[In the following essay, Baldridge explores an aspect of the French Revolution depicted in A Tale of Two Citiesthat he claims has been neglected by critics: the assertion that “the group, the class, the Republic—and not the individual—comprise, or should comprise, the basic unit of society.”]

Dickens's ambivalence toward the Revolution he depicts in A Tale of Two Cities has been the subject of much thoughtful comment, and over the past few decades a number of differing causes for this ambivalence have been proposed. George Woodcock, for instance, sees in the “vigor” with which the author depicts the scenes of Revolutionary violence a kind of vicarious retribution against the society which betrayed him in his youth: “in one self [Dickens] is there, dancing among them, destroying prisons and taking revenge for the injustices of childhood.”¹ Others have interpreted it as the result of the author's fitful attempts to work out an overarching theory of history, or to adapt Carlyle's ideas on historical necessity to the needs of his fictional genre.² Some critics have even pointed out parallels between the methods of the Jacquerie and the literary techniques employed by Dickens himself.³ What I shall do here is to focus upon one particular aspect of the Revolutionary regime in A Tale which has received less attention than most, and attempt to put forward a largely political explanation for Dickens's ambivalence concerning it. The aspect I refer to is the Revolution's assertion that the group, the class, the Republic—and not the individual—comprise, or should comprise, the basic unit of society. The corollaries which spring from this belief (and which are themselves fully depicted in the text) will also be considered: that all merely personal claims must defer to those of the polity as a whole; that the minds and hearts of citizens must be laid bare to the scrutiny of the community; and that virtues and guilt, rights and responsibilities, inhere in groups rather than in individuals. My contention is that Dickens's deep dissatisfaction with the social relations fostered by his own acquisitive and aggressively individualist society leads him at times to explore with sensitivity and even enthusiasm the liberating possibilities offered by an ideology centered elsewhere than upon the autonomous self. As we shall see, what emerges is a subversive subtext to the narrator's middle-class horror at the collectivist Revolutionary ideology promulgated behind the barricades of Paris.

In what follows I shall be employing the interpretive strategies of neo-Marxist hermeneutics in a way which some readers may find troubling, in that it might appear that I am crediting Dickens with mounting some sort of proto-Marxist critique of his society. In fact, nothing of the kind is intended. Rather, I mean only to suggest that while Dickens finds much to disparage in the Revolutionary regime he depicts, he nevertheless understands at some level that it offers stark alternatives to the social relations undergirding those aspects of Victorian England that he also thoroughly despises, and that because of this an undercurrent of sympathy makes its way into the text despite his explicit intention to paint the Jacquerie as bloodthirsty, implacable, and deranged. Dickens, who will have no truck with schemes of social amelioration which depend upon class-conflict, is far from being a cultural materialist, even when he thunders most vehemently against the abuses of industrial capitalism. One can, however, safely credit him with comprehending a relationship between a society's view of the individual and the economic and interpersonal texture of its daily life. This act of understanding is all I mean to burden Dickens with by way of an “authorial intention,” and surely much of the sympathy I find for the Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities escaped the novelist's conscious control. If the terminology I employ to describe all this is that of our century rather than his, this is not done in order to paint Dickens the Marxist he wasn’t, but rather to bring to bear what I believe to be a reasonably precise and nuanced hermeneutical technique upon a text whose politics is complicated by its author's peculiar set of personal ambivalences and historical limitations.

