A Tale of Two Cities
In the eighteen-fifties,
Charles Dickens was concerned that social problems in England,
particularly those relating to the condition of the poor, might provoke a mass
reaction on the scale of the French Revolution. In a letter written in 1855,
for example, he refers to the unrest of the time as follows:
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 . into such a devil of a
conflagration as never has been beheld since. (qtd. in
I. Collins 42)
At the beginning of A
Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens once again expresses his concern. The
novel opens in 1775, with a ison of England
and pre-revolutionary France.
While drawing parallels between the two countries, Dickens also alludes to his
own time: 'the period was so far like the present period, that some of its
noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in
the superlative degree of ison only' (1; bk. 1, ch. 1). The rest of
the chapter shows that Dickens regarded the condition to be an 'evil' one,
since he depicts both countries as rife with poverty, injustice, and violence
due to the irresponsibility of the ruling elite (1-3; bk. 1, ch. 1). As the
novel unfolds, however, England
becomes a safe haven for those escaping the violence perpetrated by the French
Revolution. In this paper, I shall argue that A Tale of Two Cities
reflects the popular confidence in the stability of England in the eighteen-fifties,
despite Dickens's suggestions at the beginning. A Tale of Two Cities
thus becomes a novel about the England
and the English of Dickens's time. And yet, many people today would believe
that the novel is essentially about the French Revolution, which brings me to
my second point. If in the nineteenth century the novel served to affirm the
stability of Britain, in this century it has been greatly influential in the
formation of the popular image of the French Revolution, mainly thanks to film
and television adaptations. The purpose of this paper is to look at the popular
reception of the novel from the time of its first publication in 1859 to the
nineteen-nineties.
A Tale of Two Cities proved a disappointment even to
critics who had received Dickens's earlier works favourably. In The Life of
Charles Dickens (1872-4), John Forster argued that 'there was probably
never a book by a great humourist, and an artist so prolific in the conception
of character, with so little humour and so few rememberable ures' (qtd.
in P. Collins 422). However, Forster praised the novel when it was first
published, referring in particular to the 'subtlety with which a private
history is associated with a most vivid expression of the spirit of the days of
the great French Revolution' (qtd. in P. Collins 424). This comment
suggests that Dickens successfully integrated fiction and history, but it is
clear from what Forster says later that he prefers the fiction to the rendering
of history in the novel: 'But in his broadest colouring of revolutionary
scenes, while he gives life to large truths in the story of a nation, he is
working out closely and thoroughly the skilfully
designed tale of a household' (qtd. in P. Collins 424). Forster's
preference may be connected to the growing feeling of indifference towards the
French Revolution in the eighteen-fifties. Dickens was not the first to draw attention
to England's
social and political problems by using the French Revolution as a point of
reference. As David Lodge explains, several Victorian writers, particularly
Thomas Carlyle, had used this 'rhetorical strategy' to emphasise the
severity of the condition of England
(129). And yet, such a strategy would no longer impress itself on Dickens's
readers in the eighteen-fifties, because mass demonstrations and riots of the
previous decades, which were encouraged by reform movements like Chartism, and which
worried writers like Carlyle and Dickens, had by this time become a spent
force. In Victorian People and Ideas, Richard Altick points out that Chartism
virtually came to an end in 1848, and summarises the socio-political condition
of England
in the following years as follows:
As throne after throne
was . overturned on the Continent, England's remained secure . . Now, finally, even those most fearful of a
proletarian takeover began to concede that it probably would not happen here . .
The clinching proof came three years later[in 1851],
when throngs of workingmen and their families, among them many erstwhile
Chartists, poured into London to see the Crystal Palace. Despite predictions of rampant
crime and disorder, nothing untoward happened; 'the people' . proved
to be orderly, sober, and good-humoured-anything but revolution-minded. (94)
France and England in A Tale of Two Cities
What, then, could A Tale
of Two Cities signify for Dickens's readers, if the writer's fears of a
massive uprising similar to the French Revolution appeared groundless? The
answer may be found by a closer look at the contrasts, and not the
similarities, between France
and England
as they are depicted in the novel. Rather than drawing readers' attention to
the current problems of the country through a ison with the condition of
pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France,
these contrasts serve to reaffirm the stability of England.
