A Tale of Two Cities

Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities covers the life of a French doctor in England, his devoted daughter, and his aristocratic son-in-law. And it is easily one of my favourite books. I did not realise how much I cared about writing style until I read Dickens, whose consistent descriptive set pieces make up for a largely trite, moral reading of the French Revolution. His control over prose also contributes to quite possibly my favourite character in fiction. In summary, despite a couple of flaws, this book is sublime.

In full honesty, I believe that Dickens’ prose, despite being masterful, has the capacity to be extremely dense to the reader’s detriment. There’s the common myth that Dickens was paid by the word – ‘debunked’ on the basis that he was paid by the ‘installment’. Except, each installment is a fixed length of 32 letter pages – so dense prose is very much still encouraged. Let me be absolutely clear: to have a problem with this is a skill issue on the part of the reader; unfortunately, I very regularly struggle to defeat the illiteracy aligashuns.

But despite that, he also has some of the most enrapturing prose I’ve ever read. The best way to put it sis that Dickens constructs set-pieces. Whether he chooses to describe a universal feeling or capture a single event in his book, he forces his reader to sit, focus, and appreciate the description set before them. And his reader is rewarded every time.

Rather than unpack passages at length, I’ll just put below a few of my favourite examples.

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?” – ch. 1.3 Night Shadows

[Describing the spillage of a wine casket in the streets of Saint Antoine, a fomenting district of revolutionary spirits]

“The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees — BLOOD.
    The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.” – ch. 1.5 The Wine Shop

“And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was heavy — cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence — nobles of great power all of them; but, most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a garment that the wind shook. The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere.” – ch. 1.5 The Wine Shop

“Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur's lips. One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have died of two.” – ch. 2.7 Monseigneur in Town.

“In such risings of fire and risings of sea – the firm earth shaken by the rushes of an angry ocean which has now no ebb, but was always on the flow, higher and higher, to the terror and wonder of the beholders on the shore – three years of tempest were consumed. Three more birthdays of little Lucie had been woven by the golden thread into the peaceful tissues of the life of her home.”

Some of the moralising of the French Revolution is slightly exhausting. For example, Dickens’ choice to refer to Defarges’ lieutenant exclusively as ‘The Vengeance’ is a constant reminder of his disapproval of the excesses of the terror, and the ‘duel’ between Mrs. Pross and Madame Defarges depicts an almost cartoonish villainy. As a modern reader, it sort of feels like a boring centrist take on revolution – you can imagine Keir Starmer explaining that yes, aristocratic oppression was absolutely awful, but we simply cannot condone the actions of the revolutionaries. I don’t even disagree with it, but as the moral force underpinning the book, it can feel slightly tiring.

That said, there is a level of balance here which is refreshing. An aspect of framing to the Revolution is its inevitability, such as in Dickens’ description of aristocratic conversation:

“It was too much the way of Monseigneur under his reverses as a refugee, and it was much too much the way of native 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.” – ch. 2.24 Drawn to the Loadstone Rock

And it is when you remove the morals from his descriptions, and focus on the environment which he paints that you can appreciate the contribution of the French Revolution to the narrative. When Madame Defarges declares to her husband ‘Tell the Wind and the Fire where to stop; not me’ for the second time, I felt the chills of Lucie Manette realising her husband was doomed. The seamstress’ calm demeanour, broken only once, colours Carton’s resolve, while simultaneously demanding a respect from the reader for her equanimous analysis of the Revolution. And finally, Carton’s prophetic clarity, when stood at the Guillotine, is built upon the bloody violence that has guided the book up until that point.

And that self-eulogy is one of the finest pieces of writing in the English language. It reframes not just the character of Sydney Carton, but the entire book itself. 

He starts off as a pitiful character. At his first introduction, he is depressed, going to bed on a pillow “wet with wasted tears”, and we are told that the next day the sun “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 waste him away”.

But he has within him the seeds of a character to be redeemed. Throughout the second part of the novel, he does not appear much, but it is always clear that he wishes he were more. And this is what his tears are for as he sees the waste forces all around him. He has an unrequited love for Lucie, and he begs her that she see him how he truly is deep down, rather than how he portrays himself. There is, within him, a level of depth that reminds the reader that we only underestimate him because he underestimates himself.

He truly comes to life as a character in the third act of the book. We see his skill as a lawyer as he entraps Barsad - he may be aided by the miraculous plot contrivance of Jerry Cruncher’s grave-robbing, but it is still his clarity of thought which is the engine of the final scheme. The reader feels a mounting sense of uneasiness over where Carton is heading: in the aftermath of his secret plotting with Barsad, he goes on a walk, and declares “there is nothing more to do”. Dickens tells us that he said it in “the settled manner of a tired man, who had wandered and struggled and got lost, but who at length struck into his road and saw its end.” But as he looks upon dawn, and looks upon a disappearing sail-boat, “the prayer that had broken up out of his heart for a merciful consideration of all his poor blindnesses and errors, ended in the words, ‘I am the resurrection and the life'”. If one reads these lines and expects Carton to survive the end of the novel, then they clearly have never read a book in their lives. But one has no idea what it is that he has in mind. He recognizes his end, and one can tell that he has most likely contrived his own end through plotting with Barsad. But these lines betray a sense of conviction within him. His aimless wandering along the Parisian rivers only serves to highlight that finally he knows where he is going: to the guillotine in the place of D’Arnay.

Across the 3 parts of the novel, we are treated to incredible descriptions of events, places, and atmospheres. The environment of the French Revolution is laid bare for us in a way that grips the reader. And amidst all this, Dickens paints for us the hero of the novel: a man who grows from despair in life to one of utter conviction, determination, and belief. If there is a moral to A Tale of Two Cities, I believe that it lies in the final lines of the book. Sydney sacrifices himself to the brutality of the French Revolution, and saves his fellow man. And he does so with conviction. It is on this note that Dickens concludes his book, choosing for his character to find meaning in his life, and finally to come to the end of his path.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that that I go to, than I have ever known.

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