Charles Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities (A Critical Analysis by Qaisar Iqbal Janjua)

A TALE OF TWO CITIES
Charles Dickens
(1812-1870)
“Crush humanity out of shape once more, under

similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the
same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of
rapacious license and oppression over again, and
it will surely yield the same fruit according to its
kind.”
A Tale of Two Cities
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Qaisar Iqbal Janjua from Lahore, Pakistan. Contact (92) 300 8494678
qaisarjanjua@hotmail, qaisarjanjua@gmail, qaisarjanjoa@yahoo.com
LIFE AND WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS
Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, the son of John and
Elizabeth Dickens. John Dickens was a clerk in the Naval Pay Office. He
had a poor head for finances, and in 1824 found himself imprisoned for debt.
His wife and children, with the exception of Charles, who was put, to work
at Warren’s Blacking Factory, joined him in the Marshalsea Prison. When
the family finances were put at least partly to rights and his father was
released, the twelve-year-old Dickens, already scarred psychologically by
the experience, was further wounded by his mother's insistence that he
continue to work at the factory. His father, however, rescued him from that
fate, and between 1824 and 1827 Dickens was a day pupil at a school in
London. At fifteen, he found employment as an office boy at an attorney's,
while he studied shorthand at night. His brief stint at the Blacking Factory
haunted him all of his life -- he spoke of it only to his wife and to his closest
friend, John Forster -- but the dark secret became a source both of creative
energy and of the preoccupation with the themes of alienation and betrayal
which would emerge, most notably, in David Copperfield and in Great
Expectations.
In 1829 he became a free-lance reporter at Doctor’s Commons Courts,
and in 1830 he met and fell in love with Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a
banker. By 1832 he had become a very successful shorthand reporter of
Parliamentary debates in the House of Commons, and began work as a
reporter for a newspaper.
In 1833 his relationship with Maria Beadnell ended, probably because
her parents did not think him a good match (a not very flattering version of
her would appear years later in Little Dorrit). In the same year his first
published story appeared, and was followed, very shortly thereafter, by a
number of other stories and sketches. In 1834, still a newspaper reporter; he
adopted the soon to be famous pseudonym “Boz.” His impecunious father
(who was the original of Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, as Dickens’s
mother was the original for the querulous Mrs. Nickleby) was once again
arrested for debt, and Charles, much to his chagrin, was forced to come to
his aid. Later in his life both of his parents (and his brothers) were frequently
after him for money. In 1835 he met and became engaged to Catherine
Hogarth.
The first series of Sketches by Boz was published in 1836, and that
same year Dickens was hired to write short texts to accompany a series of
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humorous sporting illustrations by Robert Seymour, a popular artist.
Seymour committed suicide after the second number, however, and under
these peculiar circumstances Dickens altered the initial conception of The
Pickwick Papers, which became a novel (illustrated by Hablot K. Browne,
“Phiz,” whose association with Dickens would continue for many years).
The Pickwick Papers continued in monthly parts through November 1837,
and, to everyone’s surprise, it became an enormous popular success. Dickens
proceeded to marry Catherine Hogarth on April 2, 1836, and during the
same year he became editor of Bentley’s Miscellany, published (in
December) the second series of Sketches by Boz, and met John Forster, who
would become his closest friend and confidant as well as his first biographer.
After the success of Pickwick, Dickens embarked on a full-time career
as a novelist, producing work of increasing complexity at an incredible rate,
although he continued, as well, his journalistic and editorial activities. Oliver
Twist was begun in 1837, and continued in monthly parts until April 1839. It
was in 1837, too, that Catherine’s younger sister Mary, whom Dickens
idolized, died. She too would appear, in various guises, in Dickens’s later
fiction. A son, Charles, the first of ten children, was born in the same year.
Nicholas Nickleby got underway in 1838, and continued through
October 1839, in which year Dickens resigned as editor of Bentley’s
Miscellany. The first number of Master Humphrey’s Clock appeared in
1840, and The Old Curiosity Shop, begun in Master Humphrey, continued
through February 1841, when Dickens commenced Barnaby Rudge, which
continued through November of that year. In 1842 he embarked on a visit to
Canada and the United States in which he advocated international copyright
(unscrupulous American publishers, in particular, were pirating his works)
and the abolition of slavery. His American Notes, which created a furore in
America (he commented unfavourably, for one thing, on the apparently
universal -- and, so far as Dickens was concerned, highly distasteful --
American predilection for chewing tobacco and spitting the juice), appeared
in October of that year. Martin Chuzzlewit, part of which was set in a not
very flatteringly portrayed America, was begun in 1843, and ran through
July 1844. A Christmas Carol, the first of Dickens's enormously successful
Christmas books -- each, though they grew progressively darker, intended as
“a whimsical sort of masque intended to awaken loving and forbearing
thoughts” -- appeared in December 1844.
In that same year, Dickens and his family toured Italy, and were much
abroad, in Italy, Switzerland, and France, until 1847. Dickens returned to
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London in December 1844, when The Chimes was published, and then went
back to Italy, not to return to England until July of 1845. 1845 also brought
the debut of Dickens's amateur theatrical company, which would occupy a
great deal of his time from then on. The Cricket and the Hearth, a third
Christmas book, was published in December, and his Pictures From Italy
appeared in 1846 in the “Daily News,” a paper that Dickens founded and of
which, for a short time, he was the editor.
In 1847, in Switzerland, Dickens began Dombey and Son, which ran
until April 1848. The Battle of Life appeared in December of that year. In
1848 Dickens also wrote an autobiographical fragment, directed and acted in
a number of amateur theatricals, and published what would be his last
Christmas book, The Haunted Man, in December. 1849 saw the birth of
David Copperfield, which would run through November 1850. In that year,
too, Dickens founded and installed himself as editor of the weekly
Household Words, which would be succeeded, in 1859, by All the Year
Round, which he edited until his death. 1851 found him at work on Bleak
House, which appeared monthly from 1852 until September 1853.
In 1853 he toured Italy with Augustus Egg and Wilkie Collins, and
gave, upon his return to England, the first of many public readings from his
own works. Hard Times began to appear weekly in Household Words in
1854, and continued until August. Dickens's family spent the summer and
the fall in Boulogne. In 1855 they arrived in Paris in October, and Dickens
began Little Dorrit, which continued in monthly parts until June 1857. In
1856 Dickens and Wilkie Collins collaborated on a play, The Frozen Deep,
and Dickens purchased Gad's Hill, an estate he had admired since childhood.
The Dickens family spent the summer of 1857 at a renovated Gad's Hill.
Hans Christian Anderson, whose fairy tales Dickens admired greatly, visited
them there and quickly wore out his welcome. Dickens's theatrical company
performed The Frozen Deep for the Queen, and when a young actress named
Ellen Ternan joined the cast in August, Dickens fell in love with her. In
1858, in London, Dickens undertook his first public readings for pay, and
quarrelled with his old friend and rival, the great novelist Thackeray. More
importantly, it was in that year that, after a long period of difficulties, he
separated from his wife. They had been for many years “temperamentally
unsuited” to each other. Dickens, charming and brilliant though he was, was
also fundamentally insecure emotionally, and must have been extraordinarily
difficult to live with.
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In 1859 his London readings continued, and he began a new weekly, All
the Year Round. The first instalment of A Tale of Two Cities appeared in the
opening number, and the novel continued through November. By 1860, the
Dickens family had taken up residence at God’s Hill. Dickens, during a
period of retrospection, burned many personal letters, and re-read his own
David Copperfield, the most autobiographical of his novels, before
beginning Great Expectations, which appeared weekly until August 1861.