To illustrate, when Lucie
Manette finds her father Dr. Manette in Paris after his eighteen-year imprisonment
in the Bastille, she tells him that they will 'go to England to be at
peace and at rest' (44; bk. 1, ch. 6). Charles Darnay, while explaining
his decision to renounce his title and privileges as a member of the
aristocratic Evrémonde family, refers to England as his 'Refuge'
(119; bk. 2, ch. 9). Jarvis Lorry complains about the difficulties of
communication brought about by the Revolution between the London and Paris
branches of Tellson's Bank: 'At another time, our parcels would come and
go, as easily as in business-like Old England; but now, everything is
stopped' (226; bk. 2, ch. 24). In contrast, France becomes more and more
dangerous as the novel unfolds. The acts of violence committed by the
revolutionary mob are among the most memorable scenes in the novel. To give but one example, when the Bastille is stormed, the mob kill
the governor 'with a rain of stabs and blows,' and Madame Defarge
decapitates him 'with her cruel knife' (209; bk. 2, ch. 21).
It may be argued that
Sydney Carton's silent prophecy about the future on his way to the guillotine
compensates for the negative image of revolutionary Paris and France in the
novel. 'I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this
abyss,' (357; bk. 3, ch. 15) thinks Carton to himself. And yet, his
prophecy seems to be inappropriate, as the novel has never given a sense that Paris is likely to become
a 'beautiful' city that ennobles or is ennobled by its people. Carton's
'solemn interest . in the streets along which the sixties rolled to a death
which had become so common and material, that no sorrowful story of a haunting
Spirit ever arose among the people out of all the working of the
Guillotine . ' (298; bk. 3, ch. 9) is one of the best examples of the
feeling of revulsion that is associated with Paris and its people throughout
the novel. Nor has the novel shown any characters who may become the 'brilliant
people' of France
who will make their country rise from 'this abyss' in the future. Dr.
Manette comes closest; he has suffered the evils of both the ancien régime (a
term referring to the rule and the way of life in France
before the Revolution) and revolutionary France,
but his future is clearly with his daughter and son-in-law in England. None
of them is likely to return after their escape, not only because it will be
politically unwise, but also because a happy and safe future awaits them in
England, as Carton prophecies: 'I see the lives for which I lay down my
life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see
no more' (357; bk. 3, ch. 15).
The future awaiting the
'villains of the piece,' on the other hand, is death in France. In the
penultimate chapter of the novel, Madame Defarge, who has been driven by a
desire to see each and every descendant of the Evrémonde family executed, dies
by accidentally shooting herself in a struggle with Miss Pross, Lucie's
faithful maid. Although the deaths of the other 'villains' are not
narrated directly in the novel, Carton foresees their fate on the guillotine:
'I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, the Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge,
long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old,
perishing by this retributive instrument [the guillotine], before it shall
cease out of its present use' ( 357; bk. 3, ch.
15). It is interesting to note that Carton's list contains not only those
French characters associated with the Revolution, but also two English
characters, Barsad and Cly. Their careers as spies have finally brought them to
Paris, where
they work for the revolutionary French government. The pattern is one of poetic
justice: the characters who have been depicted
sympathetically will end up in England,
whereas the villains, both French and English, will finally pay for their
crimes on the guillotine in France.
The only character to
contradict this pattern is Sydney Carton, who is executed on the guillotine in Paris. However, his death
is not rendered as part of the workings of poetic justice, as in the case of
the villains, but rather as a divine reward. From the moment that he decides to
sacrifice himself by dying on the guillotine instead of Darnay, he repeats the
lines from the Scriptures, beginning with 'I am the Resurrection and the
life.' This theme of resurrection reappears with Carton's prophecy, where
he envisions a son to be born to Lucie and Darnay, a son who will bear Carton's
name (357-8; bk. 3, ch. 15). Thus he will symbolically be reborn through Lucie
and Darnay's child. This vision serves another essential purpose, however. In
the early parts of the novel, Lucie and Darnay have a son, who dies when yet a
child (201; bk. 2, ch. 21). Why the vision of another child, and a son, apart
from the continuation of the theme of resurrection? If the DarnayCarton family
is to survive into the future, they need a son to bear their name. But much
more importantly, this second son will be born free of the aristocratic stigma
that has almost destroyed his father Darnay's life. In this way, the
descendants of Lucie and Darnay will live as English citizens free of any
association with France
and its violent past. When viewed from this perspective, A Tale of Two
Cities becomes a novel not about the French Revolution, but about the
reaffirmation of England
as a safe haven and English citizenship as something to be proud of. As Miss
Pross says, 'the short and the long of it is,
that I am a subject of His Most Gracious Majesty King George the Third . and as
such, my maxim is, Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks, On
him our hopes we fix, God save the King!' (276; bk. 3, ch. 7)
That the English should be
proud of their country and nationality, which finds its most straightforward
expression in Miss Pross's words, is a message which many of Dickens's contemporaries
would readily endorse. The merit of such a message becomes unquestionable when
considered in relation to a historical event-i.e. the French Revolution-which
is depicted as pure and simple carnage. As John Gross
points out, the novel 'doesn't record a single incident in which it [the
French Revolution] might be shown as beneficent, constructive, even as
tragic' (191).
