Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities. Pub. 1859. Ed. Andrew Sanders. Oxford World's Classics, 1998 (repr. 2008).

General Notes

• The extent to which this is a multimedia object since (see Appendix A, p. 363-4) it was published in AYR in weekly numbers (30 April-26 Nov 1859), already stated on the serial page as being "In Three Books" for triple-decker publication, then Dickens planned out monthly numbers with illustrations by Phiz from June-December 1859. In a sense, this is even more the case than Great Expectations (Dickens, 1861) because of this and since the last page of the serial form ends with the beginning of Woman in White (Wilkie Collins, 1860)

Reading Notes

• intro Sanders says that individuals always escape institutions rather than institutions reforming themselves in Dickens, and yet the double figures of Darnay and Carton

(or Pip and Orlick, Wrayburn and Headstone) suggest that identity does not reside neatly in the individual body (thinking of Armstrong 2005 here somewhat)

• dickens said (according to Slater's biography) that he wanted the novel to be plot rather than character oriented
• impt and innovative too that he designed it to be published weekly and monthly simultaneously (tho the former sapped market share for the latter)
• 7 cf Bowen 2009 for a Derridean reading of the famous first para
  • I note the shift from "it" to "we" as an enfolding of the present in the past, turning time inside out
  • also positive being critiqued by negative
• 16 strange opening para of ch 3 about secrecy and individual incomprehensibility
• 22 "his mind was busy digging, digging, digging in the red coals": inner and outer boundary between body and space not as firm in dickens as in, say, Eliot
• 25 Lorry describes himself as a speaking machine
• 26 "immense pecuniary Mangle" - not unlike wiglomeration in Bleak House (1852), and Micawber has a similar term in David Copperfield (1849)
• Lucie a ward of Tellson's Bank, as Esther Summerson of the state
• 32 analogy between revolutionary bloodletting and the carnivalesque spilled wine
• 42 Manette's yellowing white appearance and reclusion prefigures Miss
  • though by book 2 in 1780 he's recovered
• 48 the difficulty of interiority when describing Manette: "No human intelligence could have read the mysteries of his mind, in the scared blank wonder of his face."
  • trauma has stopped time for him, again like Havisham
• 52 "Your bank notes had a musty odour, as if they were fast decomposing into rags again."
• Abyssinia and Ashantee - black African kingdoms. Note mentions CD wrote about the Ashanti in HW
• 60 compare Darnay to Manette on 48 "as an emotion of the mind will express itself through any covering of the body..."
• 61 nice free indirect discourse thru Cruncher, who gets some details wrong
• 76 Lucie is "the golden thread that united [Manette] to a Past beyond his misery, and to a Present beyond his Misery"
• 81 Carton's saturnine jealousy of Darnay and Lucie
• 83 Stryver calls Carton "Memory" presumably for his help with legal briefs
• 94 Manette physicalizing memory by pacing - Miss Prosser says his mind is still in prison then
• 102 in his rather garish satire of the ancien regime he says "the leprosy of unreality" is the feature of all who attend on Monseigneur
• 107 the boy the marquis hits with his carriage becomes "a bundle"
• 113 Louis xiv furniture as material history, "illustrations of old pages in the history of France"
• 116-7 the marquis represents despotic cruelty, Darnay enlightenment social contract liberalism
• 118 interesting doubling pattern - the marquis and Darnay's father were twins
• 120 this overnight passage of time sequence reminiscent of the survey right before shots ring out when Tulkinghorn is murdered in Bleak House
• 129 here Manette says "I can make no guess at the state of her heart" ant Lucie
• 132 "fogs atmospheric and fogs legal" directly recalling bleak house
• 144 Carton says he is like one who died young - he's of a category with Richard Carstone, perhaps, a character whose bildung got routed on the wrong track and who is aware of the difficulty of changing tack (though Richard's knowledge comes much too late)
  • "the mystery of my own wretched heart" -- he's really problematizing the knowability of motive and of fiction's ability to discern and analyze it
• 169 "chateau and hut...and as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light...so sublimes intelligences" etc -- ways of knowing and interpreting being contemplated here along one presumes with history as a way of knowing
• 178 and elsewhere Madame Defarge knits intelligence into her craft
• 188 Manette obsessively regresses to making shoes
  • 192 he loses time, thinking Lucie had gotten married the day before when he'd been obsessively working 9 days
  • the relation between knowledge, memory, and obsession, the "delicate organization of the mind" (195)
  • and on 196-7 the way memory and disorder reside in objects, namely his shoemaking materials
• 202-3 time as echoes and a device for narrative passing time
• 207ff Defarges et al storming the Bastille
  • 210 they light a fire from Manette's old cell
• 213-24 chs 22 and 23 which narrate revolutionary violence in Paris and in the Marquis' village, are vivid and dramatic, rather narrationally straightforward too
• 225 figuring time as natural disaster during the Revolution
• 226 nice joke about the spirits of the ancien regime naturally haunting a bank
• 231-2 Gabelle's letter likely a ruse to lure Darnay back to France
• 243 "but never by me, citizen Defarge": the enlightenment liberal individual up against class warfare collectivity
• 244 again the question of motive, responsibility, agency, and how history works in contemplating proleptically the guillotine and the Terror
  • the receipts for Darnay exchanging hands - is dickens already highlighting the bureaucratization of the Revolution?
• 247 Darnay's fragmented and repetitive thoughts ("scraps") in solitary confinement
• 252 phantasmagoria of poor people in rags sharpening bloody weapons
• 258 Lorry's "secret mind" troubled by the Defarges even as he tells Lucie to be brave
  • what is the relationship between the highlighting of the problem of individual characterization given their "secret minds" and the problem of motive and responsibility on the larger scale of history? History as a mode of knowing and understanding but also as a way of structuring and even determining agency and time?
• 259 Defarge on the prison tribunal - he mysteriously seems to be everywhere, like Bucket
• 260 Manette's own history of suffering he now considers teleological: it gives him Powerade strength
  • Lorry thinks he's like a clock that's been set going again
• 262 scales up from Manette to broader strokes of history beginning again in revolutionary time
• 267-8 the Carmagnole dance: again such a profound fear of collectivity that it has to be represented in gothic terms
• 274 the difficulty of assigning a motive to why the crowd supported Darnay's release
  • is this perhaps the relation: that history highlights the problem of agency and motive which fiction claims to be able to read?
• 281 interesting that in the space of one weekly number (2 chapters) Darnay is freed and then denounced again by the Defarges
• 285 Barsad is none other than Ms Pross's brother Solomon (a nice Dickensian coincidence)
• 288 Barsad is a double agent for the English, it seems? No
  • he was in league with Cly, whose coffin Cruncher found empty when he worked as a resurrection man
• 298 Lorry says his memory cycles back around now that he is old
• 301 "tomorrow and tomorrow" recalling Macbeth, the only direct Shakespeare allusion so far
• carton repeats "I am the resurrection and the life" -- the cycling and doubling of this theme through Manette, Cruncher, Carton
• 305 cliffhanger as Defarge prepares to read Manette's prison statement and then a chapter break til the next weekly installment (#27)
  • a gothic device this, and an interruption of the past in the present, 1767 in 1793 (retroactive causality?)
  • the upshot being Manette denouncing the Evremondes for brutality toward a poor family which landed him in prison the first time
• 327 Mrs Defarge is family with the brother and sister brutalized by rage Evremondes
• 328 Manette relapse again
• 334 paragraph about the questions Darnay asks himself the morning of his execution - moving
• 344 Madame Defarge talking about her husband's weaknesses -- very Lady Macbeth