A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens, 1859 

I love reading Dickens, but I did not love reading this book. I doubt that it’s in the curriculum any more, but I can understand a blogger who recently wrote that he avoided Dickens for years after being forced to read it. True, it opens and closes on two of the most memorable, and quoted, sentences in English fiction, and it contains some stirring scenes. There’s also a satirical tone in many places, comparing the grandiose pretensions of the English nobility with the imperiousness of the French. The tone initially suggests some of Dickens’ usual humour, but it is far more bitter than usual with Dickens. This turns into the deep pathos of a broken man and his daughter, to be followed by the triumph of love (both familial and romantic), reversal and finally rescue and transcendence. The transcendence is big here.

  But it’s a general humourlessness and shallowness that makes the book hard to read for me. Dombey and Sons, the last Dickens novel I read, was perhaps equally somber in tone, but it had sympathetic characters and psychological depth. In Two Cities, the only sympathetic character is old Dr. Manette, wrongly imprisoned in the Bastille for 16 years and psychologically fragile when released. His friend, the banker Mr. Lorry, is surprisingly sympathetic as well, although a side character to the central events of the story. The other lead characters are so thinly drawn that they have no real presence. Lucie Manette is a typical Dickens heroine, devoting her whole life first to her father, then to her husband. Charles has apparently renounced his French title in disgust, but we know little about him beyond his nobility of character and courage. Both are idealized stereotypes that I never felt any connection to, so when they first find happiness, then tragedy, I found myself wishing they’d just get on with it and bring the story to its end.

  Even the minor characters, usually so interesting in Dickens, hold little interest. Jerry Cruncher and his young son seem to be there only to entertain the English working class readers, but they add nothing to the storyline. The French nobles seem to be deliberately drawn as indistinguishable archetypes, while the French revolutionaries are so exaggerated that they are more like scary nineteenth-century cartoons than even Dickens’ usual figures. Dickens, while acknowledging their oppression, portrays the residents of the countryside, and particularly the St Antoine district of Paris, as terrifyingly out of control, insane and diseased. This contrasts starkly with the orderliness of Lorry’s good English business sense, and the common sense of Miss Pross, Lucie’s nursemaid and friend. The French revolutionary mob is a scarecrow, built out of the most frightening elements, but a hollow creation.

  Was this because Dickens’ abhorrence and fear of the French revolutions, writing just 10 years after the wide-spread upheavals of 1848, drove him to choose to demonize everything about it? The novel seems to be as much a propaganda piece against working-class revolution, and in support of British stability, as it is a paean to true love and noble virtue. Unfortunately, this thought makes me suspect many of Dickens’ other popular works. Dickens is known for his depictions of the oppressed and impoverished life of the English working class, and this is reflected here in his many references to the extreme poverty and privation of the French peasants and labourers. But the reaction that he depicts in France is so ignorant and brutal, and unbalanced, that it appears to be a warning to English readers not to do anything rash in trying to overcome the conditions he depicts in England. The novel comes across as profoundly conservative and reactionary, and makes me wonder about his actual political leanings (particularly after becoming a wealthy property owner himself). Perhaps the most charitable reading of the novel is as a warning to the English upper classes to avoid oppressing the working class so much that they have no alternative but revolution. But I think his readers are more likely to be lower or middle than ruling class, so this message, if that’s what it is, is not well directed.