Wherein The Dickens Chronological Reading Club wraps up Weeks 3 & 4 of A Tale of Two Cities, our 21st read; with a chapter summary, discussion wrap-up, and a look-ahead to weeks 5 & 6.
(Banner Image: By Fred Barnard, Scanned image by Philip V. Allingham for Victorian Web.)
by the members of the #DickensClub, edited/compiled by Rach
Friends, there is certainly a storm coming, to judge by the anger of the Jacquerie of the Saint Antoine quarter of Paris.
And in London, we have three men interested in Lucie Manette: Stryver, ever self-congratulatory and wishing to save face after his unreciprocated interest; Carton, self-loathing, whose declaration of love quickly turns into a hopeless self-disclosure, but with a promise of fidelity to her and those she loves; finally, Darnay, beloved of Lucie, who cannot quite fathom the struggle that Dr Manette is making in order to see him as his son-in-law, worthy as he feels Darnay is.
And now, Dr Manette has reverted to his old occupation which helped him to cope through his long years in the Bastille. What are we to make of it all?
First, a few quick links:
- General Mems
- A Tale of Two Cities, “Book the Second,” Chs 6-18: A Summary
- Discussion Wrap-Up (Weeks 3-4)
- A Look-Ahead to Weeks 5 & 6 of A Tale of Two Cities (30 Jan to 12 Feb, 2024)
General Mems
A huge “thank you” to all who joined us for last Saturday’s Zoom chat on Little Dorrit! What an amazing group. SAVE THE DATE: For our upcoming chat on A Tale of Two Cities, we have tentatively proposed Saturday, 2 March, 2024. 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern/7pm GMT (London). We hope you can join us!
If you’re counting, today is Day 756 (and week 109) in our #DickensClub! This week and next, we’ll be continuing (in weeks 5 & 6) with A Tale of Two Cities, our twenty-first read as the group. Please feel free to comment below this post for the fifth and sixth weeks’s chapters or use the hashtag #DickensClub if you’re commenting on twitter/X.
No matter where you’re at in the reading process, a huge “thank you” for reading along with us. Heartfelt thanks to our dear Dickens Fellowship, The Dickens Society, and the Charles Dickens Letters Project for retweets, and to all those liking, sharing, and encouraging our Club, including Gina Dalfonzo, Dr. Christian Lehmann and Dr. Pete Orford. Huge “thank you” also to The Circumlocution Office (on twitter also!) for providing such a marvellous online resource for us.
And for any more recent members or for those who might be interested in joining: the revised two-and-a-half year reading schedule can be found here. If you’ve been reading along with us but aren’t yet on the Member List, we would love to add you! Please feel free to message Rach here on the site, or on twitter. And for any more recent members or for those who might be interested in joining: the revised two-and-a-half year reading schedule can be found here. If you’ve been reading along with us but aren’t yet on the Member List, we would love to add you! Please feel free to message Rach here on the site, or on twitter.
For Rach & Boze’s Introduction to A Tale of Two Cities, please click here. For Chris’s wonderful supplemental materials to ATTC, please click here.
A Tale of Two Cities, “Book the Second,” Chs 6-18: A Summary
(Illustrated by Phiz. Images below are from the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery.)
In that “wonderful corner for echoes” in Soho where the Manettes and Miss Pross live, life has taken its quiet course. Doctor Manette, restored to health, has resumed his calling. Mr Lorry has become a regular visitor and faithful friend; one day, he expresses his concern to Miss Pross about the Doctor’s state of mind, and whether he still thinks of his old time in the prison, and she believes he does, especially when he walks up and down late at night. Miss Pross is distressed by the “hundreds of people” coming to take her Lucie’s affections away—by which hyperbole she probably refers to Darnay, Carton, and Stryver, all of whom visit at varying degrees of regularity. During one gathering on a stormy evening, Lucie confesses her dread of the echoing footsteps that she hears in her imagination.
“‘I have imagined them the footsteps of the people who are to come into my life, and my father’s.’
