COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives.The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

MARK TWAIN

I have always been a great admirer of Dickens, and his ‘Tale of Two Cities’ I read at least every two years.

—from Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field (1922)

 

CHARLES DICKENS

I set myself the little task of making a picturesque story, rising in every chapter, with characters true to nature, but whom the story should express more than they should express themselves by dialogue. I mean in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written (in place of the odious stuff that is written under that pretence), pounding the characters in its own mortar, and beating their interest out of them. If you could have read the story all at once, I hope you wouldn’t have stopped halfway.

—from a letter to John Forster (August 29, 1859)

 

SIR JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN

It would not, indeed, be matter of much difficulty to frame from such a book as the Tale of Two Cities regular recipes for grotesque and pathetic writing, by which any required quantity of the article might be produced with infallible certainty. The production of pathos is the simpler operation of the two. With a little practice and a good deal of determination, it would really be easy to harrow up people’s feelings as to poke the fire. The whole art is to take a melancholy subject, and rub the reader’s nose in it, and this does not require any particular amount either of skill or knowledge. Every one knows, for example, that death is a solemn and affecting thing. If, therefore, it is wished to make a pathetic impression on the reader, the proper course is to introduce a death-bed scene, and to rivet attention to it by specifying all its details. Almost any subject will do, because the pathetic power of the scene lies in the fact of the death; and the artifice employed consists simply in enabling the notion of death to be reiterated at short intervals by introducing a variety of irrelevant trifles which suspend attention for the moment, and allow it after an interval to revert to death with the additional impulse derived from the momentary contrast. The process of doing this to almost any conceivable extent is so simple that it becomes, with practice, almost mechanical. To describe light and shade of the room in which the body lies, the state of the bedclothes, the conversation of the servants, the sound of the undertaker’s footsteps, the noise of driving the coffin-screws, and any number of other minutiae, is in effect a device for working on the feelings by repeating at intervals, Death—death—death—death—death, just as feeling of another class might be worked upon by continually calling a man a liar or a thief. It is an old remark, that if dirt enough is thrown some of it will stick; and Mr. Dickens’s career shows that the same is true of pathos. . . .

The moral tone of the Tale of Two Cities is not more wholesome than that of its predecessors, nor does it display any nearer approach to a solid knowledge of the subject-matter to which it refers. Mr. Dickens observes in his preface—“It has been one of my hopes to add something to the popular and the picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, though no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle’s wonderful book.” The allusion to Mr. Carlyle confirms the presumption which the book itself raises, that Mr. Dickens happened to have read the History of the French Revolution, and, being on the look-out for a subject, determined off-hand to write a novel about it. Whether he has any other knowledge of the subject than a single reading of Mr. Carlyle’s work would supply does not appear, but certainly what he has written shows no more. It is exactly the sort of story which a man would write who had taken down Mr. Carlyle’s theory without any sort of inquiry or examination, but with a comfortable conviction that “nothing more could be added to its philosophy.” . . .

We must say one word in conclusion as to the illustrations. They are thoroughly worthy of the text. It is impossible to imagine faces and figures more utterly unreal, or more wretchedly conventional, than those by which Mr. Browne represents Mr. Dickens’s characters. The handsome faces are caricatures, and the ugly ones are like nothing human.

—from the Saturday Review (December 17, 1859)

 

THE SUNDAY TIMES

The value and earnestness of criticism are not to be measured by its prolixity; and if we dismiss within the space of a paragraph a work on which whole columns of shrewdest analysis and warmest panegyric would not be thrown away, let no reader suspect us of want either of respect for the illustrious author, or of appreciation of what we must deliberately pronounce to be one of the very greatest productions of his prolific pen. We are not unmindful of the vulgar abuse which has been heaped upon “A Tale of Two Cities” and its writer by the Saturday Review; but we shall not give up our gratitude to the latter, nor our admiration for the former, at the instigation of any such low-bred cynicism as that in which it is the habit of our contemporary to indulge. It may be possible to manufacture pathos by a mere mechanical process; but it does not require even the ingenuity of the artisan to produce the cold-blooded and undiscriminating censori ousness which is the only distinctive quality of the Saturday Review.

—January 22, 1860

 

ANDREW LANG

The Genius of Charles Dickens, how brilliant she is! dwelling by a fountain of laughter imperishable; though there is something of an alien salt in the neighbouring fountain of tears. How poor the world of fancy would be, how ‘dispeopled of her dreams,’ if, in some ruin of the social system, the books of Dickens were lost.

—from Letters to Dead Authors (1886)

Questions

1. What is Dickens’s understanding of mob psychology? Does he get it right?

2. Is Madame Defarge a plausible character? Why?

3. Dickens clearly sees the Manette household, presided over by Lucie, as a repository of value, a private sanctuary from public spying, madness, and violence. To some readers, however, it has seemed frail, and in any case, more a product of the author’s values than his observation of reality. What do you think?

4. Would the novel be better without Sydney Carton’s sacrificial act and final speech?