1861 found Dickens embarking upon another series of public readings
in London, readings that would continue through the next year. In 1863, he
did public readings both in Paris and London, and reconciled with
Thackeray just before the latter’s death. Our Mutual Friend was begun in
1864, and appeared monthly until November 1865. Dickens was in poor
health, due largely to consistent overwork.
In 1865, an incident occurred, which disturbed Dickens greatly, both
psychologically and physically: Dickens and Ellen Ternan, returning from a
Paris holiday, were badly shaken up in a railway accident in which a number
of people were injured.
1866 brought another series of public readings, this time in various
locations in England and Scotland, and still more public readings, in
England and Ireland was undertaken in 1867. Dickens was now really
unwell but carried on, compulsively, against his doctor's advice. Late in the
year he embarked on an American reading tour, which continued into 1868.
Dickens's health was worsening, but he took over still another physically and
mentally exhausting task, editorial duties at All the Year Round.
During 1869, his readings continued, in England, Scotland, and Ireland,
until at last he collapsed, showing symptoms of mild stroke. Further
provincial readings were cancelled, but he began upon The Mystery of
Edwin Drood.
Dickens’s final public readings took place in London in 1870. He
suffered another stroke on June 8 at Gad's Hill, after a full day's work on
Edwin Drood, and died the next day. He was buried at Westminster Abbey
on June 14, and the last episode of the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood
appeared in September.
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AN ANALYSIS OF “A TALE OF TWO CITIES”
From the momentous time in the 1830s when the monthly parts of The
Pickwick Papers revolutionized British publishing, Charles Dickens had
customarily collaborated with such artists as Robert Seymour, George
Cruikshank, George Cattermole, and especially Hablot Knight Browne
(1815-1882) -- better known simply as “Phiz”-- to create the illustrations for
his fiction. However, when Dickens serialized the shorter novels Hard Times
1854) and Great Expectations (1861) in his own weekly periodicals,
Household Words and its successor, All the Year Round, there was no such
collaborative programme of illustration. Aware, perhaps, that his friend
Browne's essentially comedic style of illustration was beginning to look
somewhat dated to his serious- minded Victorian readership, Dickens
severed an artistic relationship that had resulted in some five hundred initial
vignettes, wrapper designs, and full-page illustrations of nine novels.
For twenty-three years Browne continued as illustrator-in-chief of
Dickens’s writings, ten of the novels being illustrated by him in etching or in
wood engraving, besides various “extra illustrations,” and numerous
duplicate etchings. A Tale of Two Cities . . . was the last of the novels upon
which he was engaged, but there was no rupture in the friendship which had
so long subsisted between him and Dickens, and we can only attribute the
change to the very natural desire of the author to have his fiction illustrated
by an artist of the younger school, whom he found in the son of his old
friend, Frank Stone.
One criticism of Browne's style in the monthly pairs of illustrations, A
Tale of Two Cities is the absence of the dark plates so characteristic of his
work in Bleak House and Little Dorrit, a type of plate using subtle
gradations of light and shade to create the impression of a mezzotint.
Solberg relates the absence of such atmospheric illustrations after Little
Dorrit to the inability of the new lithographic mode of to reproduce
Browne’s dark plates: “For duplicating a ‘dark plate’, he was given an
additional seventeen guineas, raising his earnings to over £40 a month” (40).
However, by issuing A Tale of Two Cities in weekly instalments in All the
Year Round, Dickens so reduced the demand for monthly parts, that, as
Solberg explains, a single engraved plate was sufficient to print both
illustrations required for the monthly part. “Once this happened, Browne, for
whom the business motive appears to have operated throughout, lost the
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economic incentive for using 'dark plates' and returned to simple line
drawings”. Thus, we must take the following criticism cum grano salis:
There is little or nothing in Browne’s final work for Dickens, A Tale of
Two Cities (1859), that comes near to matching his own best work in either
Little Dorrit or Paved With Gold [by Augustus Mayhew, monthly
serialisation, 1857-1858]. The cover design is inferior to many Phiz did for
Dickens and other novelists, there are no dark plates or emblematic details
among the sixteen etchings, and only a few scenes of revolution in their
energetic depiction of the mob add very much to this last collaboration with
Dickens.
To maintain as wide a readership as possible, Dickens issued the weekly
numbers of All the Year Round without illustration, the price of that small
pulp magazine being only 2 d. per issue. However, as Edgar Browne says of
A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens “also issued it independently in the usual
green-covered monthly parts, with two illustrations by Hablot K. Browne.
The two issues ran concurrently, the monthly part in the blue-green wrapper
costing a shilling. Elizabeth Cayzer notes that, “When assembled as a
monthly part, the pictures were tipped into the episode ahead of the text.
Such a juxtaposing of two plates would easily set up a train of reverberations
in the reader’s mind”. “In the closing double number, the reader would find
two more illustrations, the Frontispiece and the Title-page. Placed here they
allow him to reflect upon what he has read. Later, placed at the front of a
bound copy of the novel, they also announce the main themes and concerns
of the book”. Cayzer's remarks, of course, could be applied to almost any
previous Dickens novel that Browne had illustrated, from the fourth monthly
part of The Pickwick Papers (1836-7), when Browne (alias “Nemo” and then
“Phiz”) was only twenty, until the closing number of Little Dorrit, in June,
1857. One naturally wonders what Dickens felt had gone so wrong with the
illustrations for A Tale of Two Cities that he determined to severe a
collaborative relationship which had lasted twenty-three years, and which
had resulted (by Albert Johannsen's calculation, p. vi) in 1,603 illustrations.
Phiz was much upset at Dickens's strangely silent manner of breaking the
connection. Writing to his friend and assistant, Robert Young, shortly before
the publication of Great Expectations, the artist, Marcus [Stone] is no doubt
to do Dickens. I have been a good boy I believe. The plates in hand are all in
good time, so that I do not know what are up any more than you. Dickens
probably thinks a new hand would give his old puppets a fresh look, or
perhaps he does not like my illustrating Trollope neck-and-neck with him
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(though, by Jingo, he need have no rivalry there! Confound all authors and
publishers, I say. There is no pleasing one or to other. I wish I had never had
anything to do with the lot.
Ironically, although subsequent editions of A Tale of Two Cities were
illustrated by “new hands” (Marcus Stone and Fred Barnard in Great Britain,
J. McLenan in the Harper’s Weekly serial in America), it is still Phiz’s plates
that are most commonly chosen to accompany the text (the most notable
example being the Penguin English Library edition of 1970), “remarkably
tame and lacking in dramatic spirit” as some, including paratextual
Dickensian Michael Steig, may find them. The note of bitterness about all
publishers and novelists in the closing of his letter to Young suggests that
Browne sensed he was near the end of his career as an illustrator; in fact, he
was already nearing the end of his working life, for in 1867 he suffered a
stroke which rendered him incapable of further artistic production, although
he did not die until long after Dickens, on July 8, 1882. Steig notes that the
actual duration of their active collaboration would have been somewhat less:
“during the twenty-four years from 1836 through 1859 Browne had thirteen
years of employment on Dickens' novels”.
Although several possible explanations may account the “falling-off” in
quality which Steig among others detects in the sequence for the 1859 novel,
he speculates that, owing to the novelist's growing lack of interest in
illustration, Dickens provided “Browne less interesting subjects and
relatively little guidance. Perhaps another factor was that A Tale of Two
Cities was written for weekly part publication (in All the Year Round), and
it is thus unusually compressed in its bulk and schematic in its plan and
development”. Much of Browne's work involves contemporary settings and
characters in nineteenth-century costume, so that, as Percy Muir
uncharitably remarks of his work for A Tale of Two Cities, “The figures
look like characters in a masquerade and not very convincing ones at that”.
