A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [5]
In his novel of the Revolution, Dickens expresses pity, even outrage for the downtrodden individuals under the yoke of France’s ancien régime and abhors that regime itself; but once its oppressed citizens transform themselves into a mob, he is filled with the same disgust and horror he experienced at the hanging at Horsemonger Lane. Dickens never concedes the loftiness of French revolutionary ideals, because his vision is filled with Burkean images of the revolutionary militias, whose pitiless violence renounced not only human ideals but reason itself:
The mad joy over the prisoners who were saved, had astounded him scarcely less than the mad ferocity against those who were cut to pieces. One prisoner there was, he said, who had been discharged into the street free, but at whom a mistaken savage had thrust a pike as he passed out. Being besought to go to him and dress the wound, the Doctor had passed out at the same gate, and had found him in the arms of a company of Samaritans, who were seated on the bodies of their victims. With an inconsistency as monstrous as anything in this awful nightmare, they had helped the healer, and tended the wounded man with the gentlest solicitude—had made a litter for him and escorted him carefully from the spot—had then caught up their weapons and plunged anew into a butchery so dreadful, that the Doctor had covered his eyes with his hands, and swooned away in the midst of it (p. 269).
In many of Dickens’s novels, it is children who experience the keenest terror, trapped in an adult world of violent caprice and cynicism in which they have no power to defend themselves. Pip’s encounter with Magwitch on the marshes in Great Expectations is the most convincing description of childhood fear in literature, and David Copperfield’s persecution at the hands of the Murdstones has the power of archetype, a modern-day “Hansel and Gretel.” Dickens’s success in evoking the terror of the mob in A Tale of Two Cities (it is what most readers remember long after they have forgotten Lucie, Darnay, and the rest) lies in his transferring those real and imagined terrors of childhood, of which he is the fictional master, to the adult world and the stage of history. Returning to his native Paris, Doctor Manette stumbles into a scene of infantile nightmare: a world where bullies and gangs and revenges and tattletales are removed from the relative security of the playground to the public square turned death trap. The Manettes and their entourage, the grown-up “innocents” of the tale, fight for survival in this murderous topsy-turvy city, where the helplessness and dread of childhood seem once again the permanent conditions of existence; presiding over the carnage is the totemic Guillotine, like some monstrous, deadly toy come to life and let loose in the playroom: “Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine” (p. 367).
When Dickens expressed to A. H. Layard his fear of revolution in Britain in 1855, he only echoed many dozens of commentators over the preceding six decades, who wondered why mob violence could not simply cross the English Channel and turn the streets of London into a bloodbath of class retribution. The textbook historian’s answer points to the bloodless coup of 1688, the so-called Glorious Revolution, which saw the tyrant James II forced into exile, and William and Mary inaugurate a form of managerial rule in Britain, a constitutional, “mixed” monarchy where many absolute powers of the