A TALE OF TWO CITIES - Reviewed by Naval Langa

Charles Dickens

To write a review of Charles Dickens’s novel is easy. It is as easy as selling the ice on Mt. Everest. Yes, it is so because a great number of the master writers and reviewers have already done it. Let me try it in a somewhat novel way.

Let me take the A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Why this novel? It is because, when I read the book first, I could not believe that the writer of Hard Times (1854) and Oliver Twist (1838) would choose such a historic subject. Here the master novelist pens a romantic story along with opening the social folios of the two cities: London and Paris. It was the best of times for London: the fruits of the industrial revolution were visible on the streets of London. It was the worst of the times for Paris: the French Revolution was at its highest boil.   

The Plot: A Story of Turmoil

Dr Manette and Lucie with Charles Darnay

The love relationship of two unusual characters, Lucy Manette and Charles Darney passed through the time narrated by Dickens as 'It was the best of the times; it was the worst of the times'. 

The couple made their way through strange circumstances. They were caught in a storm of the revolutionary atmosphere of late eighteenth-century France. And they would have hardly passed through it without offering abnormal responses to the situation they were forced to face.

The story is painted on a torn canvas of turbulent London where mockery of the law had replaced justice, the guns were necessary articles for travellers, and the fresh graves were excavated for selling the parts of dead bodies. The warehouse of France in general and the theatre of Paris, in particular, were worse than London.

The Storming of the Bastille 

The last phase of feudalism and the haunted conscience of French peasants had outrun all the notions of civility and human behaviour. 

The movement of peasants for removing the tyrant rulers partially ended on the fall of the prison of Bastille. All the prisoners were freed from the Bastille jail. Dr Manette, the father of Lucy Manette, was one of them.

Lucy helped her father to come out of the obsession of his jail-phase. She took charge of the boat and sailed through the demanding process of curing his father and developing her relationship with Charles. 

A migrant from France and language teacher in London school, Charles Darney had an aristocratic lineage that he kept undisclosed until the day of his marriage with Lucy. But his aristocratic virtue of protecting one of his former loyalists drove him into the storm of France. He was caught; he was convicted for merely having the aristocratic lineage, and he was to be executed.

Sydney Carton

Dr Manet freed him once. Again he was jailed. However, he was ultimately freed through unexpected assistance from a former lover of Lucy, Sydney Carton. His face was similar to the face of Charles. 

Sydney Carton replaced himself in Charles' place in the jail, sacrificing his life for saving the life of the husband of the woman whom he loved. 

For the other characters, we can say that each one has his or her uniqueness. We take the name and we brand each one of them with a particular characteristic: Mr Jarvis Lorry (a man of business), Mr Defarge (loyal servant, a level-headed revolutionist), Mrs Defarge (diehard revolutionary, no space for mercy), Mrs Pross (a loyal, motherly figure), and Jerry Cruncher (very difficult to describe, but an obedient servant). They all walked with the story, making its flow lucid and the contents rich.

How to Create Believable Characters - Learning From Charles Dickens

If you want to know how the characters in novels are created; if you want to experience how they are made lively, the reading of A Tale of Two Cities would be a good guide.

Dickens’s characterization of the men and women in A Tale of Two Cities is vividly realistic. Some of them act a little bit dramatic, as and when the plot of the novel demands so. Jarvis Lorry, a simple-minded banker and Madame Defarge, a diehard revolutionary, never depart from the strict necessities attached with their occupations. 

Dr Manette turns himself into an advocate and takes the tools of a saviour in his hands. He had a mission to save his son-in-law from a certain death penalty.

Charles Dickens was the technician of the craft writing. He used symbols as effective tools for helping the larger picture of his novel, to make the story easily explained. Unlike a well-sculptured use of powerful symbols in his other novels, in A Tale Of Two Cities, he used sharp adjectives and salient humour. While caricaturing the host of characters, he displayed his masterly art of telling about the aspects of contemporary society. 

Mme Defarge confronts Miss Pross 

As a historic novelist, he narrated the pros and cons of the ongoing revolution in France. The description of the characters is such that if by chance any one of them passes by us, we would immediately tell that ‘this is Jerry Cruncher (from his unique style of walking) or this is Lucy (by seeing her serene beauty), or this is Madame Defarge (from the frozen lava of her anger)’.

The dialogues go with the characters. Mr Lorry and Dr Manette are professionals. They represented the cultured face of the time. Madame Defarge is the firebrand lady representing the wrath of the revolutionaries of contemporary France. 

As the novel was to be published as serial in a newspaper, the beginning and the end of each chapter tend to be loaded with gunshot sentences. And when a writer like Dickens fires a shot, it is heard up to far pavilions. He did not give us characters; he gave us the models of people. 

In real life, you would find a replica of every man and woman Dickens depicted in his novels. Becoming the mother of children with impressive looks, Dickens had created a crowd of characters. They are proud; they are feeble. They are generous; they are greedy. 

They are coward; they are bold. Dickens read the life before his eyes and used it for his creations. For 180 years, the readers have loved them to read and remember.

How to Write Humorously - Learning From Charles Dickens

In A Tale Of Two Cities, Dickens had distributed the humour among various pockets. We can summarise how he created humour:

• the way he described the characters, 
• the pretentious mannerism that the lords of the land followed in France, 
• and the narrative technique in which he had no competitor. 

While describing the human tragedies and follies of common men, he had endeavoured to infuse humour through the comedy of manners. However, he had not tried to soften the bitterness of the truth that the ongoing revolution was supposed to hold.

Charles Dickens had the courage to be an innovator. Standing against all the contemporary writers, he had chosen the subject like poverty in Oliver Twist. He obeyed his inner voice—his sincere service to the world in which he lived. Again, even if being the writer of neat fiction, he chose history as background for his novel A Tale of Two Cities. 

The writer of Domby and Sons and Martin Chuzzlewit had preferred to narrate the rigid truth of history without reservations, without making compromises. He chose the theme of history because it contained the hardest challenges the people had faced; he chose it because a larger portion of the people had at last responded to the wildest behaviour shown to them for a long period. 

Every drop of blood spilt on the street of Paris, every drop of the sweat fallen on the farms of feudal France, melted into each other and became the blade of the Guillotine. And then everything flew from the power of that Guillotine. Dickens picked up that theme; honoured it in its right perspective; and dealt with it using his masterly skill.

While reading Dickens, humour would not fail in helping our strains to disappear. It would make our mind lighter. Had Dickens not been a writer and the humorist as he was, he would have become a social activist. Such were the subjects he chose for his writings. 

A Tale of Two Cities, a novel that runs overloaded with the hard facts of an ongoing revolution, it contains the salient stock of wits and irony. Though the thematic compulsions restrained Dickens to become outright humorist; he fully counterbalanced it while caricaturing some of the characters.

If we look at the novel from a different angle, then war or a revolution is the greatest satire itself. Mankind has never learnt a lesson from the past. We go on slaughtering each other without realising the futility of our actions. Perhaps that was the biggest message this novel should have delivered. 

A Tale of Two Cities is a masterpiece novel. It had always sparkled like a gem on a bookshelf. 

[Images courtesy Charles Dickens enwiki,  Charles Edmund Brock, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons  - The Storming of the Bastille Jean-Pierre Houël 1789 Watercolour    National Library of France, Paris - Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons -  Fred Barnard, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons ]