A Tale of Two Cities

In brief

A Tale of Two Cities is the Dickens novel with the famous first sentence, the famous last sentence and the least of Dickens in between. A doctor is dug out of the Bastille after eighteen years, his daughter marries a French aristocrat who has renounced his family, and a drunken English barrister who happens to look like the husband goes to the guillotine in his place. It is a thriller with one great idea, written at speed by a novelist who had deliberately put away his usual gifts.

It should be read for what it is, which is not a history of the French Revolution. It is a study of what happens when cruelty is left to compound, and of whether a life thrown away can be redeemed by the manner of its ending. The first of those subjects it handles better than it is usually given credit for. The second has made it one of the most quoted novels in English, and is more doubtful than the quoting suggests.

The argument

The novel’s real thesis is at the end, in the voice of a narrator who has stopped pretending to be neutral: “Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms” (Book 3, ch. 15). Dickens’s account of the Terror is an account of cause. The Marquis who runs down a child throws down a coin and complains “that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children” (Book 2, ch. 7). The father hangs for killing him (Book 2, ch. 15). The Evrémonde brothers rape a peasant girl and kill her brother, and a surviving sister grows up to be Madame Defarge. Nothing in the Paris of Book 3 is uncaused.

The “two cities” of the title matter here. The opening insists that “the period was so far like the present period”, and its catalogue of horrors gives England as many as France (Book 1, ch. 1). Darnay stands trial for his life at the Old Bailey with the crowd hoping to see him quartered (Book 2, ch. 2), and a London mob wrecks a spy’s funeral for fun (Book 2, ch. 14). Dickens is warning the English of 1859 that they are not a different species.

The trouble, as George Orwell saw, is that the warning and the spectacle pull apart. Orwell thought the book “tends to leave a false impression behind”: Dickens understood that the Revolution had to happen and then wrote its violence so vividly that for generations of readers it meant little but heads in baskets. “Thanks to Dickens, the very word ‘tumbril’ has a murderous sound; one forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of farm-cart.” The novel’s crowds are its most powerful writing, and they are written as weather or as beasts, without any politics. Having explained why the people rose, Dickens cannot imagine them doing anything with it.

The shape of the book

The novel has three books, forty-five chapters and thirty-one weekly parts. Book 1 is a short overture, ending with Manette brought out of a Paris garret. Book 2, the longest, runs twelve years through London courtrooms and Soho Sundays while Saint Antoine knits. Book 3 shuts every door: Darnay goes back to Paris to save an old servant, and the machine closes on him.

The plot is built like a mantrap, and its best mechanism is a letter. In the Bastille in 1767, Manette writes down the crimes of the Evrémondes and curses “them and their descendants, to the last of their race” (Book 3, ch. 10). He hides it in the wall and his mind gives way. When the fortress falls Defarge goes straight to the cell (Book 2, ch. 21). Years later, with Manette a hero of the Revolution and his son-in-law just freed on his word, the paper is read in court. The doctor is his own witness for the prosecution, and his younger self condemns the man his older self has forgiven. That is a better twist than the famous one.

The voice

Dickens knew what he was doing and said so. He wrote to John Forster that he had set himself “the little task of making a picturesque story, rising in every chapter, with characters true to nature, but whom the story should express more than they should express themselves by dialogue.” So the great talkers are absent, and the humour he later admitted the book lacked is confined to Jerry Cruncher and a few jokes at Tellson’s expense.

In their place is rhetoric, much of it learned from Carlyle: repetition, the present tense, and the historical address that turns events into judgements. The opening, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, is a joke at the expense of people who talk that way, and it ends by mocking those who insist on “the superlative degree of comparison only”. The rest of the book then proceeds in the superlative. It can tip into bombast, but at full stretch, in the wine cask spilled in the street (Book 1, ch. 5), the grindstone (Book 3, ch. 2) and the guillotine as a household joke, “the best cure for headache” (Book 3, ch. 4), no one has done it better.

Recalled to life

Dickens tried out the titles Buried Alive and The Thread of Gold before settling on the one he used, and the first of them shows what he thought the book was about. The message Mr Lorry sends back on the Dover road is “Recalled to life” (Book 1, ch. 2), and resurrection then turns up everywhere in serious and comic form. Manette is dug up. Darnay is snatched from death again and again. Jerry Cruncher, the bank’s messenger, is a “Resurrection-Man” who robs graves by night (Book 2, ch. 14), and his rusty fingers are the novel’s joke against its own solemnity.

All of this leads to Carton walking the Paris streets repeating “I am the resurrection and the life” (Book 3, ch. 9) and to the last chapter. Here the most commonly missed fact about the book matters. Carton never says the famous words. The narrator tells us that a woman who died on the same scaffold had asked “to be allowed to write down the thoughts that were inspiring her”, a detail taken from Carlyle’s account of Madame Roland, and continues: “If he had given any utterance to his, and they were prophetic, they would have been these”. The whole vision, including “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done”, is conditional. It is a speech given by nobody, the novelist’s tribute laid over a silent man.

