Charles Dickens

by Jane Smiley

  After 1859, for the next eleven years, Dickens lived so secret a life that Ellen Ternan’s place in it did not emerge at all until 1934. The figure his family, friends, and audiences saw was of a man frantically using up his energy and his health giving strenuous and emotionally taxing public readings while editing a weekly periodical and writing three major novels—A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. Commentators have seen Ellen in the angelic figure of Lucie Manette, in the unattainable figure of Estella, in the playful, money-hungry figure of Bella Wilfer. It is, of course, always tempting to extrapolate from an author’s work to his state of mind, and Dickens did have a history of explicitly depicting associates in his work—Leigh Hunt in Bleak House, Georgina Hogarth in Bleak House, Maria Beadnell Winter in Little Dorrit. But each time he communicated to someone, usually Forster, what he was doing and how he was modifying the original to make him or her, supposedly, less recognizable. Dickens’s daughter maintained after his death that he didn’t understand women, but, in fact, the portraits of women in his last three completed novels are more complex and interesting than in earlier novels. Miss Pross, in A Tale of Two Cities, for example, is explicitly declared to have more than one layer: “Mr. Lorry knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew her by this time to be, beneath the surface of her eccentricity, one of those unselfish creatures—found only among women—who will, for pure love and admiration, bind themselves willing slaves, to youth when they have lost it, to beauty that they never had, to accomplishments that they were never fortunate enough to gain, to bright hopes that never shone upon their own sombre lives.” Rather than starting out with a Flora Finching, who is her main characteristic at the beginning and gradually develops depth, he defines Miss Pross immediately, in the voice of the narrator, as complex. Unlike Flora and Miss Tox, she doesn’t have to earn her way out of being ridiculous (and physically unappealing women are often portrayed as ridiculous in Dickens’s works). The evidence, though slim, is that Dickens learned something about women from the crucible of his divorce and showed it in his work almost immediately.

  In 1837, when Dickens himself was a young man and just married, Thomas Carlyle published History of the French Revolution. Dickens said later that he carried it everywhere with him, and he read it many times over the years. After 1840, when Dickens met Carlyle and his wife, Jane, at a party, they formed a friendship that was marked by reverence on Dickens’s part. (He told Forster, “I would go . . . farther to see Carlyle than any man alive.”) Carlyle’s feelings were more mixed, partly because he did not respect novels or novelists (though his writing style and historiographic style were far more novelistic than would be considered objective or professional today). At any rate, by 1858, when Dickens began to think about A Tale of Two Cities, he was eminently familiar with Carlyle’s History and his interpretation of the important features of the French Revolution. By this time, also, Dickens had been to France so often and with such pleasure that he considered himself more than a Francophile, almost a Frenchman in exile. He spoke fluent French and had, in fact, through Mr. Meagles in Little Dorrit lampooned Englishmen who insisted upon making themselves understood abroad only by raising their voices. He would later expand his satire on narrow-minded Englishness in the figure of Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend.

  A Tale of Two Cities was planned for the launch of All the Year Round, and Dickens seems to have begun writing in earnest in March, for publication at the end of April. Thereafter, the novel appeared in weekly installments until November. Commercially, it was a huge success. The first issue sold 120,000 copies (though, of course, some portion of the sale must have been due to the novelty appeal of the new magazine) and then settled down to about 100,000 copies. Sales of monthly parts were not as good, but in volume form it has always since been the steady bestseller of Dickens’s oeuvre.

  Dickens planned to try a few new things with the novel, and whether they succeeded or not in the view of friends and critics, he did produce a novel that is in some ways not as “Dickensy” as his other works. He had a stronger grasp of the requirements (and perhaps the impossibilities) of the historical novel than he had had with Barnaby Rudge, and he was able to consciously subdue some of his own habits of imagination in order to represent as truly as possible the nonrepresentable—that is, a historical period that the author had not personally experienced.

