What Book to Read?

I haven’t spent all the holiday season reading crime fiction. My book club mostly reads contemporary works, but we decided this time to venture into the classics. So I’ve also been reading A Tale of Two Cities (1859) for the first time in fifty years. All I can remember from my earlier reading is how noble I thought Sydney Carton was, and though I’m now probably much more critical about other aspects of the book, I still find what he does very moving. Sentimental, aren’t I?

The book is often thought to be about the French Revolution. The revolution is the occasion for the climax of the tale, but it’s actually a story of love and revenge. It begins in 1775, so the famous opening lines – ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ – don’t actually apply to the Revolution itself (unlike Wordsworth’s lines – ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!’). Mr Jarvis Lorry, of Tellson’s Bank, is on his way to Paris to meet Dr Manette, who has recently been released from long and unjust imprisonment in the Bastille. It then jumps five years to the trial of the Frenchman Charles Darnay at the Old Bailey for treason, and our first meeting with Sydney Carton. In this section, the love story dominates, though the action switches from time to time to Paris where to poor of the city are becoming desperate. The third section begins in 1789, and jumps to 1792, when Charles Darnay is drawn back to Paris. There are numbers of characters and many twists and turns in the story; Dickens can always be relied on for a good plot, even if he sometimes tends to melodrama.

Dickens is often highly acclaimed for his prose, and certainly there is a lot of it. No piece of action, no description or reflection by the author can pass without an elaborate embroidery of words. Even the smallest incident is given its full due. Dickens doesn’t let a good idea get forgotten, and there are many wonderfully sustained images throughout the story, such as Mr Stryver shouldering his way through life, or Madame Defarge knitting in her wineshop. His writing can be superb, but it can also be frustrating, particularly where the language is highly coloured or the syntax convoluted. I find some of the passages give detail far beyond what is necessary, and there are others that don’t seem necessary at all. For example, of what relevance to the story is Mr Stryver’s decision not to propose to Lucie Manette? While the plot is ultimately quite coherent, I guess that writing in weekly instalments allowed – or even required – Dickens to let his prose have its head.

Dickens has, as always, stock characters, and some of these are unconvincing. Lucie is too beautiful, good and lovable, Miss Pross is too devoted, and Charles is rather too noble. Madame Defarge, on the other hand, is too implacably evil. But Jarvis Lorry, the soft hearted man of business is a joy. I assume Jerry Cruncher is supposed to be funny, but I found he grated on me. And what of Sydney Carton? Does he merely serve a role in the plot, or is he a convincing character? I’m not sure I’m the best judge of that.

Reading it now, the book immediately raises the issue for me of whether historical literature – and it was historical even when Dickens wrote it – has to be true to history. We know Dickens didn’t study the events of the revolution; he took his details from the historian Thomas Carlyle. The picture he presents of what happened is terribly skewed as to causes and effects. There is no mention, for example, of the role middle class members of the Third Estate played in what happened; all that he is interested in are the poor of Paris and the hated aristocracy. Dickens presents the Paris crowd as bloodthirsty and anarchic, but not entirely to blame; he also shows the aristocracy as corrupt and selfish. He sees the condition of the Paris crowd as a ‘frightful moral disorder’, but believes it is ‘born of unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference’. To suggest the enmity between the Paris crowd and the aristocracy was the driving force of the revolution distorts what really happened, but suits the story. The battle between these forces is personified by Charles Darnay and Madam Defarge – though of course Darnay is not representative of the nobility, thus allowing Dickens to highlight the injustice of the Terror. London comes out of it rather better than Paris.

There is perhaps no real answer to the question of where a novelist should stand in relation to historical reality, or rather, there are as many answers as there are novelists and historical realities. It does worry me, though, that generations of readers may think Dickens’s version of the French Revolution is accurate, and be thereby misled about what actually happened. But as I said above, I think it is the story of love and revenge that is really important to the author. He wasn’t trying to write history.

This is a very partial account of the novel. You can read more about some of its other major themes here.