A Tale of Two Cities (36 page)

AFTERWORD

The defining event of nineteenth-century English history happened not in England, but in France; and not in the nineteenth but the eighteenth century. The shadow of the French guillotine fell starkly over the Victorian English. Just under fifty years elapsed between the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837. But in that very year, Thomas Carlyle published his book
The French Revolution
. This extraordinary book is certainly not what modern practitioners would see as straightforward history. Written in a hectic and wholly idiosyncratic style, it introduces its English readers to such phrases as were to enter their language when considering France and her revolutionary turmoils: “a whiff of grapeshot,” “seagreen incorruptible,” and so forth. Carlyle, who was a lapsed Calvinist, really saw the Revolution as an object lesson in Retribution. “Dance on, ye foolish ones,” he apostrophized the French aristocracy in an early chapter of his book. “Ye sought not wisdom; neither have ye found it. Ye and your fathers have sown the wind, ye shall reap the whirl-wind. Was it not, from of old, written:
The wages of sin is death
?”

Thomas Carlyle was among the circle of Dickens’s close friends, and he was a passionate admirer of the novelist. We see him, for example, in the line drawing made of Dickens reading aloud his Christmas story “The Chimes” in John Forster’s rooms in Lincolns Inn Fields, together with William Dyce, the great medievalist painter, Byron’s old school friend the Reverend William Harness and others. When, in 1859, Dickens started plans for a novel with a French Revolutionary theme, he inevitably turned to Carlyle. The old historian—by then sixty-five years old to Dickens’s forty-seven—replied by loading a cart with books on the Revolution and getting it sent round to the novelist from the London Library.

Dickens chose to base his novel on a play by the now forgotten dramatist Watts Phillips, and it is for this reason, perhaps, that the book is so well-structured. Apart from
Great Expectations
, there is no Dickens novel that is more concisely modeled around a single story. Although most of the novels do follow plots—Dorrit should never have been in the debtors’ jail and it is all obscurely the fault of Arthur Clenham’s parents; the Mutual Friend is not dead but in London under an assumed name, etc.—they do not draw their lives from the plots.
David Copperfield
is pure and simple a bildungsroman, which does not need the structure of a mystery or a plot to sustain its glorious transcriptions of experience.
Great Expectations
does, however, depend upon the very simple fact that Pip, who believes his money comes from old Miss Havisham, and that he has thereby mysteriously achieved gentility, really owes his wealth to an act of kindness he performed for an escaping convict.

A Tale of Two Cities
follows a comparably exact and simple pattern. In a French aristocratic family that has oppressed and maltreated the poor, there occurs a crisis. The marquis, who has exercised his droit de seigneur over a young girl, desperately needs the help of a skilled doctor. She has been raped, her brother stabbed, her husband, as a punishment for his protest, whipped and abused to the point of death. The doctor attends his patients, but he knows too much, and the penalty he pays is to spend eighteen years as “One Hundred and Five, North Tower”—a prisoner in the Bastille.

But the whirligig of time brings in its revenges. Dr. Manette, when he is finally released from prison, is brought to England, where his posthumously born daughter is being looked after by Mr. Jarvis Lorry, of Tellson’s Bank in the Strand. His daughter, whom he has never before seen, has been raised by one of those abrasive, grotesque beings whom Dickens loved so well:

Mr Lorry knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew her by this time to be, beneath the surface of her eccentricity, one of those unselfish creatures—found only among women—who will, for pure love and admiration, bind themselves willing slaves to youth when they have lost it, to beauty that they never had, to accomplishments they were never fortunate enough to gain, to bright hopes that never shone upon their own sombre lives.