I

Clearly, we should not expect any such countervailing current of thought as the one outlined above to emerge except in thoroughly disguised and displaced forms, for, as W. J. Harvey long ago pointed out, the assumptions of bourgeois individualism are central to the enterprise of Victorian novelists generally and to that of Dickens in particular. Middle-class orthodoxy posits the discrete human subject as primary and inviolable, a move which Harvey declares to be the indispensable core of Classical Liberalism, that ideology which he credits both with nurturing the infant genre of the novel in the eighteenth century and assuring its triumph in the nineteenth. Broadly defined, Liberalism is, says Harvey, a “state of mind [which] has as its controlling centre an acknowledgment of the plenitude, diversity and individuality of human beings in society, together with the belief that such characteristics are good as ends in themselves,” and he goes on to assert that “tolerance, skepticism, [and] respect for the autonomy of others are its watchwords” while “fanaticism and the monolithic creed [are] its abhorrence.”⁴ Harvey's phrasing may strike some as overly laudatory, but it does help to underscore why the chronically permeable barriers of the self in A Tale of Two Cities constitute such a politically dangerous issue: in depicting the Revolution, the text takes pains to portray—and to roundly denounce—a counter-ideology to Classical Liberalism, in which the claims of the individual are assumed to be secondary to those of the collectivity, and in which the individual is seen as anything but sacrosanct. It should come as little surprise, then, that Dickens's most forceful statement of subversive sympathy for the Revolution's attack upon the idea of the discrete subject, his most anguished confession of ambivalence concerning the bourgeois notion of an inviolable individual, comprises what has long been considered merely an “anomalous” or “digressive” portion of the text—I refer specifically to the “Night Shadows” passage, a striking meditation upon the impenetrable barriers separating man from man which has proved perennially troublesome to readers.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them? (p. 44)

The relationship of this passage to the major concerns of the novel has struck many a critic as problematic. Some have sought to link it with the rest of the text merely by pointing out its similarities to Carlyle's practice of dramatizing the miraculous hidden within the mundane, and thus to account for it as yet another example of the literary influence of Dickens's occasional mentor.⁵ A more ambitious explanation of its thematic significance is attempted by Catherine Gallagher. She, claiming that Dickens depicts the Revolutionary ideology as ruthlessly inquisitive in order to make his own, novelistic invasion of the private sphere appear benign by comparison, sees the passage as a reassuring statement that novelists are needed by modern society to overcome a “perpetual scarcity of intimate knowledge,” despite the lines' melancholy ring.⁶ I shall return to this argument later.) Most critics, however, follow the lead of Sylvère Monod in simply seeing it as an anomaly. Monod, who posits several distinct narrators for A Tale, asserts that he who speaks this address is employing “the philosopher's I” and that such a device “is used for general statements, not in order to convey any impression of the narrator as an individual person.”⁷ J. M. Rignall agrees, insisting that “the brooding, first-person voice is never heard again in the novel,” that the passage is at best awkwardly related to the scene which immediately follows it, and that it cannot be said to illuminate “the general condition of life as it appears in the novel.”⁸

It is Rignall's contention that I specifically wish to take issue with, for I believe that there is in fact a broadly thematic resonance to the passage—a resonance which is crucial to the book's attitudes concerning bourgeois individualism and its supposedly detested alternatives. To begin with, it is significant that all the above critics, whatever their varying degrees of bafflement or insight, call attention to the passage's tone, for it is that aspect of the “digression” which, I believe, can most quickly lead us into its involvement with the novel's political contradictions. While the adjectives used to describe this supposed fact concerning contemporary social relations are not explicitly derogatory, the atmosphere of the paragraph as a whole is distinctly—nay, poignantly—that of a lament. What clearly comes across is a deeply felt sadness and frustration before the impermeableness of the barriers between self and self—a despairing desire to merge the discrete and opaque personalities dictated by Gesellschaft and to enter a state of communal knowledge and even communal being. Reflecting upon the iron-clad separation of souls within the “great city” may indeed provoke wonder and awe—but it also clearly elicits a wish that things might be otherwise.

The imagery employed in the passage is also pertinent if we remember that the working title of A Tale was “Buried Alive,” for the passage continually attempts to blur the distinction between life and death, presenting a portrait of urban existence as a kind of living entombment. Not only does the incommunicability of souls have “something of the awfulness, even of Death itself … referable” to it, but the narrator, in his quest for closer communion with his fellow beings, speaks of himself as looking into “depths” for “glimpses of buried treasure.” Furthermore, the deaths of his friend, neighbor, and love are described as “the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation” of their isolated, living states—as if these people are most true to their nature only after they have ceased to breathe. The final sentence, in which the corpses in actual graveyards are declared to be “sleepers” no more “inscrutable” than the town's “busy inhabitants,” completes the equation of the living community with that of the dead. What the narrator has accomplished here is graphically to portray the “great city” as a metropolis in which everyone is virtually “buried alive”: to depict a condition of society in which each citizen goes about his everyday offices—and even endures his supposedly most intimate moments—enclosed in a sarcophagus of impenetrable individuality. As we shall see, this damning critique of the way we live now inaugurates the subversive subtext which runs beside and beneath the narrator's subsequent denigration of the French Revolution's insistence that collectivities must supersede the individual as the fundamental unit of social life; it is here that we can apprehend the first movement of that counter-current which dares to consider the ideology of the Jacquerie as a possible escape from the “solitary confinement” mandated by bourgeois individualism.

