"I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising..."

When I was in college in the late 1980s, one of my English professors used to keep cartoons posted on her office door. One of my favorites was titled something like "confessions of an English major" and portrayed two graduates wearing caps and gowns, in line to gather their diplomas. One of them is sheepishly admitting to the other, "Y'know...I never really finished Hamlet."

Well, I was an English major with a double concentration in Literature and Writing. And I will now confess, for many people to read, that "I never really read Dickens."

At least not much. In high school we read Great Expectations but almost all of that has faded from my memory, except for the character of Miss Haversham. In college, I tackled Hard Times, which I remember enjoying in a sort of breakneck, exhausted way, as I had a very full load that term and seemed to be reading constantly. (One of my clearest memories from that semester is of standing on my desk and dancing in celebration when I finally finished Thackeray's Vanity Fair. But now I really digress!)

The only Dickens I have ever really absorbed in my literary soul is his famous and beloved A Christmas Carol. My husband and I often read it aloud during the Christmas season, and what a wonderful tale it is. In spite of its almost too familiar plot (thanks to dozens of dramatic versions) the real thing packs a literary wallop. We love the message, the characters, the language. Having loved this story for as long as I have, I'm not sure why I've hesitated so much to delve further into Dickens. A too busy life and the huge size of his novels, perhaps.

But I finally did it. I went back to Dickens, and I'm so delighted I did. Granted, I didn't tackle the tomes. Instead, based on very enthusiastic recommendations from friends in an online book group, I decided to read his classic A Tale of Two Cities, which has the honor of being his shortest and perhaps most oft-read novel. The eleventh of his fourteen novels, the book was written in 1859, found an audience then, and has kept one ever since. Among other things, it has perhaps the most famous beginning and ending lines in all of English literature. I think that was a first for me, knowing both the first and last lines of a book before I ever started reading: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.... and then, 371 pages later: It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done..."

Chances are, you know those first and last lines too. What you might not be as familiar with is the story that unfolds between them.

Plot and Characters

The story begins during the years just prior to the French Revolution, though much of the action in the book's last half takes place during the Revolution itself. In true Dickens fashion, we meet a lot of characters, and it's sometimes hard to tell who's major and who's minor -- though usually much easier to tell who's bad and who's good, at least initially. In fact, sometimes his characters can feel a bit overdrawn, either through comic or sentimental means. The saintly Lucie is a case in point of the latter.

A list of the "main" characters whose stories we follow, and whose stories do intertwine by book's end, would have to include Lucie Manette; her father, Doctor Manette; their loyal friend the bank manager, Mr. Lorry; Lucie's nurse and companion, Miss Pross; Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat living in self-imposed exile in England; Sydney Carton, a somewhat hard to like barrister; Monsieur and Madame Defarge, frightening owners of a wine-shop in St. Antoine, France; and Jerry Cruncher, who works for Tellson's Bank, where Mr. Lorry works.

Although it's a shame to try to reduce such a richly woven story to a few sketchy paragraphs, in the interest of brevity I'll highlight some of the main action, taking care not to provide too much information for those of you who haven't had the pleasure of reading it yet.

Prior to the novel’s opening, the English Doctor Manette was wrongfully and unjustly imprisoned in the French Bastille for eighteen years, believed by most people to be dead. Even his daughter Lucie, a baby when he was taken away, and now grown, believes this to be so. Mr. Lorry, an old family friend, finds out that he has in fact been released from prison, informs Lucie that he is alive (though not well) and takes her to him. Thus begins a hard but happy chapter in their lives, when Lucie gets her father back, and through her consistent and loyal love, helps restore him to good health and his right mind.

