Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cites and the French Revolution (review)

For a general readership, the most frequently quoted lines in Charles Dickens’s novels are probably from A Tale of Two Cities (1859): “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” declares the narrator at the opening; “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known,” thinks Sidney Carton as he mounts the guillotine in place of Charles Darnay. Yet what lies between these oft-rehearsed quotations is a historical novel less prominent in Dickens studies and less frequently adapted for film or television than, say, Great Expectations (1861), Bleak House (1852–53), or David Copperfield (1849–50). A BBC TV miniseries of A Tale shown in 1989, for example, garnered none of the critical attention directed at the Bleak House of 2005. And although it remains a standard text in English classrooms (probably by virtue of its length and accessibility), A Tale figures infrequently in undergraduate reading lists dealing with nineteenth-century literature and culture: Hard Times (1854) and David Copperfield, with their narratives of brutalizing industrialization and childhood unhappiness, seem to resonate more powerfully with twenty-first-century readers.

The capable editors of this collection of essays aim to restore A Tale to some of the critical and popular success it enjoyed in the nineteenth century, if not to its phenomenal appeal when first issued on a weekly basis between April and November 1859 in All the Year Round; so successful was the weekly serialization that parallel monthly numbers appeared between June and December of that year. To display “the complexity and subtly deployed force of this haunting novel” (18), the editors frame the essays within the context of the French Revolution. Somewhat paradoxically, however, they also insist that the obsessive memory of Jacobin atrocities, Jean-Paul Marat, and Maximilien Robespierre that fueled the popularity of A Tale when it first appeared and continues, in muted form, to construct the novel as a Francophobic depiction of revolutionary violence, has sold the novel short. How, then, to acknowledge the influence of the Revolution on Dickens’s novel without making it just about the carmagnole and tumbrils rumbling through Paris streets?

A persuasive restoration to complexity must depend, of course, on the essays’ skill in leading us beyond familiar interpretations of A Tale; as the editors observe it has, for instance, commonly served as a reference point for Franco-British relations, as a terrifying representation of mob violence, as a fable of Christian sacrifice, and as a “psychological emanation of the author’s troubled sexuality” (5). As an avenue to fresh readings, the editors point to the remarkable contradiction between Dickens’s enduring fondness for Paris (from 1844 onwards he was a regular visitor and in the mid-1850s a minor celebrity on the boulevards) and the quite stunning absence of success for A Tale when it was first published in France in 1861. Under the title Paris et Londres en 1793, it not only failed to generate any enthusiasm in the French reading public, it was also seen as both Francophobic by virtue of Dickens’s savage depiction of revolutionary characters and as anti-ancien régime by virtue of his heartless depiction of pre-Revolutionary France. In general, the novel was dismissed as yet one more text in the xenophobic English political discourse that originated with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

The introduction also usefully places the novel in an international context. Most critics, they argue, have failed to connect Dickens’s principal political message—a “neglectful and uncaring government could spark insurrection” (10)—with the savage condemnation in Dickens’s letters of the rebels who “mutinied” in India in 1857. For Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh, and Jon Mee, A Tale discloses Dickens’s...