It is this image of the
French Revolution that has influenced subsequent generations of English
readers, particularly in our century. Most of book 3, which comprises the
climactic episodes of Darnay's condemnation to death and Carton's execution,
takes place during the Terror of 1793-94, the period which witnessed the most
violent events of the Revolution. According to the historian Eric Hobsbawm,
British people have generally tended to associate the French Revolution with
the atrocities committed during the Terror only:
In Britain . . this was
the image of the Revolution that came closest to entering public consciousness,
thanks to Carlyle and Dickens's (Carlyle-inspired) A Tale of Two Cities,
followed by pop-literary epigones like Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel:
the knock of the guillotine's blades, the sansculotte women knitting
impassively as they watched the counterrevolutionary heads fall. Simon Schama's
Citizens, the 1989 bestseller written for the English-language market by an
expatriate British historian, suggests that this popular image is still very
much alive. (5)
Dickens,The French Revolution, and the legacy of A Tale of
Two Cities
It is a commonplace of
Dickensian criticism that the writer was influenced by Carlyle's The French
Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities. Taking Dickens's comment that he
read Carlyle's history 'five hundred times' (I. Collins 46) as a starting
point, many critics have discussed Carlyle's influence on several aspects of
the novel, such as the narrative technique (Friedman 481-5), the imagery
associated with the Revolution (I. Collins 52; Baumgarten 166; Lodge 131-2),
and the narration of the historical episodes (Lodge 134; Friedman 489). And
yet, Dickens's outlook on revolutionary violence differed significantly from
that of Carlyle. As Irene Collins points out, Dickens 'dislikes the
violence of the revolutionaries, both in its popular form (the mob) and in its
institutionalised form (the Terror). Unlike Carlyle, he can
no longer see justice in the violence' (53). Moreover, it is
Dickens's novel, rather than Carlyle's history, which is responsible for the
popular image of the French Revolution in England in our century, not least
due to the popularity of A Tale of Two Cities on film and television.
The most famous adaptation of the novel is the 1935 MGM production, directed by
Jack Conway. The film capitalised particularly on scenes depicting the
revolutionary mob: the film critic Derek Winnert describes it as 'a wildly
extravagant production' with '17000 extras in the Paris street scenes' (1009). The
novel was again filmed in 1958 by the British director Ralph Thomas. This
production again used a 'lavish staging' (Winnert 1009). The novel
has proved to be a popular source for television adaptations as well: it was
adapted in 1980 and 1989, the first being an ATV production directed by Jim
Goddard and the latter an Anglo-French production directed by Philippe Monnier.
A Tale of Two Cities promoted the image of a stable England by using revolutionary France as a setting to highlight the contrasts
between the two countries, although Dickens seemed to believe in the
eighteen-fifties that England
was heading towards an uprising on the scale of the French Revolution. In the
twentieth century, we see the French Revolution used as a 'lavish' setting in
film and TV productions of A Tale of Two Cities. In the preface to the
novel, Dickens says 'It has been one of my hopes to add something to the
popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time' (xin).
It seems that, through the popular media, our century has fulfilled Dickens's
intention, perhaps even more so than the previous century. What remains to
readers and film/TV audiences is to decide whether this 'popular and
picturesque means of understanding that terrible time' through A Tale of Two
Cities does justice to that momentous historical phenomenon called the
French Revolution.