We should now briefly glance at the narrator's “official” condemnation of the Revolution's propensity to merge individuals together into larger conglomerations, for much of what is denigrated here will appear later in altered forms which the novel will tacitly approve. One technique which Dickens employs in this regard is that of taking the Revolutionary government's organization of Paris by supposedly socially homogeneous “sections” a step further and relentlessly anthropomorphizing the district of Saint Antoine. Needless to say, the section, as a character, is almost always depicted as a villain: “The hour was come, when Saint Antoine was to execute his horrible idea of hoisting up men for lamps to show what he could be and do. Saint Antoine's blood was up. … ‘Lower the lamp yonder!’ cried Saint Antoine, after glaring round for a new means of death” (p. 249). Indeed, all the Republic's citizens seem to move from one place to another as a single entity, and the tone used to describe such occurrences is always fraught with fear and condemnation. Instances here come quickly to mind: the echoing footsteps which merge the tread of suffering individuals into the thundering of a vengeful herd,⁹ the “sea” and “tide” of the Revolutionary mob breaking over the walls of the Bastille, and the dancing of the Carmagnole, during which the sexes seem to merge into a horrid androgyny and “five hundred people” become “five thousand demons” (p. 307). For our purposes the last of these is especially important, because in Dickens's assertion that the dancers' frightening communal gyrations are “types of the disjointed time” (p. 308), we can see his insistence that the morally detestable practice of subsuming the individual into the group has penetrated beyond the strictly political sphere and pervasively tainted other aspects of life. Clearly, then, the implication of all these passages is that collective action is necessarily evil action, that mass-movements by definition can give expression only to the basest instincts of the individuals who comprise them. Dickens's fear of mobs is of course a critical commonplace, but the very word “mob” only refers to a specific subclass among crowds—those inspired with violent intentions—whereas what in fact comes across from A Tale is the more blanketing notion that the moment any conglomeration of people can merit a collective lable, one is already in a politically disruptive realm: after all, the “character” who sows the Revolution is the equally hydra-headed “Monseigneur.” At the level of the novel's explicit rhetoric, Dickens doth protest too much.

The author also gets a good deal of mileage out of the revolutionary conspirators' habit of referring to each other by the code-name “Jacques”—indeed, when more than two plotters come together in a scene Dickens deliberately makes it difficult to remember who is speaking:

“How goes it, Jacques?” said one of the three to Monsieur Defarge. “Is all the spilt wine swallowed?”

“Every drop, Jacques,” answered Monsieur Defarge. …

“It is not often,” said the second of the three, addressing Monsieur Defarge, “that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine, or of anything but black bread and death. Is it not so, Jacques?”

“It is so, Jacques,” Monsieur Defarge returned. …

“Ah! So much the worse! A bitter taste it is that such poor cattle always have in their mouths, and hard lives they live, Jacques. Am I right, Jacques?”

“You are right, Jacques,” was the response of Monsieur Defarge. (pp. 64-65)

Although some of these exchanges verge upon the comic, there is, from the Victorian standpoint, always a palpable air of threat about them, for this blurring of personality and agency always takes place amidst talk of a violent conspiracy, thereby undermining the middle-class faith that guilt and innocence can be doled out in just portions to discrete and self-responsible subjects. These plotters eventually receive numbers, but, with the exception of the overtly sadistic Jacques Three, the effect is just the opposite of endowing them with distinct personalities. At the storming of the Bastille, for instance, we get the following call to arms, ostensibly from Defarge: “Work, comrades all, work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand, Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name of all the Angels or the Devils—which you prefer—work!” (p. 245). And, as with Monsieur Defarge's lieutenants, so with Madame's, for it has been noted that “The Vengeance” is one of several nicknames indicative of “the tendency toward generalization and abstraction” in the novel.¹⁰ This “tendency,” given the political concerns of A Tale, becomes highly subversive, for in a world of merely generic entities, the discriminations upon which bourgeois law and political economy depend simply cannot be made—the idea that “we are all equally guilty” is anathema to Victorian orthodoxy.

