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one another and the guard, they all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but the horses” (p. 12). In the mail coach sits one of our principal characters, Mr. Lorry of Tellson’s Bank (itself a repository of many secrets), on a clandestine mission whose purpose he will not divulge “anywhere or in any way,” except to trusty Jerry Cruncher in the form of a single, enigmatic phrase: “Even I, safe as an Englishman, and even Tellson’s, important as they are to French credit, avoid all naming of the matter. I carry about me, not a scrap of writing openly referring to it. This is a secret service altogether. My credentials, entries, and memoranda, are all comprehended in the one line, ‘Re called to Life’ ” (pp. 29-30). Mr. Lorry’s cautiousness is no fictional fancy. In the late-eighteenth century, interception of the mail by government agents was “nearly universal.” The London Public Record Office alone possesses more than two dozen volumes of intercepted dispatches for the years 1756 to 1763, while in France, surveillance was almost total: The notorious cabinet noir read all letters sent abroad through the French post (Neilson, Go Spy the Land, p. 101).

Even the background canvas of Dover is gloomy with secret business conducted in the dead of night: “A little fishing was done in the port, and a quantity of strolling about by night, and looking seaward. . . . Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever, sometimes unaccountably realised large fortunes, and it was remarkable that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter” (p. 23). Spies, smugglers, pirates. And Dickens himself gets in on the act. The opening scenes of his novel take the form of a secret, a mystery revealed with almost unbearable slowness, the story of Mr. Lorry’s client who has been unjustly imprisoned in the Bastille for eighteen years, and who is now to be reunited with his daughter.

Later, outside the Old Bailey, we witness a public manifestation of informer culture as extraordinary to Dickens’s contemporary readers as it is to us—the funeral procession of Roger Cly:

The crowd approached; they were bawling and hissing round a dingy hearse and dingy mourning coach, in which mourning coach there was only one mourner, dressed in the dingy trappings that were considered essential to the dignity of the position. The position appeared by no means to please him, however, with an increasing rabble surrounding the coach, deriding him, making grimaces at him, and incessantly groaning and calling out: “Yah! Spies! Tst! Yaha! Spies!” with many compliments too numerous and forcible to repeat. . . .

“What is it, brother? What’s it about?”

“I don’t know,” said the man. “Spies! Yaha! Tst! Spies!”

He asked another man. “Who is it?”

“I don’t know,” returned the man, clapping his hands to his mouth nevertheless, and vociferating in a surprising heat and with the greatest ardour, “Spies! Yaha! Tst, tst! Spi-ies!” (p. 155).

It is a typical Dickensian crowd, its passion directly proportional to its stupidity. Here they are duped entirely (Roger Cly lives!), but that such a crowd might be whipped up to mock a dead government agent signifies a state intelligence apparatus that is as ubiquitous and unpopular as it is incompetent. These are not the spies of John le Carré, let alone Ian Fleming, and A Tale of Two Cities is the more historically credible for that. Secret agents in the late-eighteenth century were mostly grasping mercenaries drawn from the criminal classes. “There were few Nathan Hales,” one historian records, and “for the most part it remained a venal business” (Go Spy the Land, p. 110).

But it is Paris, not London, that is most infested with spies. Dickens drew much historical detail for the Paris sections of the novel from Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s twelve-volume Le Tableau de Paris (1781-1788). In an essay entitled “Spies,” Mercier describes how, in the 1780s “the Parisian . . . was surrounded . . . by spies . . . it was the universal means of gathering secrets for the efficient use of the ministers.” Historians’ estimates