When Charles John
Huffham Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, the great nineteenth century of
political, social and literary change was only beginning. The Victorian Age,
when Dickens was to reach his greatness as a novelist lay ahead; and in the
year of his birth, Napoleonic France received its first setback at the gates of
Moscow, which was followed in 1817, 1830 and 1848 with the liberal movements
that overthrew some of the revolutionary message, of the French Revolution.
But
France remained nonetheless continually in men’s minds throughout his life. In
1837, Thomas Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution had a profound
impact on English thought and made a specially deep impression upon Dickens,
and it is on this dramatic episode that his A Tale of Two Cities came to
be written.
The
Tale of Two Cities—London and Paris—shifts, as its name suggests, from
England to France, arid back again settling down finally in France. In its
English episodes, Dickens tells us something of the condition of England at the
time of George III: the squalor of everyday life—which grew considerably worse
in Victorian England as the industrial revolution gathered momentum—the conduct
of justice—and injustice—as administered in the London courts; the
close-packed, haphazard, drunken London of old times. Through one of his
characters in this novel, Jerry Cruncher the bank messenger and
‘Resurrectionist’, Dickens even gives a glimpse of the illicit violation of the
hallowed churchyards and sale of dead bodies for the dissection table of the
doctor. Dickens does not bring out the sordidness of Victorian England to the
extent he does in Oliver Twist and David Copperfield but he does
tell us something of the life and times in the first half of the nineteenth
century in England when the industrial revolution began to make its impact on
the lives of ordinary men and women.
But
it is with France and the French Revolution that the main theme of the story is
concerned. It is the first five years of the Revolution, 1789-1794, when the
Terror was at its height and thousands were executed or guillotined, that forms
the backdrop of A Tale of Two Cities; subsequent events when ‘the
Revolution ended and the Republic began’, are mentioned en passant but
do not form the core of the novel. But it is important to remember that while
Dickens wrote a historical novel there are some deviations from the actual
course of events and a historian would not take it as an accurate picture of
how the revolution developed its elan and then petered away. A Tale of Two
Cities must therefore be read as a novel where the novelist’s imagination
is stretched to its limits and allowed full play.
The
book, written in 1859, has in fact been regarded as one of Dickens’ most mature
works and differs from his earlier novels in three noticeable points. First, it
has an elaborately constructed plot: his characters are carefully delineated
and are not allowed to run away without any aim or purpose. Second, in the
semi-historical nature of his theme, the descriptions of courts of justice, the
French Bastille, the old aristocracy in Britain and France are as close to the
actual conditions as possible. In fact, the bulk of the background information
for A Tale was drawn from Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution and
from “about two cart loads” of books that Carlyle sent Dickens while he was
writing the novel! Third, Dickens’ description of “the topmost stratum of the
social world in England and France” and the lowest layer of all, “the
uncultured, the poor, the quaint, the ruffianly, the oppressed” are so true
that social historians have used the material in A Tale as source
material for a social history of the times. Dickens was to say later that he
regarded A Tale of Two Cities as perhaps his best work (he was equally
fond of David Copperfield) for which he Lad to do an enormous amount of
research, quite apart from using Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution as
a basic guide to the momentous events of the Revolution
THE
STRUCTURE OF THE STORY
The
story opens in 1775 when the troubles were just beginning in France. Dr
Manette, an old Bastille prisoner, long believed to be dead is brought away
from Paris. It continues in 1780 when the troubles had begun to reach a boiling
point with the trial in London, on false charges of treason, of one ‘Charles
Darnay’ who was believed to be a member of the French aristocratic family which
had imprisoned Dr Manette. Meanwhile ‘Darnay’ had married two years later the
Doctor’s daughter and had two children. The Revolution in 1789 brings to the
surface all the pent up emotions of the poor and the oppressed who storm the
Bastille and unearth an old confession of Dr Manette in one of the prison
cells. Darnay, in the meantime, goes to France to rescue an old friend and is
immediately arrested by the French revolutionary council as a member of the
French aristocracy. The year is now 1793 and the beginning of the Reign of
Terror. Darnay is tried, acquitted, and then re-arrested and condemned to
death. Darnay is rescued from the guillotine much against his wishes by his
friend and look-alike, Sidney Carton who sacrifices his life for Darnay and his
family, and above all for his love for Lucie Manette.
But
A Tale is considered a great novel not merely for the
story that Dickens weaved with the French Revolution in the background. It is
remembered for the array of characters that Dickens brings into play in the
drama of terror and for the self-sacrifice of Sidney Carton, a drunken and
dissolute advocate.
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