This brings us, of course, to Madame Defarge's attitudes concerning who deserves to suffer for the sins of the Ancien Regime, for these constitute the most sinister instance of moral collectivism the novel has to offer. When Darnay is arrested and flung into prison his defense rests upon his assertion that he is not personally responsible for the crimes either of the aristocracy in general or of his family in particular. This argument carries no weight with Madame, however, for her mind is simply incapable of focusing upon any moral entity so small and discrete as an individual—her roster of victims and villains being filled exclusively with the names of groups. Speaking of the Evrémondes, she says that “for other crimes as tyrants and oppressors [she has] this race a long time on [her] register, doomed to destruction and extermination” (p. 370, italics mine). Halting the slaughter at those who can claim innocence only for themselves and not their class strikes her as unsound:

“It is true what madame says,” observed Jacques Three. “Why stop? There is great force in that. Why stop?”

“Well, well,” reasoned [Monsieur] Defarge, “but one must stop somewhere. After all, the question is still where?”

“At extermination,” said Madame.

“Magnificent!” croaked Jacques Three. The Vengeance, also, highly approved. (p. 369)

Lucy—apparently intuiting the bent of Madame's mind in the heat of distress—appeals to her for mercy as a “sister-woman” as well as a wife and mother, but this bit of rhetoric, meant to mask a personal appeal in collectivist diction, fails to take in Madame Defarge: “We have borne this a long time. … Is it likely that the trouble of one wife and mother would be much to us now?” As Madame makes her way through the streets on her way to kill Lucy and the child, the narrator sums up that blind spot in her moral vision which the champion of bourgeois individualism cannot help but abhor: “It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them” (p. 391). Perhaps it is this mote, as much as the “red hue” of animalistic violence, which the narrator perceives in the eyes of the mob gathered round the bloody grindstone—eyes he wishes to “petrify with a well-directed gun” (p. 292).

II

I will now turn from A Tale of Two Cities’ explicit rhetoric to its countervailing subtext and examine those passages in which the novel's repressed desire to escape the constraints of its own prevailing ideology can best be discerned. My argument is that the sentiments voiced in the “anomalous” Night Shadows passage do in fact recur throughout the text, but that Dickens's sincere allegiance to the commonplaces of Classical Liberalism forces him to displace them in two directions: toward the comic and toward the private. The former movement is expressed through Jarvis Lorry's at best intermittently successful suppression of his own personal claims in the interest of Tellson's Bank, a process which is rendered yet more innocuous by that institution's exaggerated traditionalism and firm allegiance to bourgeois social practices. (This despite the fact that even the musty “House” is shot through with reminders of the darker results of collectivist modes of thought brewing across the Channel.) The latter—and more important—movement manifests itself in the trajectory of Sydney Carton's career. As we shall see, Carton's progress through the text first underscores the pernicious effects of bourgeois-capitalist conceptions of individualism, then affirms the heroic potential unleashed by abandoning them, only to turn back upon itself and to reaffirm the tenets of Classical Liberalism in its last hours. Furthermore, Carton is allowed to escape the culturally dictated bounds of the self only in a manner which obfuscates the process's ideological import: for a few crucial moments he and Darnay genuinely transcend those traditional barriers which wall off the inviolable individual from all his fellow beings, but this merging of a single discrete self with one other deflects a broad social goal of the Revolution into the realm of private psychology—and then too, it is performed as part of an attempt to thwart the very revolutionary practices it imitates in miniature.