Not long after they are reunited, the Manettes meet Charles Darnay, and are later called as witnesses (against him, although they do not wish to) in an unfair trial where he is being accused of treason against England (he’s French, after all, and sympathizing with those bloody American yanks). Darnay, whose real aristocratic name and identity are known to no one but himself, gets off mostly thanks to the quick work of one Sydney Carton, a lawyer portrayed as undisciplined but bright, hard-drinking and not very kind to himself. Carton and Darnay bear a curious physical resemblance to one another, but are not entirely sure how they feel about one another. What complicates their relationship further is that both men fall in love with Lucie, though neither ever admits it the other. Both admit it to Lucie, though interestingly, the reader is only really privy to Carton’s declaration. I would say Lucie rebuffs it gently, but Carton never really gives her the chance. He basically goes to her to say he loves her but knows she could never love a good-for-nothing like himself, especially because he doesn’t feel he will ever have the strength of character to change. She essentially agrees with him, tries to encourage him to change, and there the matter ends...or seems to. She promises kindly that she will never tell anyone else of his love.

Lucie does end up marrying Charles, and they have a beautiful daughter. Life goes along pretty swimmingly until Charles (who still has never told Lucie his true identity) decides he must go back to France in order to try to save an old family servant who is now suffering in prison on his account. Charles, as it turns out, was from a very old and very oppressive aristocratic family. He turned his back on all of that in order to make his own way in England, without relying on fame or fortune. Now the tides have turned in France, the peasants have risen up in anger, and aristocrats (and their former servants) are being jailed and guillotined. Charles, who has been living peaceably in England, doesn’t seem to understand the full force of the revolutionary tide in his former homeland, nor just how dangerous such a journey will be. He goes, only to find himself imprisoned and eventually awaiting execution.

What parts the Manettes, Mr. Lorry, Miss Pross, Jerry, and yes, Sydney Carton play in trying to save Charles is what makes up the last several exciting chapters of the book. I won’t give anymore away here except to say that no one in a Dickens novel is ever quite what he seems. And that Dickens has a brilliant ability to externalize a person’s inner and deeply spiritual struggles. Be on the lookout for a heartrending journey from selfishness and weakness to self-sacrifice and courage.

Tone and Style

If like me, you haven't read Dickens for a while, you may have to discipline yourself to push through the first two or three chapters of the novel. His long, complex sentences are like an old-fashioned kind of music that our contemporary ears aren't used to hearing. After struggling a bit through the first few chapters, I got attuned again --I found my feet and felt as though I was waltzing or skating along to a wonderful tune.

This is not a "plot driven" book, which is what we postmoderns are used to. Dickens doesn't mind taking detours to describe, in huge amounts of detail, landscapes or scenes that are important to the story in symbolic or metaphorical ways, although they don't advance the storyline in a linear cause and effect way. One thing you can almost be sure of is that when he lingers, it's not just for the pure enjoyment of writing such masterful prose (though no doubt he felt that way too) but because the scene is important to the heart of his story. For example, the fifth chapter of “book one,” titled “The Wine-Shop” introduces us to the Defarges, who we later find out are bloodthirsty revolutionaries. We first see the street outside their shop a number of years before the revolution, where the author stages an accident with a wine cask that causes a riot. Poor, starving, frustrated people are all fighting to get at the spilled wine, to scavenge and drink every drop of it. Their faces, hands and clothes are all stained red, and one of them even scrawls the word “blood” on a nearby wall. The time would come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones...” Dickens writes, in what can only be viewed as a heavy-handed and yet visually powerful foreshadowing.

The revolution itself is almost another character. The scenes where Dickens describes the storming of the Bastille, and the violent mobs crying out for vengeance, are absolutely chilling. He was able to portray the bloodiness and violence of the revolution with great sympathy for the oppressed, though never once condoning the awfulness of their acts of retribution. The grossness of their violence is shown for the out of control sickness that it is. But he never lets his readers forget that such violence is not something that just “happened.” Instead, he focuses our attention again and again on the fact that violent seeds bear violent fruit. A civilization built on oppression should not one day be surprised when the oppressed rise up and show that they can be oppressors too. The power of sin is strong in Dickens’ worldview. And yet so is the medicine of mercy. That’s why his final prophetic vision of a “beautiful city” and a “brilliant people” arising from the ashes still speaks with such clarity and hope.

Copyright 2005, Befus