‘I take them into mine!’ said Carton.”
In France, we learn a little more of the debauched and luxurious habits, oppressive to the poor around him, of Monsieur the Marquis—also called “Monseigneur,” and representative of a class of the old regime. “The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance upon Monseigneur.”
“He was a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in manner, and with a face like a fine mask.”
In the Marquis’s carriage rush through the city, he runs over one of the children in the streets in the Saint Antoine quarter, dismissing the event coldly as the fault of people not able to take care of their own. The child dies, and the father (Gaspard) weeps. The Marquis tosses a coin out of the carriage, as if that could “pay” for the damage done. The coin is tossed back into the carriage by an unseen hand.
“‘You dogs!’ said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front, except as to the open spots on his nose: ‘I would ride over any of you very willingly, and exterminate you from the earth.’”
One woman among the onlookers, Madame Defarge, is not cowed by him, but looks at him, knitting “with the steadfastness of Fate.”
As the Marquis approaches his country house, he questions a man—a mender of roads—as to why he was looking curiously under the carriage, and the man says that he was looking at the man who was hanging on under the carriage, swinging by the chains; the man who had propelled himself over the hillside. The Marquis has his servants look into the matter, and they search the grounds. After dismissing a poor woman’s request for a burial marker for her husband, the Marquis prepares to receive his nephew Charles, who has arrived from England.
We learn that Charles Darnay is the nephew, and heir to the estate. We receive hints that the Marquis himself, having a strong dislike for his nephew, would have gladly procured a lettre de cachet, like that which imprisoned Dr Manette, had he been able to; perhaps the Marquis has even been the hand behind some of Darnay’s troubles in England and the false accusations of treason. After a confrontational exchange between nephew and uncle–their philosophies so utterly at odds–Darnay casts off his inheritance, having already decided to make his living by working in England, and not to be a part of a hated system that has long oppressed the people of France. Darnay retires.
But the Marquis’s fate has come to meet him, when an unseen hand drives a knife into the Marquis’s heart as he lays in bed. Around the hilt of the knife a piece of paper hangs:
“Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from JACQUES.”
In England, Darnay has been making his way as a teacher of French language and literature. He has loved Lucie Manette from the beginning, and at last delicately brings it up to her father, who, in spite of some personal interior struggle (the cause of which is a mystery to Darnay), the doctor assures Darnay that he believes in his love for Lucie, and will witness to it if Lucie should ever speak of it to her father. Darnay assures the Doctor that he only wants to share their lives together, and not to separate him from his daughter. Darnay then wishes to reveal to the Doctor his true name, and why he is in England. At that, however, the doctor appears fearful, and begs Darnay not to speak of it until their wedding morning.
On that same night, at Stryver’s lodgings, Stryver tells Carton in his most blustering, self-interested, self-congratulatory way, that he intends to marry Lucie Manette. Carton is evasive in his words of approbation. Stryver then chides Carton on his mode of life, and suggests that he look out for “a nurse” (a wife): “Find out some respectable woman with a little property—somebody in the landlady way, or lodging-letting way—and marry her, against a rainy day.”
But Stryver’s plans did not take the lady’s feelings into consideration, and Mr Lorry delicately tells him so when Stryver comes to ask for his advice. Lorry promises to observe Lucie on this matter without committing Stryver in any way. When Lorry returns to Stryver to reaffirm his belief that Miss Manette is not favorable to Stryver’s attentions in this regard, Stryver employs “the art of the Old Bailey tactician” and blows it off, trying to put everyone else in the wrong and that it never would have done, and that “you cannot control the mincing vanities and giddinesses of empty-headed girls,” with the implication that she will repent of it in poverty after. All but shoving Mr Lorry out the door, Stryver lets the matter drop.
In contrast, “the fellow of no delicacy,” Sydney Carton, goes alone to the Manette household. There, in the most unconventional manner, he haltingly declares his love for Lucie, in spite of his own unworthiness (“I am like one who died young. All my life might have been.”)—which she tries to assuage—but immediately puts his own wish out of her consideration as a hopeless position when he notices the slightest distress in her.