Throughout the novel, Jarvis Lorry fights a losing battle to deny his individuality, constantly insisting that he possesses no “buried life” whatsoever, and that all his aims and desires are perfectly congruent with those of the institution for which he labors. In his first interview with Lucy, for instance, he begs her not to “heed [him] any more than if [he were] a speaking machine” (p. 54). He then goes on to explain that all his dealings with Tellson's customers are devoid of private emotional entanglements:

His [Manette's] affairs, like the affairs of many other French gentlemen and French families, were entirely in Tellson's hands. In a similar way I am, or I have been, trustee of one kind or other for scores of our customers. These are mere business relations, miss; there is no friendship in them, no particular interest, nothing like sentiment. I have passed from one to another in the course of my business life, just as I pass from one of our customers to another in the course of my business day; in short, I have no feelings; I am a mere machine. (p. 54)

In such capacity does Lorry claim to turn his “immense pecuniary Mangle” with “no time for [feelings], no chance of them.” Goaded by Carton about the way his loyalty to Tellson's seems to take personal proclivities, the banker testily reminds him that “men of business, who serve a House, are not [their] own masters” and “have to think of the House more than [them]selves” (p. 113). Indeed, when Lorry shakes hands, he does so “in a self-abnegating way, as one who shook for Tellson and Co”—a trait “always to be seen in any clerk at Tellson's who shook hands with a customer when the House pervaded the air” (p. 172). “The House,” of course, is both the shorthand name for Tellson's as a whole and the only title ever bestowed upon its director—touches which heighten the sense of the Bank as a single organism, staffed only by a host of undifferentiated cells.

Lorry's relentless assertion that he gladly subsumes his own will into that of the firm “whose bread [he has] eaten these sixty years” (p. 266)—the fact that he claims (and at times truly seems) to have no desires which can be distinguished from the collective aims of “the House”—clearly suggests a parallel with the Jacquerie. The banker, like the model citizen of the Revolutionary Republic, defines himself first and foremost as part of a collectivity, and only secondarily as an individual. Related to this is Lorry's contention that he is a completely transparent being, the entire contents of whose mind and heart can be effortlessly read because they are writ large upon the public aspirations of the collectivity he serves. Now as Gallagher points out, it is precisely the Revolution's adamant “demands for transparency” and its practice of the “universal watchfulness” (p. 275) needed to insure it that “the narrator finds particularly abhorrent,” since, as the novel purports to demonstrate, such a state of affairs can only be guaranteed by “a whole population practic[ing] surveillance on itself, a surveillance that ultimately destroys.”¹¹ A paradox clearly arises: the parallels enumerated above would all appear to denigrate Lorry, but of course the banker's career emerges as anything but sinister. Indeed, as Albert Hutter rightly notes, Lorry seems to gain mobility, strength, and even renewed youth from his unswerving devotion to Tellson's,¹² and no one can dispute the fact that his subsumption of self into the collective enterprise of the Bank endows his life both with a beneficent purposefulness and (for all his talk of heartlessness) an unproblematic sociality which that of A Tale's protagonist signally lacks. But with so many ties to the dogmas of Paris, why should this be so? The explanation, I think, can be approached by recalling the Night Shadows passage, for if Lorry's immaculate “citizenship” within Tellson's associates his service with the totalitarian aspirations of the Tribunals, it also exempts him from residence in the “great city” depicted by that striking segment. In other words, Lorry's devotion to “The House” renders him largely devoid of the terrifying and impenetrable secrets possessed by the denizens of that bourgeois metropolis of the prematurely buried, where the most significant fact about individuality is the utter opacity with which it confronts all attempts at genuine knowledge and communion. If the Revolutionaries of Paris are blind and intoxicated in their frenzied hurtlings, the inhabitants of the Night Shadows city are frozen in ice, and to the extent that the elderly banker inclines toward the practice of the former, he avoids the paralysis of the latter. The enveloping shackles of bourgeois orthodoxy thus partially cast off, Lorry is free to act as the novel's factotum of beneficence until Carton awakes from his own lethargy. Already Dickens's “digression” on the unknowable nature of his fellow citizens begins to nudge its way towards the novel's (suppressed) thematic center.

