****My commentary contains major
spoilers. I found it impossible to convey the thoughts that I wanted to
commutate here without giving a lot away.*****
Thanks to Caroline at Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Delia at Postcards
from Asia for hosting Dickens in
December.
Charles Dickens’s A
Tale of Two Cities seems to engender very divergent reactions from
commentators, some of whom laud this novel as the best of books while others
excoriate it as the worst of books. My
take is that while this is not, as some contend, one of history’s all time
greatest novels, it is a very enjoyable read that contains a fair share if
interesting and meaningful characters and ideas.
As Dickens often does, major plot details are often
revealed out of order as characters tell stories of events that occurred long
ago, old letters are read, and surprising revelations abound.
In 1775, after years of imprisonment, Dr. Alexandre Manette
is released from the Bastille a psychological wreck. Brought to England and
nursed back to mental health by his daughter Lucie Manette and his banker Jarvis
Lorry, Manette eventually regains his sanity. Subsequently Manette and Lucie establish
a happy and comfortable life in London. Enter Charles Darnay, who when we meet
him is on trial, falsely accused of being a spy. Darnay is acquitted with the
help of Lucie and attorney Sydney Carton, an otherwise drunken and depressed
self – professed failure who physically resembles Darnay.
Carton falls in love with Lucie. When he professes
his feelings in a moment of sobriety, strength and dignity he is gently rejected,
at which time he acknowledges that his life will continue down the road of
ruin.
Instead Lucie and Darney fall in love, marry and have
a daughter. Unbeknownst to Lucie, her husband is really Charles St. Evrémonde,
a French aristocrat who has renounced his nobility due to his revulsion towards
the monstrous injustice and oppression meted out upon the French lower classes
by his family and his class. Furthermore, it turns out that Darnay’s family was
responsible for Manette’s imprisonment.
When the French revolution breaks out Darnay returns
to France to help rescue his business agent from the guillotine. The former
nobleman and is quickly arrested himself and faces execution as he is a member
of hated aristocracy. Lucie, Manette, Lorry, Darnay and several others arrive
in Paris to help extricate Darnay. Manette, a survivor of a long hard ordeal in
the Bastille, has enormous credibility and influence within the revolution, but
still struggles over a fifteen - month period to get have his son in law released.
Our protagonists are opposed by Madame Thérèse
Defarge, who is a bloodthirsty French peasant woman bent upon seeing Darney
executed. It turns out that Madame Defarge’s family members were tortured,
raped and murdered by Darnay’s father and uncle. Madame Defarge eventually
threatens to send all of the principle protagonists to their deaths. On the eve
of Darnay’s slated execution Manette succumbs to the pressure and reverts back
into a state of mental incoherence.
When all seems lost, in a supreme act of self – sacrifice,
Carton switches places with an unconscious Darnay, engineers the escape of all
the principle characters, and goes to his death on the guillotine in place of
Darnay.
Dickens devotes much effort on first showing the
terrible brutality of the pre -revolution French power structure and then in
turn the equally terrible brutality of the revolution itself. Tales of physical
and sexual abuse, starvation, mass murder, etc. abound throughout the
narrative. His analysis of the revolution is relatively simple and he reiterates
it several times. He portrays the French monarchy, aristocracy and church as
horrendously oppressive and unjust. This viciousness and corruption created a reservoir
of hatred and thirst for vengeance among the French peasantry. The hatred
exploded into a chaotic bloodbath of executions, vengeance and sadism by the peasantry
once it arose.
Dickens Writes,
“Along the
Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the
day's wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined
since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation,
Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and
climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to
maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this
horror. 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. “
There is a lot more going on in this book in terms of
characters, themes and philosophy then I can possibly get my arms around in a
single post. As I like to do I will instead focus of one interesting aspect of
this work; that is the character of Carton. Tales of burned - out failures rising
to the occasion in a crises seem to be somewhat common in books and movies
these days, but Carton may be the archetype of all this.
Dickens explains that Carton did not always have such
bleak prospects,
“he had been
famous among his earliest competitors as a youth of great promise”
But the author paints a picture of a man that low
self - esteem and alcohol have nearly ruined.
At one point Carton declares,
When he reveals his feelings for Lucie this usually
pitiable character shows an unusual composure and there is a hint that he might
be saved. Upon his rejection he slides back into drink and despair however.
A key point here is that under normal circumstances Carton
is unable to pull himself together and live a life if dignity. Only when the
world around him turns into the hellish chaos of the height of the French
Revolution, when he faced by barbarity and madness triumphant, does this man find
himself and begin to behave in a super - virtuous manor. At this point he is motivated by his love for Lucie
and the positive attributes that she brings out in him, as well as Christian
virtues instilled in his youth. He sees his sacrifice as a tradeoff between his
own unworthy existence and the very worthy existence and happiness of others.
One gets the sense that if the world had not turned into a nightmare of death and
despair, that Carton could not have risen to the spiritual heights that he
attains. Strangely, in a way, abominable evil has does Carton a favor, as it
provides him with an epiphany that allows him to save his soul.
A resurrection motif pops up all over this novel (a
special note here. I usually attempt to keep my commentary all - original. I
try not to read criticism about a work until after I write about it. In this
case I was tipped off to the resurrection theme from several sources included the Wikipedia article
on the book.) Clearly the concept of virtuous good “returning from the dead”
in response to evil is reflected in Carton’s transformation.
Earlier in the novel Dickens ruminates at several
points, that to some degree all people are unknowable and isolated from each
other. One example,
“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!”
As he goes to die, Carton makes a connection with a
young woman who also is condemned to be executed. At this moment it seems that
Carton and the girl, due to his spiritual elevation, is able to transcend the
human estrangement,
“The two stand
in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they speak as if they were alone.
Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand, heart to heart, these two children of
the Universal Mother, else so wide apart and differing, have come together on
the dark highway, to repair home together, and to rest in her bosom.”
Carton is a very, very interesting man! In him
Dickens has crafted such a dynamic and thought proving persona.
This novel is at times flawed, some scenes lack credibility,
sometimes the characters are portrayed too simplistically, Dickens’s take on
politics and sociology is also without a lot of nuance. On the other hand there
is a lot more really good stuff here then I touched upon above.
Dickens fans as well as those who enjoy the classics
should give this read. While I do not esteem this novel as highly as some
others do, it is an entertaining read and certainly worthwhile. Though it has
its weaknesses, this classic has a lot to recommend it.