Look too at what the vision contains. There is a sentence for France, “I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss”, and then a long passage about the Darnay family, their child “who bore my name”, and how fondly he will be remembered. A man who has hated himself for a lifetime dies imagining he is loved in a nice house in England. It is moving, and it is exactly the private reward the public horror has been warning us not to expect.

The people

Sydney Carton

Sydney Carton is the reason the book survives. He does a better lawyer’s thinking for him at night, drinks, and tells Darnay “I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me” (Book 2, ch. 4). Dickens describes him as “the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise” (Book 2, ch. 5), which is a more frightening sentence than anything about the guillotine. His proposal scene, “there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you” (Book 2, ch. 13), sets up the end far in advance.

Doctor Manette

Doctor Manette is the book’s finest invention and its most modern one. Asked his name in the garret, he answers “One Hundred and Five, North Tower” (Book 1, ch. 6), and under later stress he goes back to the bench and the shoes (Book 2, ch. 18). Dickens shows a damaged mind with real care, including the friends’ decision to destroy the bench (Book 2, ch. 19), which leaves them feeling like accomplices in a crime.

Madame Defarge

Madame Defarge knits names into a register that no one can escape, “one letter of his name or crimes” (Book 2, ch. 15) being enough. She is the only character with the novel’s full energy, and her hatred has a reason, which Dickens gives her in Book 3, ch. 12 before refusing her any mercy. “Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop,” she says, “but don’t tell me.”

Lucie and Charles Darnay

Lucie Manette is “the golden thread” (Book 2, ch. 4) and little else, and Darnay is an honourable blank who shares Dickens’s initials. They exist to be saved. Their dullness is a real weakness, but it also tells you something: Carton’s sacrifice needs its object to be ordinary.

Miss Pross, Lorry and Cruncher

The minor English characters give the book what warmth it has. Mr Lorry claims “I pass my whole life, miss, in turning an immense pecuniary Mangle” (Book 1, ch. 4) and then behaves with steady love throughout. Miss Pross, declaring “I don’t care an English Twopence for myself”, fights Madame Defarge hand to hand in Book 3, ch. 14; the pistol goes off and kills the Frenchwoman, and Miss Pross is deaf for the rest of her life. Dickens credits her victory to “the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate”, and it is the one moment in the novel when love beats history without anyone dying for it.

How it was made

Dickens’s preface says he first conceived the main idea while acting in Wilkie Collins’s play The Frozen Deep in 1857, playing a man who gives his life for his rival. It also defers to “Mr Carlyle’s wonderful book”, The French Revolution (1837). Another source was a play by Watts Phillips, The Dead Heart, whose similar setting and climax led to talk of plagiarism when it was staged during the serial.

The novel launched Dickens’s new weekly, All the Year Round, running from 30 April to 26 November 1859 and also issued in monthly parts with illustrations by Phiz. He had just left his wife and quarrelled with his old publishers. Ellen Ternan, who acted in a later staging of The Frozen Deep, is often seen behind Lucie, though little is known for certain. A man who had just broken up his family, and who gave his initials to the good husband, was writing about two men with one face.

Readers and critics

Contemporary opinion was split. Carlyle’s approval delighted Dickens, while James Fitzjames Stephen in the Saturday Review called the novel a “dish of puppy pie and stewed cat which is not disguised by the cooking”. Margaret Oliphant found little of Dickens in it, and many Dickensians have since agreed, because it lacks the abundance they read him for.

Serious discussion has centred on politics. Orwell’s essay, quoted above, is still the best place to start. Georg Lukács, in The Historical Novel, took the book as a case of history receding into a backdrop for private life after 1848. Albert Hutter read the plot as a conflict of fathers and sons, in which the family drama and the political one are the same drama. The claim that it has sold 200 million copies, repeated everywhere, was dismissed by Peter Thonemann in the TLS in 2016 as pure fiction, and nobody has a real figure.

Afterlives

The stage got there first. The Only Way (1899), with John Martin-Harvey as Carton, became the best-known stage version and fixed the book in the public mind as a vehicle for one noble part. Ronald Colman played it in the 1935 film, with Basil Rathbone as the Marquis, and Dirk Bogarde in 1958. A Broadway musical opened in 2008.

The two famous sentences have gone further than the novel. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) turns on them: Kirk reads the opening from a copy Spock has given him, and speaks the close after Spock’s death. Christopher Nolan named the novel as an inspiration for The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and the closing lines are read aloud at the end.

How to read it

Be patient with Book 1. It is mannered and over-written in places, and it sets up every thread that pays off later.
Read Book 3 quickly. It was written for weekly suspense and works best at speed. From Book 3, ch. 8 to the end should take one sitting.
Watch the small mechanics. The letter, the likeness, the knitting and Cruncher’s trade are all planted long before they are used.
Read the end slowly. Notice the conditional in the last paragraphs, and the seamstress who asks him, “Are you dying for him?” (Book 3, ch. 13).
Read Carlyle alongside. Even a few chapters show how much of the music came from him.