The physical depiction of Tellson's itself is likewise imbued with palpable ambivalence. On the one hand, what keeps Lorry's selfless devotion to the Bank safely within the confines of the comic is that institution's unswerving allegiance to a fusty—and exceedingly English—tradition. Indeed, its partners' unashamed pride in its “smallness,” “darkness,” “ugliness,” and “incommodiousness” (p. 83) links Tellson's with the decidedly unreformed England of 1780 and allows it to function as a specifically Burkean counterweight to the programmatic rationalism of the Revolution. Thus while Lorry's devotion to the House may resemble the Jacquerie's commitment to the Republic, the entity he serves could not be more different. Moreover, banking is a profession which in some measure depends upon secrecy and opacity, and which often serves interests opposed to those of the state. When Lorry is sent to France late in the book, for instance, he sets about saving what he can of his clients' property from the Revolution's program of confiscation and nationalization.

Still, there are odd echoes of the Terror cheek by jowl with the comic “Olde England” trappings of Tellson's. For instance, if the single-minded business sense of Lorry and the Bank as a whole are, as claimed above, reminiscent of the Revolution's totalizing dynamic, it should come as no surprise that Lorry labors over “great books ruled for figures, with perpendicular iron bars to his window as if that were ruled for figures too, and everything under the clouds were a sum” (p. 172). More graphically still, Tellson's is linked to the Revolution by its alarming proximity to the corpses of those executed by the state and the consequent violent intrusion of the political sphere into a previously sacrosanct domestic realm:

Your lighter boxes of family papers went up-stairs into a Barmecide room, that always had a great dining-table in it and never had a dinner, and where, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty, the first letters written to you by your old love, or by your little children, were but newly released from the horror of being ogled through the windows, by the heads exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or Ashantee. (p. 84)

Perhaps, though, the ambivalence with which the novel views Lorry's position can best be shown by a statement of the banker's which abuts upon two well-known Dickensian attitudes: a belief, on the one hand, in the Carlylean gospel of work and, on the other, a view of childhood as a realm to be protected at all costs from the intrusion of adult anxieties and responsibilities because it is the age when the crucial imaginative faculty is either nurtured or starved. Late in the book Lorry confesses to a resurgent Carton: “I have been a man of business, ever since I have been a man. Indeed, I may say that I was a man of business when a boy” (p. 339). No passage better illustrates the promises and costs which are implicitly weighed against one another in Lorry's comic renunciation of the “buried life” which is both his birthright and curse in Liberal society.

III

In turning our attention to Sydney Carton we must adopt a more diachronic approach, for whereas the very constancy of Lorry's relationship with Tellson's plays a part in revealing Dickens's ambivalence about Revolutionary notions of individualism, it is precisely the sudden, erratic reversals in Carton's career which do the most to illuminate A Tale's subversive subtext. When we first encounter Sydney, he appears to be the very embodiment of the secretive and unfathomable individual lamented in the Night Shadows passage.¹³ Darney, his outward double, feels as if he is in “a dream” in his presence (p. 114), and indeed no one else—not Lorry, certainly, or even Stryver—has much of a clue as to what he is really about. The political implications of Carton's opaque character come to the fore as soon as we recall the work he performs, for as Stryver's “jackal” he enacts what can almost be termed a parody of the division of labor which upholds bourgeois capitalism. He and Stryver, it should be remembered, divide between them what should rightly be the labor of a single person, and furthermore, this “division” is anything but equitable—Carton performs the labor, Stryver garners the credit. Moreover, the very nicknames “jackal” and “lion” seem to replicate the social practices of Victorian society at large, heaping opprobrium upon the faceless who sell their labor, lauding the famous who purchase it. As Rignall—pointing to this same connection between unreadable character and exploitative labor relations—puts it, Carton's “gloomy estrangement … suggests the neurotic price that may be exacted by the aggressive pursuit of individual success, by the bourgeois ethos of individual endeavor in its most crassly careerist form.”¹⁴ Carton, then, though distinctly odd, is in a real sense a typical citizen of Dicken's nocturnal city of unknowable individuals: the victim of alienated labor, he too is “buried alive.” Thus, if we now recall Lorry's attitude toward his “business” at Tellson's—so fraught with Revolutionary connotations—and contrast them with Carton's view of his own labors, the following exchange between Sydney and the banker takes on a new significance:

“And indeed, sir,” pursued Mr. Lorry, not minding him, “I really don’t know what you have to do with the matter. If you’ll excuse me, as very much your elder, for saying so, I really don’t know that it is your business.”

