Sentimental Transport and Stoic Sacrifice in A Tale of Two Cities

This article explores the importance of sentimental transport, Stoic philosophy, historical representation, and masculine self-fashioning in A Tale of Two Cities by examining the historical novel in relation to Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey and Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. The novel invokes and democratizes a tradition of manly emotion associated with eighteenth-century sensibility. The memorable ending of A Tale of Two Cities combines Sternean sentimental transport with a form of Stoic selfcommand praised by Smith. Dickens imagines Sydney Carton's death as a manly act that revives republican virtues through the cultivation of moral sentiments as both an object of pity and a model of action. His substitution for Darnay demonstrates quite literally how the Smithian cultivation of sympathy as fellow feeling causes him to put himself into the shoes of a fellow sufferer and to embody the Stoic principle of regarding oneself as a world citizen. By historically staging Carton's death within revolutionary France, Dickens presents a form of manly feeling that associates sentimental transport with historical transport and celebrates the feeling of history as an embodied experience. Deeply influenced by Walter Scott's historical fiction, A Tale of Two Cities reasserts the value of manly feelings in historical representation but imagines such feelings not as a national tale, but rather as a form of transnational sentimental journey. Dickens seeks to recover a manly sociability lost since the decline of the Grand Tour and the emergence of a bourgeois ideology focused on private individualism and economic success.