“I wish you to know that you have been the last dream dream of my soul…Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent forever.”
Lucie, though unable to return his love, is distressed that she can’t be of more help to him in his state of mind, and feels that he might be much, much worthier. He assures her that he will never bring this up again, but he holds sacred “the one good remembrance…that the last avowal of myself was made to you.”
“It is useless to say it, I know, but it rises out of my soul. For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything….O Miss Manette, when the little picture of a happy father’s face looks up in yours, when you see your own bright beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!”
We return to Jerry Cruncher, Tellson’s messenger by day and grave-robber (“Resurrection-Man”) by night. After being part of a mob gathering around the funeral of a hated spy, Roger Cly, Jerry recognizes the name as one of the two spies—along with John Barsad—that falsely spoke against Darnay at his trial. That night, Jerry and his companions take out the coffin of Roger Cly, only to find stones there, and no corpse. Jerry comes home in a foul mood, abusing his wife for praying against his business again. His son, however, finally having a sense of what it is that his father does, wants to follow his lead in the Resurrection-Man line.
Back at the Defarges’s wine shop, Defarge and his fellow “Jacques” are grooming a new “Jacques”—the mender of roads who witnessed Gaspard under the Marquis’s carriage—to join them in their cause against the aristocrats. “They had the air of a rough tribunal.” At the end of the story of the mender of roads, who testifies that Gaspard had been captured and killed, his corpse suspended above the river, poisoning the water, Defarge announces that this Marquis and all his race are registered as “doomed to destruction” and extermination.
Then, John Barsad, the English spy feigning to be French and on the side of the people, enters the wine shop. Madame Defarge, who had been warned about him, leads him astray in conversation and doesn’t give him any helpful information in regard to his fishing. She reveals that she knows he is English. There is finally some interest shown by her, however, in Barsad’s mention that the new Marquis St. Evremonde is in England, and is going by the name of Charles Darnay, and that he is to marry Dr. Manette’s daughter.
In England, it is the night before Lucie’s wedding, and she and her father have a heartfelt talk, and he finally alludes openly to the time of his imprisonment, in a peaceful sense of the difference of his life now, to what he had dared to hope for or imagine throughout the years of his distress. He is happy in her marriage, and she is comforted. Lorry and Pross are proud and happy on the marriage morning; there seems, however, to be a cloud on Dr Manette after a conversation with Darnay. But they all see the bride and bridegroom off for their fortnight’s honeymoon. Later, however, Miss Pross is terrified of the sudden change in Dr Manette, a reversion to his prison days: “He doesn’t know me, and is making shoes!” Mr Lorry decides to take the first significant break from Tellson’s, and attends the Doctor faithfully, alongside Miss Pross, hoping that Manette will recover quickly and spare Lucie the knowledge of this distress. But Dr Manette is growing more skillful at his old work as the days pass.
Discussion Wrap-Up (Weeks 3-4)
Miscellany & What We Loved–and Didn’t
Just for fun:
The Stationmaster, however, is not thrilled by the “underdeveloped” relationship between Lucie and Darnay:
Perhaps we’re all still stuck on this gent…?
Meanwhile, Chris and I are dying to know what Deborah is pondering…
Comparing A Tale of Two Cities & Barnaby Rudge; Turmoil/Trauma Within vs. Societal Turmoil
Lenny considers the similarities and differences between Barnaby Rudge and A Tale, with the latter perhaps encouraging us towards “breaking new ground” in our emphasis “on the psychology of various characters as well as the mental states and mental health of its writer”:
Chris delightfully points out the timeline overlap of Barnaby and A Tale–wouldn’t we love to see some of these characters run into each other in the streets?
And the Stationmaster points out a relationship similarity: Darnay/Marquis is the new Sir John Chester and son:
The Mystery of Sydney Carton
The Stationmaster wonders whether it is “selfish” of Sydney to declares feelings that he knows will (or should?) be unrequited. Is his declaration a “big pity party for himself”?