Muir and Steig seem to concur in their explanation for this inferior narrative
series: “The sad fact is that the poor man’s powers were declining”. Like
Alan S. Watts in “Why Wasn't Great Expectations Illustrated?” Steig
attributes Dickens’ abandonment of Phiz as symptomatic of Dickens’ attitudes
towards pictorial accompaniment by the end of the 1850s:
“The fact is that Dickens no longer felt the need for illustrations”
Because,
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“The days of illustrated novels were drawing to an end, and possibly
Dickens foresaw this”.
Had Dickens wanted illustrations [after severing his connection with
Browne] he would have had to seek out a new collaborator, a search made
difficult by the marked change in style and use of book illustrations in the
late fifties. The familiarity of the subject matter in the new realistic fiction,
and the growing sophistication of the reading public, made illustrators less
essential to the novels of the 1860s than they had been to the novels of the
forties and fifties.
On the other hand, Percy Muir like A. J. Hammerton suggests that
“Dickens felt the need of new blood” in illustrating Great Expectations.
Certainly on the eve of his second American reading tour Dickens seems
quite interested in the numerous Sol Eytinge and Sir John Gilbert
illustrations intended to accompany A Holiday Romance in the Boston
publishing firm of Ticknor and Fields' recently-launched children's magazine
Our Young Folks:
“They are remarkable for a most agreeable absence of exaggeration, a
pleasant sense of beauty, and a general modesty and propriety which I
greatly like”.
Although this letter to the novelist's American publisher may suggest
Dickens' desire to stay current with popular taste, the Eytinge vignettes for A
Holiday Romance are hardly the “austere” and serious productions that Steig
asserts are characteristic of 1860s illustrators.
Finally, in “To Edward Chapman, 16 Oct. 1859” Dickens complains to his
publisher: “I have not yet seen any sketches from Mr. Browne, Will you see to
this, without loss of time”. The Pilgrim editors note that Dickens may have felt
that Browne was dilatory and have resented the fact that he was simultaneously
providing numerous illustrations for Once a Week. When the book was
published as a volume, CD had his own copy bound without the plates.
The rival weekly was one of the new, illustrated sort, and the other
serialised novel on which Phiz had been working was Charles Lever’s
Davenport Dunn (1857-9), the plates for which Steig pronounces “more
interesting than those for Dickens' novel” because of their incisive lines
“greater attention to detail, and a depiction of human figures which is charged
with life and energy”. Thus, Dickens may well have felt that Phiz’s superior
work for Once a Week was preventing the illustrator from adhering to
Chapman and Hall’s publishing deadlines for the monthly numbers of Tale, and
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that Phiz was failing to clear his conceptions at the draft stage with the novelist,
who valued the opportunity to suggest alterations.
Jane Rabb Cohen in Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators (1980)
indicates that, although sales of All the Year Round rebounded after the Lever
fiasco, probably as a result of the serialisation of A Tale of Two Cities, sales of
the monthly parts, though illustrated, “languished” (118). She contends that,
since Dickens had eliminated his usual detail in descriptions of characters and
settings to accommodate weekly instalments, his style in A Tale of Two Cities
is “declarative” rather than “evocative,” and therefore failed to provide Browne
with sufficient inspiration. Dickens's cast of characters (much more limited
than one finds in his usual monthly serializations), she contends, is “easily
recalled without graphic reminders,” and therefore illustrations for this novel
are “superfluous.” She asserts that the artist's renditions of Darnay and Dr.
Manette are “too conventional to be memorable” and that his visual realizations
of the villains “look too benign to be credible.” Browne's interiors and
architectural backgrounds, she continues, lack interest, atmosphere, and
authenticity. “Since they contain neither draftsmanship to be admired nor detail
to be studied, it is hardly worth interrupting the gripping narrative to turn the
page around to view” the oblong plates, the first such plates in a work by
Dickens.
Even if we grant Sander’s point that “none of the plates adds substantially
to a reader’s grasp of the story” (Companion 166) or Steig’s that Browne’s
plates for the monthly instalments of A Tale of Two Cities lack the detail and
in particular the emblems so evident in his earlier work for Dickens,
nevertheless as a narrative series they are not lacking in imaginative power and
coherence. However, Browne’s work poses a problem for the modern, critical
reader: how to integrate illustrations and text into a total interpretation when the
relationship between the two is not entirely clear. We know little of Dickens’
directions for Browne’s programme since both author and artist subsequently
burned much of their correspondence, including (presumably) the novelist’s
instructions and responses regarding the visual sequence that runs from the
second chapter through all but the last three (that the last three are not
illustrated is perhaps no accident, since an illustration of any incident in those
last chapters would have let the cat out of the bag in terms of plot and
suspense).
One must approach Browne’s etchings for A Tale of Two Cities, then, not
individually but as a series or programme in which certain poses and objects
acquire additional meanings through repetition and placement and serve to knit
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individual scenes together, and in which characters initially unknown become
more and more recognizable as a result of an interaction of text and plate, and
of the plates with each other. The pair of plates accompanying each monthly
unit had to serve in part as an inducement to lay additional money out; another
advantage of the monthly over the weekly parts is that the former, on superior
paper, leant themselves eventually to being bound together as a single text.
Throughout their long association, Phiz had supplied the illustrations (visual
counterpoint and pictorial commentary to Dickens’ texts) as the value-added
feature that so much of the Victorian readership appreciated: two full-page
plates per serial instalment. The function of these illustrations was initially to
provide an anticipatory set for the serial reader, then subsequently a handy aide
memoir so that, as the date of release for the next number approached, the
reader could quickly refresh his memories of characters and relationships thus
far introduced. Perhaps, then, with these functions in mind the modern reader
should approach these plates as a sequence and juxtapose them against
Dickens’ text, just as monthly readers would have from May to November,
1859, the wrapper each month reiterating themes, movements, and characters,
and lending itself to successive reinterpretations as both printed and visual texts
unfolded.
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A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF
“A TALE OF TWO CITIES”
The ideas for A Tale of Two Cities came to Dickens in small doses over
twenty years. When Thomas Carlyle's book The French Revolution was
published in 1837, Dickens read it eagerly. He was so moved by Carylyle’s
descriptions of the time that he wanted to set a novel in the fiery
Revolutionary period. Some of the characters and plots came directly from
other stories that he wrote in those years. While he worked on the short story
The Battle of Life in 1846, a Christmas story about self-sacrifice, he thought
about writing the story of an imprisoned man and his mental state. This same
story featured a one sister sacrificing her love for her sister’s sake. The
largest motivation came in his friendship with the writer Wilkie Collins.
Collins and Dickens collaborated in stories about heroic and dedicated
friendships. One of the plays they wrote together, named The Frozen Deep,
describes the sacrifice of one young man, who dies to save his friend.
Another actress in this play was the 18-year-old Ellen Tiernan, whom
Dickens loved in the wake of his failed marriage. She played the beloved of
The Frozen Deep’s heroes.
Dickens was entangled in numerous scandals during the writing of A
Tale of Two Cities. His marriage to the cold Catherine Hogarth ended in
1858. The rumours said that he had left Catherine for her sister Georgina,
and the relationship with Ellen Tiernan did nothing to help Dickens' image.