  The paradox of the historical novel is that it purports to give life and spirit to the past in a way that historical accounts themselves, with their emphasis on interpretation and fidelity to facts, cannot. Of course, some historical periods are extremely dramatic, and imaginatively entering into them is quite tempting. In addition, an author like Dickens, who was interested in the workings of large social systems, is always curious about how the present system came to be, and so has a natural interest in history. And when the novel is first published, it may seem to be a true and faithful rendering of the life of the time it is looking back to, but almost every historical novel dates very quickly and soon comes to epitomize its own period more than the period in which it is set. A historical novel can be compromised by the simplest discovery of new material, but even if nothing new turns up, the style that the author has chosen to mimic the earlier period may no longer seem to do so. For all the research that goes into it, and for all the weight it seems to have, the historical novel is one of the most ephemeral genres and reveals most clearly an author’s intellectual and imaginative limitations.

  When Dickens sat down to research the novel, the Carlyles had an enormous box of books sent to him from the London Library. He intended not to contradict Carlyle’s interpretation, but to give it the life of a dramatic tale. The period of the French Revolution was less than a hundred years in the past, as retrievable for him as World War I would be for us, the era of his grandparents. Forster later said, and the evidence of Dickens’s letters supports the idea, that Dickens wanted the incidents, the history, and the plot to drive the characters, rather than his usual fashion of having the plot grow out of the characters and their situations. Specifically, he wanted them to develop through action rather than through dialogue. The novel did what Dickens intended—the characters do seem either dimmer or more normal, depending on the reader’s taste. Forster didn’t like the novel, and Dickens did have to defend it from time to time, but Dickens liked it and said, as he often did, that he thought it was the best thing he had written. It has not been as popular with scholars and critics as it has with readers, but there is a lot to be said for it.

  For one thing, it is an exciting novel. Unlike the plot of Little Dorrit, that of A Tale of Two Cities is tight and clear, almost fairy tale–like. Dickens seems to have conceived of Sidney Carton and Dr. Manette first, intrigued by the idea of self-sacrifice, as with The Frozen Deep, and also with the idea of prolonged imprisonment. To our eyes, the tightness of the plot seems not very literary—a little Hollywood—and indeed, a couple of famous movies of A Tale of Two Cities were made. But the fact that everyone is related to everyone else, aside from reiterating Dickens’s perennial theme of relationship, also pointedly asserts the moral complexity of political injury and revenge.

  Dickens never goes easy on the pre-Revolutionary French aristocracy. As a group (represented by “Monseigneur,” who requires four men to prepare and serve his chocolate), they are presented as repressive and cruel, locked in a world of unreality that they have created for themselves. Two nobles rape the daughter of a tenant, murder her brother, commit manslaughter of a child, impoverish and starve their tenants, and promote fear and intimidation as the proper mode of rule. If the sections of the novel about life in pre-Revolutionary France were excerpted and strung together, they would read like a call to revolution. Dickens shows that he perfectly understands what daily shapes the rage and zeal of the republicans—their undying hatred for their former rulers is the inevitable and perfect crop that the rulers themselves have sown.

  In the context of this large historical movement, there
seems to be some, though not much, room for personal choice. Hero Charles Darnay chooses not to profit from the exploitation of the peasantry and to work for an honest living in England, but he is sensitive to the moral confusion of his position when he hears from the family’s former agent in prison: “He knew very well, that in his love for Lucie, his renunciation of his social place . . . had been hurried and incomplete. He knew that he ought to have systematically worked it out and supervised it, and that he had meant to do it, and that it had never been done.” In addition, he is tempted. He is curious. He wonders if he might still have some influence for good. The Revolution has become for him, as Dickens calls it, “the Loadstone [sic] Rock”—“Everything that arose in his mind drifted him on, faster and faster, more and more steadily, to the terrible attraction.” This is a masterstroke of motivation, finessing the improbability of Darnay’s return to France as well as revealing Dickens’s own recent experience of the psychological process of giving in to the temptation of change and chaos. The plot turns on Darnay’s unlikely choice, and it is utterly convincing.

