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 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 historical 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
Darnay 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 to remove the tyrant rulers partially ended
with the fall of the prison of the 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 a London school, Charles
Darney had an aristocratic lineage that he kept undisclosed until the day of
his marriage to 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.
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| 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 own 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 characterisation 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 to 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 master of the craft of 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.
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| Mme Defarge confronts Miss Pross. |
As a historical novelist, he narrates 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 a 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 created a crowd of characters. They are proud;
they are feeble. They are generous; they are greedy.
They are cowardly; they are
bold. Dickens read the life before his eyes and used it for his creations. For 180 years, the readers have loved these characters 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 dared to be an innovator. Standing against all the
contemporary writers, he had chosen the subject of poverty in Oliver Twist. He obeyed his inner voice—his sincere service to the world in which he lived. Again,
even though he was the writer of neat fiction, he chose history as the background for
his novel A Tale of Two Cities.
The writer of Domby and Sons and Martin
Chuzzlewit 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 streets of Paris,
every drop of 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 minds lighter. Had
Dickens not been a writer and the humorist that 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 is overloaded with the hard facts of an ongoing
revolution, contains the salient stock of wit and irony. Though the
thematic compulsions restrained Dickens from becoming an 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.
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