In Miss Pross, Dickens has defined the Good and Faithful servant. Miss Pross will never need to be a revolutionary; she is no Figaro, claiming superiority to her employer and charge. She retains her dignity by being a “character,” by being sharp-tongued, but she accepts the hierarchy of things. In France, by contrast, the servants are treated like beasts, made to eat grass, driven like cattle, and the consequences will be dire. The person who will suffer from the dichotomy is none other than Charles Darnay, who falls in love with Lucie Manette. In London, he is a humble tutor of French, but what Lucie does not realize is that he is in fact the Marquis d’Evrémonde, and he will eventually be condemned to die on the guillotine. Only the intervention of the cynical Sydney Carton, doing a far, far better thing than he has ever done, saves his life. But in the decades before the revolution, and in the earlier chapters of the book, the contrasts between the Two Cities are very evenly balanced. At first, it would seem that there was not much to choose between the Two Cities when it comes to nasty prisons, and deeds of state murder. It is in London, not in Paris, that the first riots are seen in the novel, with the mob chasing a police spy after a trial at the Old Bailey. “Death is Nature’s remedy for all things, and why not Legislations? Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad oath was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death; the purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death.” The violence of eighteenth-century London, its mob life, its seething prisons, its crowds hungry for the entertainment of seeing their fellow citizens hanged is the same world that Dickens depicted in
Barnaby Rudge
.

Nor will Dickens allow the traditional Tory arguments, best expressed by Edmund Burke, that the Revolution in France was to be seen as a simple outbreak of barbarism; the overthrow of throne and altar a desecration that makes all decent people shudder, and for which no reason or justification could ever be found. Dickens gives the Burkean view of the Revolution to the wholly unsympathetic, arrogant, rich, drunken lawyer Stryver, and then observes:

It was too much the way of British orthodoxy, to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the one only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown—as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it, as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw.

So no quarter for Edmund Burke from the author of
A Tale of Two Cities
.

Nevertheless, when the Revolutionary Terror is under way, and the innocent (though aristocratic) Charles Darnay has been arrested a second time by the mob, in spite of the entreaties of poor Dr. Manette, the Bastille prisoner, there is no doubt that our sympathies have switched. Lucie Manette’s grotesque, semiliterate English nurse, Miss Pross, walled up in lodgings to escape the Paris mob, speaks for us all.

“Well, my sweet,” said Miss Pross, nodding her head emphatically, “the short and the long of it is, that I am a subject of His Most Gracious Majesty King George the Third”; Miss Pross curtseyed at the name; “and as such, my maxim is, Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks, On him our hopes we fix, God save the King!”

A Tale of Two Cities
is an underestimated novel in the Dickens canon. It is really one of his best. What a very good character, for example, is Jerry Cruncher, the sinister night watchman and messenger at Tellson’s bank who moonlights (literally) as a grave robber. Sometimes even ardent Dickensians must feel that the novelist is going through the motions and creating comic stereotypes. Sometimes, however, from the moment he presents one of his characters to us, we sense Dickens firing on all cylinders. And such is the case with Cruncher.

“His surname was Cruncher, and on the youthful occasion of his renouncing by proxy the works of darkness, in the easterly parish church of Houndsditch, he had received the added appellation of Jerry.” All the superb Cruncher scenes—the domestic ones, where he growls at his religious wife, “You’re at it agin, are you . . . What do you mean by flopping yourself down and praying agin me;” his sinister life as a grave robber, a “Resurrection man;” and the fiction fed to his young son that these nocturnal expeditions are for fishing—could only have been written by Dickens.

More central, of course, to the whole story, and indicative of the whole Carlyle-Dickensian view of Revolution, are the characters of the Defarges. Monsieur runs the wine shop in the Saint Antoine district of Paris, which is to be the scene of some of the most terrible spectacles of violence. His wife, calmly knitting in the shop when first encountered, is calmly knitting as mayhem breaks out and blood runs on the cobblestones.

Carlyle appreciated that the Terror was instituted by the formerly peace-loving Robespierre as a panicky response to the English declaration of war. Just as in some of the later revolutions of history, it was under the cover of war that the true bloodbaths began. For Dickens, however, the story is reduced to personalities and to personal terms. The novel could very easily be an opera, really. Its closing scenes are not really political. Cynical, drunken Sydney Carton, because of his close resemblance to Charles Darnay, is able to take his place on the guillotine. But by then, all the finer shades of dispute with Stryver about the cause and effect of revolution have been forgotten. The revolutionary mob is simply a hateful thing, a backdrop for individual deeds of heroism, but no longer to be justified or even explained.