When Dickens attempted to publish a letter that addressed these scandals,
his publishers refused to run the letter. Dickens saw this as such a terrible
attack that he dissolved all connections with them and began his own weekly
journal, All The Year Round. To give the journal a good start, he decided to
combine all the ideas of the past twenty years to create A Tale of Two
Cities. Each week, more than 100,000 people bought the journal to read the
next instalment.
Because Dickens was an author who frequently drew upon his personal
experiences to write, we can see the personal influences of A Tale of Two
Cities. Biographical critics believe that Dickens’ revolutionary subject
parallels his own social upheaval, created through the scandals of his
marriage and his break from his publishers. One could also make an
argument for the characters as well. Darnay’s initials are the same as
Dickens’. Carton’s love for Lucie is similar to Dickens’ love for Ellen
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Tiernan. As a physician with a dual life, Dr. Manette resembles Dickens’
desire to heal society and create imaginary worlds through his writings.
A Tale of Two Cities, however, is influenced by its setting and social
portraits more than its characters. Critics of the time decried the novel
because it focused so much on the descriptions of the countries, and lacked
any well-drawn, comic characters (a staple of Dickens' novels). Today,
critics would argue that Dickens was using the novel to bring attention to the
social problems and confusion of his own time. It is one of only two Dickens
novels that are not set in nineteenth-century England, yet the society of
England in 1859 was remarkably like the France of 1789. (This provides an
explanation for the emphasis on connections in time within the novel.) At
both times, the poor were far below the upper classes, and the poor had no
influence upon public affairs. The rich did nothing to help; for fear that the
poor would want to better themselves when they worked better as cheap
labour. The poor suffered from overcrowding, hunger, repetitive labour, and
long hours of work. The prevailing thought in Dickens’ time was that the
aristocrats of France persecuted the poor until they were driven to revolt.
Some political thinkers of Dickens’ time thought that England needed a
revolution similar to France’s. Dickens, along with most people, believed
that the English people would explode into a murderous mob at any moment.
A Tale of Two Cities is an attempt to remind the English of a revolution’s
danger.
How can the English fend off such a revolution? The individual can
have a great influence upon the halting or continuing of a revolution. For
instance, Lucie is able to win the hearts of many people, from her insane
father to the curmudgeonly Carton to the genteel Darnay, and she can
influence them through her concern for their welfare. Yet the individual is
not the only thing that can stop it‹after all, Dr. Manette could not save
Darnay through his own good influence, while Madame Defarge is able to
lead the mob to the carnage of the Bastille single-handedly. The second
thing needed to stop the revolution is love. It is not necessarily a romantic
love, although Carton’s love for Lucie is romantic on a certain level. Rather,
it is more a universal, Christian love. Just as Christ gave himself up in death
because of his for the world and desires to take its sins, Carton sacrifices
himself for the sins of the Evremondes (which suggests “every man” or
“every world”) and for his idealized love of Lucie. In the end, the anarchy of
revolution can only be tempered by the individual who acts with Christian
charity towards his fellow man.
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MOST EXPECTED QUESTIONS
Q: “A TALE OF TWO CITIES” IS A HISTORICAL NOVEL,
DISCUSS?
Q: “A TALE OF TWO CITIES” IS RELATED TO A MOST
INFLUENTIAL INCIDENT OF HISTORY BUT IT IS NOT A
COMPLETE HISTORICAL BOOK, COMMENT?
Ans:
A tale of Two Cities is a historical novel related to the period before and
all through the French Revolution. Dickens had previously written one
historical novel, Barnaby Rudge, which, however, dealt with a period of
English history. By the time he wrote A Tale of Two Cities he was feeling
vitally interested in history and was convinced of its importance in relation
to his own times. In the French Revolution he found a subject commendable
of his broadest vision to ponder upon: a great nation ripening its own
annihilation –literally France, of course, but by inference England too, and
any other nation having embedded feudal privileges with their inherent
abuses. However, it has to be kept in mind that Dickens’s novel does not by
any means depict the colossal sweep and drama of the French Revolution in
all its intricacy. Dickens has condensed the basic threat of the Revolution
and the basic lesson that can be drawn from it by depicting the effects of the
Terror, or the revengeful side of the Revolution, on a small group of people
who get involved in these public events against their will.
As a historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities has obvious limitations. It
attempts no really panoramic view of either the English or the French
political world of those critical years (1775-1793). Barnaby Rudge, its
precursor in the use of popular uprisings, was much more thorough in that
respect. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens depicts the beginnings of popular
discontent in France, the rising dissatisfaction of the people with members of
the privileged classes, the turmoil caused by public fury, and the excesses
and barbarities committed by the revolutionaries during the years of the
French Revolution. Dickens gives us no connected account of the French
Revolution, its progress and its culmination. He gives us brief and scattered
accounts of some of the principal episodes. But he manages by this means to
convey to us all the horror of the French Revolution. He gives us no
systematic analysis of the causes of the French Revolution and he certainly
takes no cognizance of the idealistic and intellectual beginnings of the
French Revolution. At the same time, Dickens takes no notice of the leading
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historical personalities of the French Revolution, such as Mirabeau,
Lafayette, Robespierre, and Napoleon; he does not, for instance, show the
struggles of the government for money in time of depression, the difficulties
of parliament, the pathetic story of Marie Antoinette, and the philosophical
thinking behind the movement. Dickens’s main concern, so far as the French
Revolution is concerned, was to show that extreme injustice leads to
violence, and violence then leads to inhuman cruelty as shown by the Reign
of Terror in France. In the first part of his novel, Dickens sympathizes with
the poor and downtrodden people, but in the end these very people become
the villains who therefore repel him.
Dickens’s first reference to the outward causes of the French Revolution
comes in the Chapter Called “The Wine Shop” in which he uses the symbol
of the mill to convey the grinding poverty through, which the people of Saint
Antoine are passing. Then there are the three Chapters in which the
callousness and arrogance of a particular nobleman are depicted. These
Chapters are “Monseigneur in Town”, “Monseigneur in the Country”, and
“The Gorgon’s Head”. The Monseigneur or Marquis Evremonde in these
Chapters symbolizes the entire privileged class, and his assassination is a
symptom of what is to come. The hanging of Gaspard (the assassin of the
Marquis) and the “registration” of the Evremonde family and of the spy John
Barsad are pointers in the same direction. One of the best known episodes of
the French Revolution is then briefly described by Dickens in the Chapter
entitled “Echoing Footsteps”. That episode is the storming of the Bastille.
Madame Defarge’s cutting off the head of the governor of the Bastille with
her own hands prepares us for the excesses, which will be committed by the
revolutionaries. The hanging of old Foulon and his son-in-law and the
setting of the chateau of the Evremondes on fire continue the episodic and
fragmentary account by Dickens of the French Revolution are conveyed to
us in the final part of the novel, where we have a depressing description of
the prisoners in La Force, a frightening description of the sharpening of
weapons by the revolutionaries on the grindstone, an awful description of
the working of La Guillotine, (the National Razor, which shaved close), the
terrible account of the dancing of the Carmagnole, and the dreadful
references to such happenings as the summary trails of the prisoners by the
Revolutionary Tribunal and the sentencing to death of such harmless persons
as the poor seamstress. These historical scenes in the novel show that
Dickens selected only two actual episodes from the French Revolution –the
storming of the Bastille and the lynching of old Foulon and his son-in-law.
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These two episodes have been re-enacted in the novel with great vividness,
and in both cases Dickens has followed Carlyle very closely. None of the
great personalities of the French Revolution appears on the scene, and only
the executioner Samson is mentioned.