I respond:
And what do we think of Deborah’s question? I’ve been pondering…
Character Spotlight: Mr Lorry & Miss Pross (or, Miss Nipper Redux?)
The Stationmaster recognizes qualities of our old friend “the Nipper” in Miss Pross:
Chris agrees that they are spiritually related, and also comments on the wonderful relationship between Pross and Lorry:
“Tampering with the Mysteries of the Brain”: Dr Manette, American Notes, and Solitary Confinement
The Stationmaster’s favorite character so far “might be Dr. Manette,” and considers him in light of Mr Dorrit:
Chris responds:
I have been considering since our read-through of American Notes the idea that Dr Manette’s imprisonment–and its effect on his mind–was birthed in the prisons of Philadelphia:
Chris also wonders whether Dickens’s experience in the blacking factory gave Dickens such a sensitivity to this concept of the effects of solitary confinement.
Character Spotlight & Dickens’s “Writing Lab”: Madame Defarge
And then there is Madame Defarge. Why did Dickens choose to make her, rather than her husband, the leader, the one who “both holds and pulls the strings”? Perhaps, as the Stationmaster commented, she is our Lady Macbeth. But might is also speak to Dickens’s concept of the chaos of the situation, turning the tables on the traditional understanding of how society “should” be?
A Look-Ahead to Weeks 5 & 6 of A Tale of Two Cities (30 Jan to 12 Feb, 2024)
For the next two weeks, we’ll be finishing Book the Second (Chapters 19-24) and reading Chapters 1-5 of Book the Third. Our portions during Weeks 5 & 6 were published in weekly parts between 20 Aug and 1 Oct, 1859. Please comment below for any thoughts regarding this portion, or use the hashtag #DickensClub if commenting on twitter/X.
If you’d like to read it online, you can find it at a number of sites such The Circumlocution Office; you can download it from sites such as Gutenberg.
All the (Dickensian) Year Round 
The thing that I have been pondering comes from the motivation underlying Dickens’s investment in the French Revolution for the temporal setting of his story, especially since A Tale of Two Cities represented his first real opportunity to write following his separation – his first real chance to escape from a self-created crisis of who he was as a husband, a father, an author, and a living icon of his times. We know that he was inspired by Carlyle – but why then? I have a theory… I’m still working on it.
Regardless of the outcome of my pondering, as I read through it again, it just keeps striking me of how much of what he says in the book can be imported into his personal life. Take for example the following:
‘Some of his King’s Bench familiars, who were occasionally parties to the full-bodied wine and the lie, excused him for the latter by saying that he had told it so often, that he believed it himself.’ (Ch 21). I wonder if that was his mea culpa in respect of the narrative he had created to justify his separation from Catherine – that they were (and always had been) wonderfully unsuited to each other? Was this a covert admission that he knew the lie in his own words?
I am so enjoying this read through. This has never been my favourite Dickens novel, and now, for the life of me, I cannot think why. It is truly marvellous, and the way he writes in this novel, more than anything, just confirms his seemingly effortless genius.
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Dear friends, not at a computer so can’t check: did someone post this marvellous map?
https://londonist.substack.com/p/dickens-the-ultimate-map?utm_medium=email
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Also, today’s elaboration on that: marvellous stuff!
https://open.substack.com/pub/londonist/p/a-celebration-and-map-of-london-the?r=62t8v&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
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Lucy, that is MARVELOUS!
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Dear Inimitables,
The level and depth of discussion and reflection are characteristically excellent. So much to ponder from all of your insights. Thank you!
Here are three perceptions:
1. Madame Defarge: I experience her as an implacable force seeking revenge for chronic and inexcusable injustice—knitting “with the steadfastness of Fate,” weaving the demise of the oppressors of the poor and powerless. She doesn’t “feel” like a flesh-and-blood human being, but like an allegorical depiction of a long-repressed passion for justice . . . with a “vengeance” (bad pun, I know).