  In fact, a major theme of the book is this very temptation—the temptation of the unknown, especially when it is embodied in violent action. To give in to the temptation, as the republicans do when they dance the carmagnole, as the Evremonde brothers do when they rape and murder, as Madame Defarge does when she sets out to find Lucie and her child in order to denounce them, is to set in motion one’s own destruction. The novel urges a proto-Freudian analysis of human nature—the harshness and unreality of the superego is finally overthrown by the id, unleashing a vast, destructive, natural force (the mobs are often represented by images of fire and flood), leaving no rational middle ground for the operation of the ego, which is defined by moral connections of right and wrong, responsibility and choice among individuals. The horrors committed by the id—that is, the republicans—do not have quite the same moral perversity of those committed by the superego, because the ego (reason) has not been falsely enlisted to justify inhumanity. The republicans know they are killing other people, but the nobles consider the peasants to be animals. The republicans know, as well, that they are numbed by death. In one interesting passage, Lucie appeals to Madame Defarge for mercy, “as a wife and mother.” Madame Defarge responds, “ ‘All our lives, we have seen our sister-women suffer, in themselves and in their children, poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst, sickness, misery, oppression and neglect of all kinds.’

  “ ‘We have seen nothing else,’ returned The Vengeance [Madame Defarge’s friend].

  “ ‘We have borne this a long time,’ said Madame Defarge. ‘Judge you! Is it likely that the trouble of one wife and mother would be much to us now?’ ”

  Like the characters of Little Dorrit, those of A Tale of Two Cities are trapped by the past. Revolution offers an interesting collective answer—destroy the institutions and relationships and citizens and thought patterns of the past. In this sense, the Terror is Dickens’s next step after the final image of the earlier novel. Rather than allowing individuals to be swallowed up in the “usual uproar,” clear away the usual uproar and see what happens. But the outcome is even worse—the usual uproar gives way to an unusual and far more destructive uproar.

  Only Sydney Carton elects not to be trapped by his past, and the solution Dickens gives him is specific—he understands that his physical life is of no importance compared with his spiritual life. When he changes places with Darnay and goes to his execution, he is connected to another human being (the little seamstress whom he comforts) and fully aware that his being will continue in the memories and relationships of those who love him. More important, at the very moment of Carton’s death, Dickens writes, “I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth in me shall never die.” In a world where the superego, the id, and the ego have all failed, only the spirit succeeds. Carton asserts several times that he doesn’t feel his death to be a sacrifice. Modern critics have taken issue with him, but Dickens asserts as strongly as he can at the end that the death of the body can and should be seen as a transfiguration, not as a sacrifice or a capitulation.

  Dickens’s religious beliefs are often the subject of debate, partly because he ridiculed Evangelicalism relentlessly, in figures like Dr. Chadband in Bleak House and Mrs. Clennam in Little Dorrit, but he was never backward in offering an alternative faith. For him the figure of Jesus Christ was a consistent image of salvation. Love, kindness, forgiveness, benevolence, celebration, mercy, joy, charity, and innocence all had their source, for Dickens, in Christ and Christmas. That these concepts had been crusted over by organized religion, not only Evangelicalism, but the corrupt and unresponsive religion of the Church of England and of the Catholic Church, did not mean that they had no existence or reality, only that their existence and reality were available solely within and among individuals.

  Of course, it is not surprising that, given the recent chaos of his life and the violence of his feelings, Dickens should choose the most violent possible subject matter for his novel and that he should depict it with vivid relish. Authors often choose subjects that are analogues to their states of mind and extrapolate successfully from individual turmoil to social or even universal turmoil. Seeing these analogues and making them understandable and believable is one of a novelist’s social roles. What is especially interesting about Dickens is that he unerringly engaged with almost every aspect of modern culture, hardly missing a single one. To read A Tale of Two Cities after the close of the violent and ideological twentieth century is to be struck over and over by the prophetic nature of his insights—the inability of the new regime to draw a line before “extermination,” as Madame Defarge puts it; the inability of the old regime to understand what it has done wrong; the submersion of the individual into the collective; the suspiciousness of the collective toward any individual, no matter how respectable his “revolutionary credentials,” who expresses doubt (as Defarge does); the elevation of ideology over relationship; the destruction of love (as between the Defarges); the moral tangle of denunciation. Dickens himself said that he did not add new insights to those of Carlyle, but he clearly and systematically made them live through character and plot, and in the process included revolution as yet another aspect of his analysis of modernity.