Dickens’s main achievement lies not only in giving us graphic and
stirring accounts in the manner of Carlyle, but also in interweaving the
personal lives of a group of private characters with the events of the French
Revolution. These private individuals are Dr. Manette, Lucie Manette,
Darnay, and Carton, besides such less important figures as Mr. Lorry, Miss
Pross, and John Barsad. The leading characters are drawn into the whirlpool
of the revolutionary events not because they have any ideological interest in
the events of the time but as innocent victims who have done nothing at all
to deserve the suffering and distress caused to them. The sentence of death
against Darnay is most unjust when we realize that he was on the side of the
people; that as a token of his humanitarian zeal, he had given up his claims
to the family property and title in France; and that, furthermore, he was
visiting France briefly in an attempt to save the life of a poor man who was
in danger. The others are drawn into the whirlpool for the sake of Darnay,
and Carton’s sacrifice of his life and his execution flow primarily from
Lucie’s involvement.
Although Dickens does not present any systematic theory of the
revolution, he certainly reveals a well-defined attitude towards the
revolution and seems to have formed certain definite views about it. In this
respect also he seems to have been influenced considerably by Carlyle.
Dickens was encouraged by Carlyle’s views to regard the past primarily as a
storehouse of lessons, and a terrible moral drama. In writing his novel, he
was very particular about integrating the personal lives of his characters with
the wider pattern of history. It is the principal scheme of the novel to show
the individual fate mirroring and being mirrored by the fate of the social
order. The lives of both Dr. Manette and Sydney Carton are parables of the
revolution, of social regeneration through suffering and sacrifice. The
Doctor’s return to life illustrates the stumbling course of the new order,
released from its dark dungeon of oppression and misery, finding its place in
a new and jester world. And Carton embodies both the novel’s central
narrative theme and its profoundest moral view: his past of sinful negligence
parallels the past of 18th century Europe; his noble death demonstrates the
possibility of rebirth through love and expiation. Indeed, the web of moral
inter-dependence has been very closely spun. According to one critic, there
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is no other piece of fiction in which the domestic life of a few simple private
people is in such a manner knitted and interwoven with the outbreak of a
terrible public event, so that the one seems to be part of the other.
The actual fact is that Dickens regarded the revolution as a monster.
That is why, here are remembered the revolutionary scenes of A Tale of
Two Cities; these scenes have the quality of a nightmare, and it is Dickens’s
own nightmare. The moral, which Dickens, therefore, wishes to teach us
through his treatment of the French Revolution, is that violence leads to
violence, that prison is the consequence of prison, and that hatred is the
reward of hatred. He wanted that governments should not allow the people
to become so frustrated and angry that they are compelled to revolt and
become not only violent, but also ruthlessly violent. If all French noblemen
had been as willing to give up their class privileges as Darnay, and if all
French intellectuals had been as keen to expose social abuses as Dr.
Manette, there might have been no French Revolution or there would at least
have been no revolution of the same terrific dimensions. Dickens never
forgets that the French Revolution was born of unspeakable suffering,
intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference. Society was diseased
before the fever broke out. And his conclusion about the French Revolution
as stated in the final Chapter of his novel is:
“Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers,
and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed
of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield
the same fruit according to its kind.”
Q: WHAT ARE THE MAJOR THEMES IN “A TALE OF TWO
CITIES”?
Q: RESURRECTION AND RENUNCIATION ARE THE THEMES
OF THE NOVEL?
Ans:
The ubiquitous likelihood of Resurrection - With A Tale of Two Cities,
Dickens avows his belief in the possibility of resurrection and
transformation, both on a individual level and on a societal level. The
narrative suggests that Sydney Carton’s death secures a new, peaceful life
for Lucie Manette, Charles Darnay, and even Carton himself. By delivering
himself to the guillotine, Carton ascends to the plane of heroism, becoming a
Christ-like figure whose death serves to save the lives of others. His own life
thus gains meaning and value. Moreover, the final pages of the novel
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suggest that, like Christ, Carton will be resurrected—Carton is reborn in the
hearts of those he has died to save. Similarly, the text implies that the death
of the old regime in France prepares the way for the beautiful and renewed
Paris that Carton supposedly envisions from the guillotine. Although Carton
spends most of the novel in a life of indolence and apathy, the supreme
selflessness of his final act speaks to a human capacity for change. Although
the novel dedicates much time to describing the atrocities committed both by
the aristocracy and by the outraged peasants, it ultimately expresses the
belief that this violence will give way to a new and better society.
Dickens elaborates his theme with the character of Doctor Manette.
Early on in the novel, Lorry holds an imaginary conversation with him in
which he says that Manette has been “recalled to life.” As this statement
implies, the doctor’s eighteen-year imprisonment has constituted a death of
sorts. Lucie's love enables Manette's spiritual renewal, and her maternal
cradling of him on her breast reinforces this notion of rebirth.
The argument of resurrection is launched at the very beginning when
Mr. Lorry, who is travelling by the mail coach to Dover, sends a message to
Tellson’s Bank through the messenger, Jerry Cruncher. The words of Mr.
Lorry’s message are “Recalled to life”. These words are of great significance
in the story of the novel and have an immediate bearing on the mission,
which is taking Mr. Lorry to Dover and from there to Paris. Mr. Lorry, who
will be accompanied by Miss Lucie Manette, is going to Paris in the order of
bring Dr. Manette to England. Now, Dr. Manette turns out to be an ex-
prisoner of the Bastille. Dr. Manette had been unjustly and arbitrarily thrown
into a cell of the Bastille by the two Evremonde brothers and has now been
released after a period of eighteen years. Not only had Dr. Manette been
given up by his relations as having been dead for many years; but a man,
who spends such a long time as eighteen years in prison, is, to all intents and
purposes, dead in everybody’s eyes. Under the circumstances, to bring Dr.
Manette to England and to enable him to live again as a free man is nothing
short of recalling him to life. As the mail-coach lurches on towards its
destination, Mr. Lorry begins to feel drowsy and it seems to him that he is
going to Paris in order to dig out a dead man from the grave where he had
remained buried for a long, long time. The prolonged imprisonment of Dr.
Manette seems to Mr. Lorry in his sleepy state to have been a kind of burial
in a grave from which Dr. Manette is now to be dug out. The image of
digging out a dead man from his grave, to Mr. Lorry’s mind occurs several
times as he leans back in his seat, half-asleep.
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But a second resurrection for Dr. Manette has yet to take place. Dr.
Manette cannot lead a normal life or enjoy his new found freedom unless he
recovers his sanity. Under the loving care of his daughter, Dr. Manette
begins to improve both physically and mentally and, after a year or so, gets
quite well. Even now, sometimes, when he is under some mental stress, he
relapses into insanity and gets busy with his shoe-making, an occupation,
which he had learnt in the prison and which used to keep him busy there.
But every time such a relapse occurs, Lucie’s loving words have a healing
effect on him and he begins to behave normally. Lucie is like a “golden
thread” uniting him to the past and to the present; and the sound of her
voice, the light of her face, the touch of her hand has always a strong
beneficial influence him. After a couple of years more, Dr. Manette gets
perfectly well and finds himself even in a position to start his medical
practice. This, then, is Dr. Manette’s second resurrection.
Then there is Charles Darnay who is rescued from an impending death
not once, not twice but three times. Each time this rescue takes place; it is a
kind of resurrection or rebirth for Darnay because each time death seems to
have snatched him away from the world of the living. The first occasion is
his trail at old Bailey where he has been charged with treason against
England. This release from the threat of death is the first resurrection for
Darnay. He has rejoined the world of the living after having been claimed by
death as one of its victims.
