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Dickens invented Victorian London as a theater of the imagination, and in his sixteen novels he ushered literally thousands of characters onto that stage. The colorful Dickensian army of Pickwicks, Micaw bers, and Little Nells—not types, but singular, unrepeatable citizens of the metropolis—formed a line of imaginative defense against what Dickens perceived as the darker potential of urbanized humanity: their transformation into an undifferentiated mass, a mob. In 1849 he attended a public execution for the purpose of observing the behavior of the crowd, and came away horrified by what he had seen:

I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning could be imagined by no man . . . thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind, flocked to the ground, with every variety of foul and offensive behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general excitement. When the sun rose brightly—as it did—it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the Devil (The Times, November 14, 1849).

Dickens writes here in his role as concerned citizen and liberal reformer, but the letter reads like a draft for one of the famous crowd scenes in A Tale of Two Cities.There is one apparent discrepancy:The scene is London, not Paris—Horsemonger Lane, not the Place de la Révolution. But for Dickens, the “brutal mirth” and “callousness” of the mob, as a destructive social menace, transcends national boundaries: It is the same tale in both cities. The first depiction of a mob we see in the novel is in fact an English one, an “ogreish” swarm of “blue-flies” at Charles Darnay’s trial at the Old Bailey. At his unexpected acquittal, “the crowd came pouring out with a vehemence that nearly took him off his legs, and a loud buzz swept into the street as if the baffled blue-flies were dispersing in search of other carrion” (pp. 80-81).

In the preface to his gripping novel of mob violence, Dickens acknowledges his debt to Thomas Carlyle’s dramatic history, The French Revolution (1837). Carlyle was the first writer to convincingly evoke the world-historical energies of the event itself, which transformed not only France, but dragged all Europe into a maelstrom of war and political upheaval from which eventually emerged the modern nation-states of the continent we recognize today. Carlyle’s swirling tumultuous prose, full of breathless outrages and bloody imagery, is a true revolutionary register, and Dickens knew well he could not improve upon it. But if the thrilling set pieces of A Tale of Two Cities—the storming of the Bastille, the September massacres—recall Carlyle, Dickens’s damning judgment of the mob more closely echoes conservative politician and theorist Edmund Burke. In 1790, in the midst of the first great shock of events in France, Burke described the abduction of the King and Queen in terms that sent a permanent shiver through the British body politic:

History will record that on the morning of the 6th of October, 1789, the king and queen of France, after a day of confusion, alarm, dismay, and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged security of public faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite and troubled, melancholy repose. . . . A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen and pierced with a hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and, through ways unknown to the murderers, had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband not secure of his own life