Thus, although the story of how Dr. Manette became incarcerated in the Bastille for so long, and the violent revenge exacted for that wrong by the Defarges, nicely reflects in miniature the whole story of the Revolution itself, the book cannot really be seen as a serious reflection on the French Revolution as such. Rather, it is a frightened Victorian’s idea of what happens when mob violence gets out of control. Liberals such as W. E. Gladstone were perpetually aware of the fact that the injustices in Victorian society could easily erupt into political violence; and Gladstone on more than one occasion admitted that were this to happen, the only way of suppressing it was by measures even more terrible than those of the mob. Blood must be shed to preserve order. The privileged classes, Gladstone once wrote, “have got to govern millions of hard hands; that it must be done by force, fraud or goodwill. . . .”

The idea for
A Tale of Two Cities
came to Dickens in 1857, a year that will always be indelibly associated in Victorian history with a potentially revolutionary moment—not in England, but in India. In October 1857, after he had heard of the massacre of English women and children at Cawnpore, Dickens wrote to his friend the philanthropist Angela Coutts that were he commander in chief of the Indian army he would “exterminate the race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested.”

Certainly there were few enough complaints when the Indian Mutiny (as it was called by the English) was suppressed with the utmost severity. The reprisals were terrible. William Howard Russell, the first modern war reporter, who had covered the Crimea and would write up the American Civil War, described Muslims being stripped and branded all over their bodies, or sown into pigskins. On another occasion he saw Sikhs and Englishmen calmly looking on while a bayonetted prisoner was slowly roasted over a fire.

Dickens, in common with most of the British at the time, reacted with absolute panic to the Indian Mutiny, and it must be this which accounts for the incoherence of his ideas concerning the French Revolution. Carlyle at least was consistent. He sat like an old prophet in Chelsea, seeing and expecting that one dark day, the capitalist system, with all its injustices, would have its comeuppance—not because Carlyle was a communist, quite the reverse, but because he knew that you could not continue to suppress people without encountering the universal justice of things. Dickens wanted to believe this, but he ultimately responds perhaps as most of us do when faced with outbreaks of terrible violence. In the end, he detests the violence itself so much, and fears it so deeply, that he has to commit the sin of Mr. Stryver and stop asking why it is there.

But Dickens is not beloved by millions of readers throughout the world as a political philosopher. The ambivalence of the Victorians to the French Revolution is probably what helps to make
A Tale of Two Cities
such a very successful parable. Balzac or Zola would have made the Defarges the central characters: that is, in a sense, the theme of Zola’s great historical novel,
La Débacle
, in which two former friends find themselves on opposite sides in the Paris Commune of 1870-71. In Dickens, the essentially innocent characters of Lucie and Darnay and Dr. Manette are caught up in the Revolution as characters in a fairy story might be caught up in a storm.

Many of us read this book for the first time in childhood. What might surprise grown-up readers when they come to the novel again in adulthood is how well the character of Sydney Carton stands up, and how moving is the ending. The chapter entitled “The Jackal” begins, “Those were drinking days and most men drank hard.” Carton’s self-hatred, which he souses in alcohol, is unsparingly treated. “Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.” Children who read the book tend to take Carton’s sacrifice of himself for granted. Older readers will find in it something chilling as well as heroic. If
Great Expectations
and
A Tale of Two Cities
are among Dickens’s finest books, it is not just because they are the best constructed. It is also the case that in these two stories he pulls no punches. The besetting sentimentality that could allow Mr. Micawber, for example, in
David Copperfield
to become a successful colonial administrator, is absent here. In the two harsh cities he depicts, though love is allowed to triumph and the happy little family is spared, the hard men and women, the Defarges and the Crunchers, never soften, and the sad and the disappointed know only the respite that a brave death can bring.