2. The Carton-Stryver “hybrid”: What a great and humorous prospect, Chris! Yes, if Carton just had more of the Stryver swagger, and if Stryver had a bit more of Carton’s self-doubt and self-abnegation. They would make an interesting frankensteinian creature!
3. Carton’s “last dream”: Carton is likely suffering from acute and chronic clinical depression. That he can rise to a “dream” of his better self, in view of his love and admiration for Lucie, signals that there are “embers” in his soul that can be stirred into flame. So gifted, so inherently good. His self-loathing and self-abusive behavior are nearly unbearable to witness.
Dickens’ fierce criticism of the practice of long-term solitary confinement is very powerful. What a voice for social reformation!
He is, truly, “the Inimitable”!
Blessings, All!
Daniel
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I love the detail of the Darnays having a son that dies even though it’s not necessary for the plot. (Or is it going to affect the plot? I only know the broad story.) It makes them feel real. I also love the comic relief provided by Stryver and his new family.
For me, the book’s quality really picks up with outbreak of the Revolution. Not that the writing was bad or anything prior to it! It was technically great, but it struck me as kind of aloof for Dickens and it wasn’t really stirring my emotions. The depiction of revolutionary France really does stir them albeit in a way that also stirs my stomach what with all the disgusting violence. Here are some particularly unforgettable passages.
“The grindstone had a double handle, and, turning at it madly were two men, whose faces, as their long hair flapped back when the whirlings of the grindstone brought their faces up, were more horrible and cruel than the visages of the wildest savages in their most barbarous disguise. False eyebrows and false moustaches were stuck upon them, and their hideous countenances were all bloody and sweaty, and all awry with howling, and all staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of sleep. As these ruffians turned and turned, their matted locks now flung forward over their eyes, now flung backward over their necks, some women held wine to their mouths that they might drink; and what with dropping blood, and what with dropping wine, and what with the stream of sparks struck out of the stone, all their wicked atmosphere seemed gore and fire. The eye could not detect one creature in the group free from the smear of blood. Shouldering one another to get next at the sharpening-stone, were men stripped to the waist, with the stain all over their limbs and bodies; men in all sorts of rags, with the stain upon those rags; men devilishly set off with spoils of women’s lace and silk and ribbon, with the stain dyeing those trifles through and through. Hatchets, knives, bayonets, swords, all brought to be sharpened, were all red with it. Some of the hacked swords were tied to the wrists of those who carried them, with strips of linen and fragments of dress: ligatures various in kind, but all deep of the one colour. And as the frantic wielders of these weapons snatched them from the stream of sparks and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in their frenzied eyes;—eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun…The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr. Lorry looked out again, and the sun was red on the courtyard. But, the lesser grindstone stood alone there in the calm morning air, with a red upon it that the sun had never given and would never take away.”
(If you know what hair those “false eyebrows and false mustaches” were made out of, that part is even more nauseating. Back to quoting.)
“It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine, looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack. It was the sign of the regeneration of the human race. It superseded the Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and believed in where the Cross was denied.
It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most polluted, were a rotten red. It was taken to pieces, like a toy-puzzle for a young Devil, and was put together again when the occasion wanted it. It hushed the eloquent, struck down the powerful, abolished the beautiful and good. Twenty-two friends of high public mark, twenty-one living and one dead, it had lopped the heads off, in one morning, in as many minutes. The name of the strong man of Old Scripture had descended to the chief functionary who worked it; but, so armed, he was stronger than his namesake, and blinder, and tore away the gates of God’s own Temple every day.”
That part about the guillotine being a theme for jests recalls the Jarndyce and Jarndyce becoming a joke in the legal profession in Bleak House.
Speaking of humor, how is the Vengeance plump when her husband (and apparently most of France) is starving? If that’s a joke, I’m afraid I don’t quite get it.