Darnay’s second resurrection takes place when he is in France and
when, after fifteen months in the prison of La Force, he is put on trial and
faces the penalty of death.
Carton himself also achieves a resurrection. He achieves resurrection in
two senses. Firstly, his death constitutes a spiritual resurrection for him. By
his sacrificial death, Carton, who had been leading a life of profligacy, is a
kind of resurrection for him. Secondly, when Carton conceives his bold plan
to save Darnay’s life, the words of the Christian Burial Service echo in his
ears. “I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: and that believeth
in me though he were dead yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and
believeth in me shall never die”. These words Carton had heard at the time
of his father’s funeral, and these words now come to him as a promise that
the man who believes in Lord Jesus Christ never dies. These words echo
again in Carton’s ears when he is actually going to be executed. Thus Carton
dies, feeling sure that he will find himself alive in another world. Carton dies
with the certainty of resurrection.
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Finally, resurrection, for the purposes of this novel, may also be taken to
mean political and social regeneration. The French people, having been
oppressed and exploited for centuries, having been clamouring for a new
political and social order without any success. Ultimately they rise in revolt
against the established authority and try to bring about sweeping reforms. Of
course, their action involves unheard of criminal acts and unprecedented
cruelties so that the remedy seems to be worse than the disease. But the
implication of the people’s revolt also is that some kind of improvement
upon the previous regime would be possible. The moral of the French
Revolution, according to Dickens, is that the upper classes everywhere
should mend their ways in order to see that the poor are contented and
happy.
The other theme, less prominent but more valuable, is renunciation. It is
through a renunciation of his claim to the family estate and the family title
that Charles Evremonde attains a heroic stature in our eyes. When Charles
was still a little child, his mother had imposed a duty on him and he had
bravely promised to keep faith with her. On growing up he decides to give
up his claim to the family inheritance because he realizes that the family to
which he belongs had done many wrongs to the poor people. To him the
family inheritance signifies “a crumbling tower of waste, mismanagement,
extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness and suffering”.
Darnay’s relinquishment of this inheritance therefore shows a generous heart
and a spirit of self-sacrifice indicative of his humanitarian instincts. If all
noblemen and aristocrats in France had possessed this spirit, there would
have been no Revolution. The other act of renunciation is performed by
Sydney Carton who gets ready to give up his life for the sake of another. He
renounces no property or title; he renounces the world itself and his earthly
life. His renunciation represents the highest achievement that any man is
capable of. Like Christ, he dies so that others may live. Carton, through his
renunciation, shows the way to achieve that to which all mankind aspires. As
such he is the real antithesis of Madame Defarge who represents evil and
hatred.
Q: DESCRIBE IN YOUR OWN WORDS THE STRUCTURE OF “A
TALE OF TWO CITIES”.
Q: ILLUSTRATE THE DEVELOPMENT OF PLOT OF “A TALE OF
TWO CITIES”.
Ans:
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A Tale of Two Cities holds one of the best stories written by Dickens,
and it has proved to be one of his most popular stories. The story of this
novel is undoubtedly realistic and convincing in the main, and it has been
very well told. Our attention is held throughout, and at every step we wait
eagerly for what is to come next. The novel has a well-constructed plot,
which does not suffer from any undue interruptions or digressions. The
author has shown a remarkable capacity for condensing his material, so that
the narration of the story is marked by an economy, which gives to the plot a
remarkable compactness. The novel contains a single plot, without any sub-
plots or side-plots. The result of this single plot is a unity of impression. The
novel is free from prolixity and from diffuseness, which often mar the novels
of Thackeray. The story progresses in a straight line, and does not halt much
anywhere on the way. Another feature of the plot is that it keeps moving at a
fast pace, so that there is no feeling of boredom caused by too much
slowness is the narration or by an excessive lingering over the details.
The story of this novel concerns a group of private individuals who are
somehow drawn into the whirlpool of a great public and political event,
which is the French Revolution. Two dominant themes of the novel are
resurrection and renunciation. Resurrection implies death and rebirth, and in
the novel it appears in several forms. Dr. Manette is “recalled to life” from
his prolonged imprisonment in the Bastille, and soon he recovers his sanity
also. Thus there is a double resurrection in the case of this man who from the
physical point of view had been buried alive in a prison cell and who from
the mental point of view had lost his sanity. Then there is a resurrection in
the case of Darnay who is saved from impending death as many as three
times in the course of the novel. There is a resurrection for Carton too who,
though he does not escape death, is to be imagined is having passed to
another world to lead a new life. His sacrificial death is in itself a
resurrection because it means his moral regeneration. Darnay’s
relinquishment of his ancestral property and title, and Carton’s sacrifice of
his life for the sake of the woman he loved constitute the theme of
renunciation in the story. These two themes of the novel are developed in a
connected manner against the background of some of the events of French
Revolution. Episodes relating to the French Revolution do not occupy too
much space in the story so that, while we are given an adequate idea of the
violence and the bloodshed that took place during the years of the French
Revolution, or attention is not taken away from the main characters and their
fortunes. Dickens wisely kept out any mention or portrayal of the actual
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historical personalities connected with the French Revolution, concentrating
only upon the imaginary characters invented by him.
The real skill of the author in constructing the plot of this novel lies in
the manner in which he has interwoven private lives with public events.
According to one critic, for instance, the domestic life of a few simple
private people in this novel is in such a manner knitted and interwoven with
the outbreak of a terrible public event that the one seems to be but part of the
other. Dr. Manette is a private individual who has suffered long years of
imprisonment in the Bastille. The Bastille soon afterwards is stormed by the
revolutionary mob to which it has become a symbol of the tyranny of the
despotic government and the callous upper classes. Dr. Manette, under the
circumstances, becomes a kind of hero because he had been a victim of the
cruelty of the aristocrats who had got him arbitrarily thrown into the Bastille.
Charles Darnay is a private individual who, however, is regarded by the
revolutionary mob as an enemy of the people because he belongs to land
owning, titled family even though he himself has of his own accord given up
his claims to the family property and the family title. Lucie earns the wrath
of Madame Defarge, a fierce revolutionary woman, for being the wife of an
aristocrat to whom she is antagonistic on personal grounds; while Carton
gets involved in the revolutionary turmoil because of his devotion to Lucie.
Madame Defarge comes of a family, which had suffered badly at the hands
of the same aristocratic family of which Darnay is the son and heir. Both she
and her husband were private individuals who, however, have risen into
prominence as the revolutionary leaders of the poor and downtrodden
inhabitants of the suburb of Saint Antoine and who lead the assault on the
Bastille. The interweaving is thus very close. Indeed, it seems that Dickens
was particularly concerned with integrating the personal lives of his
characters with the wider pattern of history. The novel aims at showing the
individual fate as mirroring and being mirrored by the fate of the social
order. The lives of both Dr. Manette and Sydney Carton become parables of
the French Revolution or of a social regeneration through suffering and
sacrifice. The structural oneness of the novel thus becomes clear, despite the
diverse thread, which go into the making of it.
Another important feature of the structure of this novel is the use of
symbolism. A large number of images in the course of the narration and the
description have a symbolic significance. For instance, the spilling of wine
outside Monsieur Defarge’s shop is an incident, which prepares us for the
subsequent spilling of blood in the streets of revolutionary France. The
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Bastille is not just a prison; it is a symbol of the tyranny and despotism of
the upper classes as well as the government of King Louis XVI. The stone
faces on the chateau of Marquis Evremonde are symbolic of the unyielding
pride and the heartlessness of the Evremonde family and of the entire land
owning gentry of which that family is representative. The “echoing
footsteps”, which Lucie hears in her house, symbolize the misfortunes and
dangers, which are in store for her family. The dancing of the Carmagnole is
a symbol of the ferocity and uncontrollable fury of the revolutionary mob.