  Every novel is a chance for the author to get at the insoluble conundrum of the novel in a new way. It is no coincidence that the disordered and tortured plot of Little Dorrit (which requires an explanation at the end to make the connections clear) was followed by the clear and compelling plot of A Tale of Two Cities. It is also no coincidence that the earlier novel is held in greater esteem by critics, while the later novel is more popular. The primacy of action in the latter work produces suspense; the primacy of character in the former work produces contemplation and analysis. But A Tale of Two Cities is no less wise than the previous novel, no less insightful, no less bleak, for that matter, since it doesn’t even make an effort to resolve the conflict between the superego and the id, except through death, redemption, and the passage of time.

  Dickens wrote most of A Tale of Two Cities at Gad’s Hill Place, where he lived with Georgina and the children. His old convivial life was more or less behind him now. He no longer spoke to some of his former companions, and he was both depressed and unwell. A Boston publisher came to visit and tried to persuade Dickens to undertake an American reading tour. Dickens was agreeable; negotiations with various impresarios continued into the next year, but the Civil War broke out before anything certain could be arranged. Meanwhile, in October, he toured the provinces, as always with a huge response from his audiences—weeping, laughter, applause. Undeniably, his life was more orderly now, and he managed his restlessness somewhat better, with long country walks. He worked on All the Year Round, sent another letter to George Eliot, and went to dinner with her and G. H. Lewes, who lived together unmarried (although he addressed her as “Mrs. Lewes” anywa
y). He invited her to write for his magazine. She was unable to find the time. He made speeches for various charitable organizations. He went about fourteen months between the end of A Tale of Two Cities and the beginning of Great Expectations without writing another novel, but he did begin a series of pieces in All the Year Round that were later collected in The Uncommercial Traveller.

  In July, his second daughter, Katey, married Wilkie Collins’s brother, Charles. Katey was twenty, a vivacious girl anxious to leave home. She had loved one of Dickens’s friends, but he was unresponsive, so she married Collins, she said later, just to get away from “an unhappy home.” To all appearances, the July 17 wedding was a bright, celebratory occasion, but when Mamie, the older daughter, went up to Katey’s room at the end of the day, she “beheld her father on his knees with his head buried in Katey’s wedding gown, sobbing.” He said, “But for me, Katey would not have left home.” Dickens’s children were all in their teens and early twenties at the time of the divorce. It is safe to say that of the nine living children, only one, Henry, made a successful career. All the rest of the boys were irresponsible and profligate with money, like Dickens’s father and two of his brothers. Mamie never married, and Kate’s marriage was not a happy one. Dickens himself found his sons’ inability to settle on their careers or to get ahead unaccountable, evidence not of his failure as a parent but of something wrong in them. He compared their fecklessness with his own youthful ambition and energy and found them wanting. His novels abound with feckless young men—James Harthouse in Hard Times, for example, and, in Our Mutual Friend, Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn, whose easy manners are so galling to the ambitious, Dickens-like characters Bradley Headstone and Charlie Hexam. Once again, the plight of his children seems more understandable to us than it did to him: a bad marriage; a bitter divorce during their most vulnerable years; a secretive, demanding, capricious father, who was apart from them much of the time, who moved them frequently from place to place, and who was himself changeable—often charming and attentive, but also often remote and angry; a caretaker (Georgina) who, whatever her good qualities, was not much older than the older children when she took over their care; the stresses of their father’s extreme celebrity. It is hard not to read into some of the disorganized large families he depicts, such as the Pockets in Great Expectations or the Jellybys in Bleak House, some aspects of his own household. Even though in these depictions he puts all the blame upon the mothers, we might say that the family system of the Dickens household was not one in which the children were likely to thrive, and they didn’t.