It’s interesting how Dickens has the aristocratic prisoners behave so decently toward Charles Darnay after portraying them (or their social class anyway) so scathingly prior to that scene. A cynic might say that Dickens was unable to imagine victims being bad people. (Another cynic might say that the aristocratic prisoners are only capable of being decent to those of their own class. That’s better than nothing though.) I see it more as Dickens being nuanced or trying to be so anyway, showing that the same people are capable of good and bad, much as he does with the revolutionaries Dr. Manette sees who “seated on the bodies of their victims” help a man they accidentally stabbed “with the gentlest solicitude” and “then caught up their weapons and plunged anew into a butchery so dreadful, that the Doctor had covered his eyes with his hands and swooned away in the midst of it.”
I feel like I’m finally getting really invested in the characters of Charles Darnay and his wife. The moment when Lucie, the novel’s embodiment of feminine goodness and nobility, kisses the hand of Madame Defarge, its embodiment of feminine wickedness, gives me the chills.
My favorite part of the book so far and its nicest surprise (well, I know the broad story, so it isn’t really a surprise, but, as I read, it still feels like one somehow) is seeing Dr. Manette come into his own in this section. It’s so inspiring seeing his tragic past become his superpower and watching him use it to payback his daughter and son-in-law for all their care for him. (SPOILER ALERT!) Of course, I know this isn’t going to last the rest of the story but it’s nice during this part.
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Bk 2 Ch 24: “Monseigneur, as a class, had dissociated himself from the phenomenon of his not being appreciated: of his being so little wanted in France, as to incur considerable danger of receiving his dismissal from it, and this life together. Like the fabled rustic who raised the Devil with infinite pains, and was so terrified at the sight of him that he could ask the Enemy no question, but immediate fled; so, Monseigneur, after boldly reading the Lord’s Prayer backwards for a great number of years, and performing many other potent spells for compelling the Evil One, no sooner beheld him in his terrors then he took to his noble heels.”
Charles is tied to this class of Monseigneur not simply by ancestry but by his inaction. He may have renounced his title to his uncle, and he may have instructed Gabelle to “spare the people, to give them what little there was to give”, but he hadn’t really DONE anything. He could have stayed in France and sold the treasures his family had amassed to do some good in his neighborhood. He could have worked with his tenants to improve their farming, set up a school, a hospital to improve the community. Instead he expatriated himself and pushed his ancestral obligations to the very back burner where they smoldered until boiling over. In his naivete he believes he can safely go to France and then, once there, actually influence the revolutionaries or make a difference. He cannot comprehend his own sense of superiority and entitlement, or his lack of understanding of just what “the miserable people” are experiencing, feeling:
“One cannot help thinking, having had some sympathy for the miserable people, and having abandoned something to them . . . that one might be listened to, and might have the power to persuade to some restraint.”
“His latent uneasiness had been, that bad aims were being worked out in his own unhappy land by bad instruments, and that he who could not fail to know that he was better than they, was not there, trying to do something to stay bloodshed, and assert the claims of mercy and humanity.”
“He knew of no rock; he saw hardly any danger. The intention with which he had done what he had done, even although he had left it incomplete, presented it before him in an aspect that would be gratefully acknowledged in France on his presenting himself to assert it. Then, that glorious vision of doing good, which is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds, arose before him, and he even saw himself in the illusion with some influence to guide this raging Revolution that was running so fearfully wild.”
It’s interesting that the reality of the situation in France and of HIS situation in France comes upon him in a chapter entitled “In Secret” – the word “secret” here refers to solitary confinement, but the irony is that Charles’s situation is not solitarily confined but shared by all aristocrats and others who would try to bring the revolutionaries to reason or at least to try to stem their wrath.
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I’m reading from the Penguins Classics edition (Introduction & Notes by Richard Maxwell). Maxwell’s Note regarding Bk 2 Ch 19 “An Opinion”: “As with Lucie in I.4, so with her father here: Mr Lorry once again imparts a delicate bit of news by seeming to talk of some other case entirely – a striking subtle version of this novel’s relentless emphasis on doubles and doubling.” Mr Lorry shows so much compassion in his hypotheticals, letting Lucie and then her father know that he is sensitive to their feelings and situations while also advocating action to alleviate and/or resolve them.