Madame Defarge is herself to be treated as a symbol of hatred and evil.
Q: DISCUSS DICKENS’ART OF CHARACTERIZATION.
Q: DICKENS IS KNOWN AS A CREATER OF LIVING
CHARACTERS, DO YOU AGREE?
Ans:
Dickens is one of the greatest creators of character in English fiction.
There is a large diversity of characters in his novels. A mere glance at the
list of persons who figure in any of his novels is enough to remind us of the
author’s amazing fertility in invention. Dickens aimed mainly at portraying
the infinite range and variety of mankind, not at analyzing the individual.
His genius was for the extensive, not the intensive, vision. In other words,
his strength lay in delineating characters of a large variety, and not in
probing them to their depths. However, the characters that he created have
been made to live before our eyes. He had given us a large number of
memorable figures such as Pick wick, Sam Weller, Mr. Micawber, Betsey
Trotwood, David Copperfield, Pip, Joe Gargery, Uriah Heep, Pecksnif, and so
on.
A Tale of Two Cities affords sample evidence of Dickens’s capacity for
character portrayal. Here too the range is fairly wide, though we do not have
any deep or penetrating studies of the working of the human mind. Each of
the characters here has been made to live, and some of the figures such as
those of Monsieur Defarge and Madame Defarge are truly memorable. In
this connection it is pertinent to point out that Dickens’s avowed purpose in
the case if this novel was to allow the characters to reveal themselves
through incidents and through their deeds and actions rather than through
dialogue. However, Dickens did not fully succeed in achieving this purpose.
Dialogue in this novel, as in his earlier novels, plays quit as much part in
revealing the characters as incidents and events do. In fact, it would not be
wrong to say that dialogue plays an even more important part in revealing
the characters than incident does. Thus is why his friend and biographer,
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John Forster, expressed the following view about Dickens’s aim in this
novel:
“To rely less upon character man upon incident, and to resolve that
his actors should be expressed by the story more than they should
express themselves by dialogue, was for him a hazardous and can
hardly be called an entirely successful experiment.”
The characters in A Tale of Two Cities have sharply been
individualized. Each stands out in a distinct person in his or her own right.
Each stands our in our imagination and memory as a separate person clearly
differentiated from the others. Dr. Manette is an outstanding personality,
despite his recurrent fits of insanity. Mr. Lorry, the old bachelor, who has
grown grey in the service of Tellson’s Bank is another impressive figure
distinct from everybody else Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay have
sharply been differentiated from each other, even though they closely
resemble each other in physical appearance and though they are in love with
the same girl. Lucie represents an entirely different type of womanhood
from that which is represented by Madame Defarge. Never was there a
greater and sharper contrast than we find between these two women. Miss
Pross belongs to a different category altogether. Likewise, Mr. Stryver and
Jerry Cruncher, though both of them are comic figures, have been clearly
distinguished from each other. Even a minor figure like the mender of road
has been made to live before us. Monsieur Defarge, bull-necked and martial-
looking, implacable and of a firm determination, is also unforgettable. Even
the woman called “The Vengeance” and the man called “Jacques Three”
have been endowed with life. Nor is the portrayal of Monseigneur
unsatisfactory, even though it has been said that Dickens was incapable of
successfully portraying the persons of the upper middle classes and of the
aristocracy.
In spite of Dickens’s declared purpose that he would like the characters
in this novel to reveal themselves through incident and action rather than
through dialogue, the fact remains that the characters named above reveal
themselves to us largely through dialogue and much less through incident
and action. The essential traits of Dr. Manette, for instance, shine through
his conversations with various persons in the story, and not through his
actions. In fact, there is hardly any action that he performs. Sometimes we
do find him occupied with shoe-making, but that is only when he gets a
shock and becomes temporarily insane. The only tangible action, which he
performs in the novel, comes towards the close when he goes about trying
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energetically to save the life of his son-in-law and through dialogue that we
find Dr. Manette to be a loving father and a kind-hearted friend. There is, for
instance, the long conversation, which Charles Darnay has with him about
his intention to marry Lucie. In the course of this dialogue, Dr. Manette tells
Lucie that his main concern in life is to see her happy. To take only one
statement made by him to this effect:
“You cannot fully appreciate the anxiety I have felt that your life
should not be wasted. Only ask yourself how my happiness could be
perfect while yours was incomplete”.
Similarly it is through one of his long conversation with Mr. Lorry that
we learn the reason why he sometimes relapses into the state of insanity to
which he had been driven by his prolonged imprisonment in the Bastille. It
is through dialogue that he reveals his desperation when Darnay, after his
second trial by the Revolutionary Tribunal, has been sentenced to death. “I
will go to others whom it is better not to name,” he says to Mr. Lorry,
meaning that he has not yet given up all hope.
Charles Darnay too reveals the essential traits of his character through
dialogue. Of course, one of his basic traits appears through action also. That
happens when after going through Gabelle’s letter, he goes at once to Paris
is order to try to save that man’s life. That action by him shows his deeply
sympathetic nature and his disregard of personal danger where his honour as
a gentleman is involved. But his love for Lucie, which is one of the chief
facts about him, appears mainly in the course of the long conversation,
which he has with Dr. Manette, and to which a reference has already been
made above. In the course of that conversation he says to Dr. Manette:
“Dear Dr. Manette, I love your daughter fondly, dearly,
disinterestedly, devotedly. If ever there were love in the world, I love
her”.
Nor do we have any reason to doubt the sincerity and intensity of
Darnay’s love for Lucie. Similarly, Darnay’s essential humanitarianism is
revealed to us through his dialogue with his uncle to whom he says that the
Evremonde family has done many wrongs to the poor that he would like to
redress some of those wrongs that he has decided to give up his entire claim
to the family estate and the family title.
We, then, come to Sydney Carton. In his case his action in giving up his
life for the sake of the husband of the woman with whom he has always been
in love is of the highest importance. It is this action, which raises him to the
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status of the hero. When he is on the point of death, he looks sublime and
prophetic. But all the other traits of Carton’s character appear only through
dialogue. He has a dialogue with Darnay immediately after Darnay’s
acquittal by the court at the Old Bailey. In the course of this dialogue,
Carton says that he is a disappointed drudge, that he cares for no man on
earth and that no man on earth cares for him. When Darnay is gone, Carton
looks at himself in the mirror and says that he hates Darnay even though
there is a physical resemblance between them. Then there is a dialogue
between Carton and Stryver. From this dialogue we learn that Carton has
been a seesaw kind of man, “up one minute and down the next, now in high
spirits and now in despondency”.
From this dialogue we also learn that even at school. Carton did
exercises for other boys and seldom did his own, just as now he does no
work of his own but does plenty of laborious work for Stryver.
Q: ‘SYMBOLISM IN “A TALE OF TWO CITIES” IS IN
ABUNDANCE’ IS IT A JUSTIFIED ANALYSIS?
Q: “A TALE OF TWO CITIES” HAS SYMBOLIC IMPORTANCE,
ELABORATE?
Ans:
A Tale of Two Cities contains a copious use of symbols and symbolic
imagery. Symbolism implies the use of an object, an idea, or a person in a
larger or wider or deeper sense than is literally conveyed by that object, idea,
or person. An author employs symbolism in order to give a deeper meaning
to his writing. The symbolic meaning is generally veiled; or it may lie at a
deeper level than the surface level. The use of symbolism thus necessarily
lends additional meanings to those, which are apparent on the surface. A
Tale of Two Cities is replete with symbols. Symbolism here is an essential
element in the structure of the novel. Indeed, symbolism permeates the
whole novel.
