1851 Dickens’s father dies. The author meets landscape painter Wilkie Collins, who has a gift for mystery writing and whom Dickens admires greatly. Dickens’s theater troupe performs be fore Queen Victoria.
1857 Dickens’s marriage becomes increasingly strained. The Frozen Deep , a melodrama written jointly by Dickens and Collins, stars Dickens and the enchanting actress Ellen Ternan, with whom he falls in love. Ternan, twenty-seven years Dickens’s junior, haunts the author’s fiction from this time on. Dickens tours Switzerland and Italy with Collins and Egg.
1858 Dickens embarks on an exhausting series of public readings, which earn money but take a toll on his physical health. He and Catherine separate.
1859 A Tale of Two Cities is published.
1860 Dickens settles in rural Gadshill, his residence for the rest of his life.
1861 Great Expectations is published in three volumes. Dickens begins a second series of public readings that lasts two years.
1863 Dickens’s mother dies, followed by his son Walter’s death in India. After quarreling with Thackeray, Dickens reconciles with him just before Thackeray’s death. The world’s first sub way, the Metropolitan Railway, opens in London.
1865 A shaken Dickens survives a disastrous train accident after he returns from France with Ellen Ternan, who is rumored to be his mistress.
1867 Dickens journeys again to America, where he reads publicly in Boston, New York, and Washington.
1868 After returning to England, Dickens continues to give public readings despite his declining health.
1870 Dickens begins his last series of readings in London. He pub lishes six parts of The Mystery of Edwin Drood , but the novel’s com position is halted by his sudden death in June. Charles Dickens is buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.
INTRODUCTION
In 1855, at a time of brewing public resentment over the slowness of political reform and a disastrous military failure in Crimea, Charles Dickens wrote to the liberal parliamentarian A. H. Layard of the imminent danger of social revolution in England:
I believe the discontent to be so much the worse for smouldering instead of blazing openly, that it is extremely like the general mind of France before the breaking out of the first Revolution, and is in danger of being turned by any one of a thousand accidents—a bad harvest—the last strain too much of aristocratic insolence or incapacity—a defeat abroad—a mere chance at home—into such a Devil of a conflagration as never has been beheld since (Letters, vol. 7, p. 587; see “For Further Reading”).
A Tale of Two Cities, which Dickens sat down to write a few years later, is only in part a “historical” novel. On Dickens’s mind was not so much the state of France in 1789, as the current state of England, and his fear of public riots and mob violence in the streets of London. Karl Marx, in an article for the New York Daily Tribune, wrote that Dickens had “issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together” (August 1, 1854); but, unlike Marxism, Dickens’s politics were essentially a matter of inexhaustible personal sympathy, not an abstract program of social change. To the extent he conceptualized in groups at all, the dominant author of the Victorian age saw himself as a leader of a new, aspirant middle class in British society, one that concentrated its reformist energies on Parliament, and whose values of family, charity, and fair-dealing far transcended the brutish will of any mob. Dickens’s lack of sympathy for the Parisian sansculottes in A Tale of Two Cities is thus directly correlated to his apprehensiveness over revolutionary rumblings at home. Dickens had a grand social vision for his own city of