****
The storming of the Bastille (Bk 2 Ch 21) is reminiscent of the storming of Newgate (Ch 65). Notable in each is the scene of the release of death-row prisoners where similar language is used to describe their reaction upon being released and the manner of their release:
ATTC – “But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression was in vivid life, there [was a group] so fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did sea roll which bore more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners, suddenly released by the storm that had burst their tomb, were carried high over head: all scared, all lost, all wondering and amazed, as if the Last Day were come, and those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits.”
BR – “The release of these four wrecked creatures, and conveying them, astounded and bewildered, into the street so full of life – a spectacle they had never thought to see again, until they emerged from solitude and silence upon that last journey, when the air should be heavy with the pent-up breath of thousands, and the streets and houses should be built and roofed with human faces, not with bricks and tiles and stones – was the crowning horror of the scene. Their pale and haggard looks, and hollow eyes; their staggering feet, and hands stretched out as if to save themselves from falling; their wandering and uncertain air; the way they heaved and gasped for breath, as though in water, when they were first plunged into to the crowd; all marked them for the men. No need to say ‘this one was doomed to die;’ there were the words broadly stamped and branded on his face. The crowd fell off, as if they had been laid out for burial, and had risen in their shrouds; and many were seen to shudder, as though they had been actually dead men, when they changed to touch or brush against their garments.”
And the burning of the Evrémonde chǎteau (Bk 2 Ch 23) is reminiscent of the burning of Haredale’s mansion, The Warren (Ch 55). Ostensibly they are burned because they are physical symbols of the institutions against which the rebels/revolutionaries are fighting – the Papists in BR and the aristocracy in ATTC – in actuality they are burned because they are the homes of the enemy of the antagonist – Gashford against Haredale and the Defarges (specifically Madame) against Evrémonde. In both novels the personal grievance lies at the base of the public grievance and drives it forward. The desire for revenge in a few persons who have insinuated themselves to the top of the rebel/revolutionary heap fuel those they lead by masking their desire with claims of liberty, equality, fraternity which all too often leads to death.
These twin scenes (more doubling?) – like so many others in these two novels – lead me to think of BR as a longer, rougher version of ATTC; or ATTC as a severely edited version of BR. I think someone stated earlier that ATTC doesn’t have the vast array of secondary characters that add pages of comic relief and atmosphere to BR, but it does have the crux of that story:
– A man seemingly dead for 20ish years returns
– His innocent child is imperiled as a result of his history
– Society faces a philosophical question, the debate of which stagnates and simmers for years until it boils over into deadly social violence
– Those in positions of power misuse that power and are unconcerned with the ramifications
– Personal revenge and long-festering rage fuel the villains
– Solid, right-thinking citizens strive to hold things together
– Other innocent’s are caught up in the struggle and victimized
– Resolution – though not conclusive resolution – comes at great cost
(Any others?)
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Chris, this is wonderful! I LOVE your ongoing comparisons of ATTC with BR!!!! ❤ The latter book I want to keep getting to know better and better…a kind of buried treasure for me. This is great stuff!
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By the way – HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CHARLES!
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The Defarges might be the Dickensian villains with the healthiest marriage since Mr. and Mrs. Squeers. Dickens’s villains, like Mr. Bumble from Oliver Twist, usually have bad marriages but Monsieur and Madame Defarge seem like a loving couple in their evil way. Villainous siblings in Dickens, like the Brasses or the Murdstones, tend to have the better relationships though Sampson and Sally ultimately have a falling out over Quilp and it’s implied that Miss Murdstone resents having to be subservient to her brother. (She still has a better relationship with him than his wife has.)
Of course, I haven’t actually read the whole book yet and one of the Defarges could turn on the other in the final part of the story. I’ll soon see.
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