The very opening chapter employs two symbols. These are the
Woodman symbolizing Fate, and the Farmer symbolizing Death. This
Woodman and this Farmer, says the author, work unceasingly, and they
work silently; on one hears them as they go about with muffled steps. Here
the Woodman is not just a worker in the woods, and the Farmer is not just a
tiller of the soil. The Woodman represents or symbolizes Fate, while the
Farmer represents or symbolizes Death; and the whole idea is that these two
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forces are at work in France to bring about destruction and bloodshed and to
ruin human happiness.
The manner in which the author describes the journey of the mail-coach
in the second chapter has also a symbolic significance. It is an uphill
journey; the hill, the harness, the mud, and the mail are all so heavy that the
horse have a difficult time of it and therefore. With drooping heads and
shaking tails, the horses laboriously make their way through the thick mud,
floundering and stumbling as if they were going to fall to pieces. This
depressing state of affairs is made even more gloomy by the fact that there is
an atmosphere of suspicion all over and around the mail-coach; the guard
suspects the passengers, the passengers suspect one another and the guard,
they all suspect everybody else, and the coachman is sure of nothing but the
horses. The whole of this account of the conditions in which this journey is
being made is a fit prelude to a story, which in many of its chapters deals
with the violent scenes of the French Revolution.
The Broken Wine Cask - With his depiction of a broken wine cask
outside Defarge’s wine-shop, and with his portrayal of the passing peasants'
scrambles to lap up the spilling wine, Dickens creates a symbol for the
desperate quality of the people's hunger. This hunger is both the literal
hunger for food—the French peasants were starving in their poverty—and
the metaphorical hunger for political freedoms. On the surface, the scene
shows the peasants in their desperation to satiate the first of these hungers.
But it also evokes the violent measures that the peasants take in striving to
satisfy their more metaphorical cravings. For instance, the narrative directly
associates the wine with blood, noting that some of the peasants have
acquired “a tigerish smear about the mouth” and portraying a drunken figure
scrawling the word “BLOOD” on the wall with a wine-dipped finger.
Indeed, the blood of aristocrats, later spills at the hands of a mob in these
same streets.
Throughout the novel, Dickens sharply criticizes this mob mentality,
which he condemns for perpetrating the very cruelty and oppression from
which the revolutionaries hope to free them. The scene surrounding the wine
cask is the novel’s first tableau of the mob in action. The mindless frenzy
with which these peasants scoop up the fallen liquid prefigures the scene at
the grindstone, where the revolutionaries sharpen their weapons, as well as
the dancing of the macabre Carmagnole.
Madame Defarge’s knitting - Even on a literal level; Madame Defarge's
knitting constitutes a whole network of symbols. Into her needlework she
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stitches a registry, or list of names, of all those condemned to die in the
name of a new republic. But on a metaphoric level, the knitting constitutes a
symbol in itself, representing the stealthy, cold-blooded vengefulness of the
revolutionaries. As Madame Defarge sits quietly knitting, she appears
harmless and quaint. In fact, however, she sentences her victims to death.
Similarly, the French peasants may appear simple and humble figures, but
they eventually raise up to massacre their oppressors.
Dickens’s knitting imagery also emphasizes an association between
vengefulness and fate, which, in Greek mythology, is traditionally linked to
knitting or weaving. The Fates, three sisters who control human life, busy
themselves with the tasks of weavers or seamstresses: one sister spins the
web of life, another measures it, and the last cuts it. Madame Defarge’s
knitting thus becomes a symbol of her victims’ fate—death at the hands of a
wrathful peasantry.
The Marquis - The Marquis Evrémonde is less a believable character
than an archetype of an evil and corrupt social order. He is not only overly
self-indulgent, as evidenced by the train of attendants who help him to drink
his chocolate; he is also completely indifferent to the lives of the peasants
whom he exploits, as evidenced by his lack of sympathy for the father of the
child whom his carriage tramples to death. As such, the Marquis stands as a
symbol of the ruthless aristocratic cruelty that the French Revolution seeks
to overcome.
In the same chapter Dickens, the symbol of the mill, employs another
symbol. Literally, of course, a mill grinds wheat into flour, which serves as a
food for human beings. But here the mill performs a different function. Here
we are told that the people of Saint Antoine had undergone a terrible
grinding and re-grinding in the mill. The mill, which had worked them down
was of the kind that grinds young people old. And then author goes on to say
that the children in this suburb “ancient faces and grave voices”; and upon
their faces, and also upon the faces of the grown-up people, the sign of
hunger was apparent. The symbol of the mill presents grinding and re-
grinding, not wheat but human beings. In the later cases, the enraged
members of the revolutionary crowd are described as sharpening their
bloody hatchets, knives, bayonets, and swords at a grindstone, which has a
double handle and which is being worked by two men furiously. Both the
mill and the grindstone thus serve as symbols of the destruction, which the
people in France face.
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The Bastille is another important symbol. Hundreds of prisoners have
been languishing in the prison for years and years, neglected, uncared for,
almost forgotten. The governor of the Bastille must be a hardened
administrator without the least pity or compassion in his heart because
otherwise the prison cannot be run cruelly. The inhabitants of Saint Antoine,
under the leadership of Monsieur and Madam Defarge, march upon the
Bastille and, after a brief assault upon it, capture it. Great is their jubilation
at having captured this bastion of authority and tyranny. The governor is
seized. And Madame Defarge with her own hand cuts off his head with a
knife.
Later in the story, La Guillotine becomes the symbol of excesses being
committed by the revolutionary mob. If the Bastille was a symbol of the
tyranny of the government of King Luis and of the privileged classes in the
France, La Guillotine has reversed the process. Now it is the turn of
aristocracy and he nobility to be prosecuted and tyrannized over. La
Guillotine has become “the National Razor which shaved close”. It is
regarded as the sign of the regeneration of the human race. La Guillotine is
mercilessly beheading all the eloquent, the powerful, the beautiful, and the
good. La guillotine is thus a symbol of the brutalities and the barbarities,
which are committed by the poor and the downtrodden when they come into
power. La Guillotine is as ugly and hideous symbol as the Bastille
previously was.
Some of the characters are also symbols. Madame Defarge symbolizes
unlimited hatred and evil. She certainly has a motive and a reason for her
revengeful and bloodthirsty attitude, but all her vindictiveness and
bloodthirstiness cannot be explained. Her very knitting acquires a sinister
significance and becomes a symbol of revolutionary ruthlessness and
resolves because in the knitting are “registered” the names of those who
must be exterminated. Miss Pros on the other hand is a personification of
love. Her attachment to Lucie is deep and abiding. Sydney Carton too serves
a symbolic purpose. His sacrificial death symbolizes the way by which the
highest human aspirations can be achieved and also the means by which a
profligate can attain moral regeneration.
William H Marshal tells us that A Tale of Two Cities is a story about
rebirth through death, and therefore Dickens gives us opposed symbols of
life and death. The symbols of death seem to triumph over the symbols of
life. In a nutshell, “A Tale of Two Cities” is one of the best novels of
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Dickens where symbols play a significant and thematic role. It is the mastery
of great novelist that he has employed nominal things for great purposes.
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Charles Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities (A Critical Analysis by Qaisar Iqbal Janjua)

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Charles Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities (A Critical Analysis by Qaisar Iqbal Janjua)

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A TALE OF TWO CITIES

“Crush humanity out of shape once more, under

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