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for the numbers of government agents in Paris alone range up to three thousand. And as Barsad’s unsuccessful infiltration of Saint-Antoine shows, Parisians were equally on their guard against foreign spies. The atmosphere in the Defarges’ wine-shop when Barsad drops in reads like the script for a thousand twentieth-century films noir: “A figure entering at the door threw a shadow on Madame Defarge which she felt to be a new one. She laid down her knitting, and began to pin her rose in her head-dress, before she looked at the figure. It was curious. The moment Madame Defarge took up the rose, the customers ceased talking, and began gradually to drop out of the wine-shop” (p. 179).

By the time Charles Darnay travels into revolutionary France, the atmosphere of deadly intrigue at the Saint-Antoine wine-shop has expanded to comprehend the entire country and its governance. The Revolutionary Convention has enacted its infamous Law of Suspects (September 1793), by which anyone might be accused by anyone, and now wields “universal watchfulness” as its supreme weapon of terror and control:

The universal watchfulness so encompassed him, that if he had been taken in a net, or were being forwarded to his destination in a cage, he could not have felt his freedom more completely gone.

This universal watchfulness not only stopped him on the highway twenty times in a stage, but retarded his progress twenty times in a day, by riding after him and taking him back, riding before him and stopping him by anticipation, riding with him and keeping him in charge (p. 245).

Darnay is in France to repudiate a lettre de cachet—a form of anonymous indictment admissible in French courts—brought against the manager of his former estate. But the sublime prosecutorial power of “universal watchfulness” means that he will do no better than join his man in the Bastille. There, of course, he will find more spies, the so-called “sheep of the prisons,” whose existence points to the paranoid extremes of government surveillance during the Terror. Even those already condemned to death aren’t safe from its harassing gaze.

The principal victim of state secrecy in the novel is not, of course, Darnay or Gabelle, but Doctor Manette. The French term for solitary confinement, en secret (the title of the opening chapter of the third book), defines not merely the physical nature of Manette’s incarceration but its systemic meaning. When Dickens traveled abroad in 1842, he found to his horror that this sinister tradition of the ancien régime was being continued where he least expected to find it: in the cradle of American democracy, Philadelphia. Dickens was no bleeding heart when it came to the routine brutalization of inmates in nineteenth-century prisons; but the practice of solitary confinement tapped the deep wellsprings of his imaginative sympathy. His visit to the Philadelphia state prison is the most passionately rendered episode in his American Notes:

Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired. He never hears of wife or children; home or friends; the life or death of any single creature. He sees the prison officers, but with that exception he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair (p. 69).

Here is the seed, almost two decades in germination, for Doctor Manette and A Tale of Two Cities (and its preliminary title, Buried Alive). While some of the scenes and characters of the novel creak with age, and read to us as stock melodrama, Dickens’s rendering of the effects of psychological torture on Doctor Manette is a terrific achievement, his use of the eighteenth-century associationist language of philosophers John Locke and David Hartley