“Business! Bless you, I have no business,” said Mr. Carton.

“It is a pity you have not, sir.”

“I think so too.”

“If you had,” pursued Mr. Lorry, “perhaps you would attend to it.”

“Lord love you, no!—I shouldn’t,” said Mr. Carton. (p. 113)

Carton possesses “no business” and further confesses that he has always “fallen into” his proper “rank,” which he describes as “nowhere” (p. 120). Now, since in Lorry's case it is precisely “doing business” which beneficently makes him as one with the collectivity of the House, Carton's having no business can be taken as yet another marker of his perverse (but socially endemic) isolation from all larger communities, an isolation which renders his life and labor meaningless.

With all this in mind, I would like to suggest a reading of Carton's name which will perhaps prove more useful than the various scramblings of the author's initials attempted in the past. “Carton,” in nineteenth-century parlance, refers to layers of paper which have been treated and pressed until they have attained the sturdiness of cardboard or pasteboard, while the related word “carton-pierre” denotes a kind of papier-mâché used to imitate much harder materials such as stone or bronze. Even more suggestive is the term “cartonage,” by which archaeologists signified the layers of linen or papyrus which were pressed and glued together to fashion the close-fitting mummy cases of the ancient Egyptians. In light of what has been said so far, it thus seems plausible to see the name as a cautiously hopeful comment upon the protagonist's enforced estrangement from his fellow beings. On the one hand, it is a label which draws attention to his predicament of isolation amidst a society whose creed of acquisitive individualism goes far towards turning all its citizens into selfenclosed enigmas—or, if you like, mummies in the nocturnal City of the Dead. Simultaneously, however, it seems to hint at the original flimsiness and permeability of those barriers, reminding us that what encloses and separates is merely a superfluity of material actually translucent, or gossamer calcified. The name then, is one which both diagnoses the protagonist's moral ailment and hints at the availability of a cure.

As it happens, Sydney does eventually puncture the “carton” walls which close him off from the world; he does finally emerge from his sarcophagus of “cartonage.” This is accomplished through his remarkable commingling with Darnay on the eve of his execution, an escape from the constraints of bourgeois individualism which is prepared for by the fact that Carton and Darnay bear a strong physical resemblance to each other. It is important to remember, however, that up until the time when the novel's main characters are all assembled in Revolutionary Paris, Sydney is at best a radically defective Doppelgänger of Charles. In fact, early on, the former's “doublings” of the latter serve merely to emphasize the distance which separates them. When first juxtaposed at the trial, they appear “so like each other in feature, so unlike each other in manner” (p. 108), and soon afterwards Carton admits that he resents a mirror-image who only serves to remind him “what [he has] fallen away from” (p. 116). In England, Darnay appears as a close-dangling but ultimately frustrating possibility, his physical resemblance suggesting that closer communion between men should be possible, the pair's mutual unintelligibility underscoring how difficult it is, under prevailing circumstances, to achieve. It is only later in Paris, when Sydney determines to sacrifice himself for Darnay and Lucy, that the doublings become nearly perfect. Indeed, “doubling” is too pallid a word to describe adequately what goes on, for such a term still implies two separate identities, two discrete selves, whereas what actually occurs is more properly described as a veritable merging of two individuals into one.

The central irony which emerges from Carton's successful commingling with Darnay in prison is that Sydney's “cure” is effected in the shadow of the novel's explicit condemnation of the very practice which heals him, for while he participates in a process whereby one man is able to transcend the suffocating barriers of the bourgeois self, the Revolution's insistence that the same is to be done for all men meets with nothing but scorn. And here one can anticipate an objection: the obvious fact that Sydney and the Jacquerie see the annihilation of the conventional barriers between individuals as the means to ends which are diametrically opposed does not weaken this irony to the extent that one might initially suppose. Yes, Carton abandons his personal claims for the protection of bourgeois domesticity (one might even say for the Victorian hearth, since Sydney's figurative descendents are to recount his story for generations) while the Paris Tribunal demands that the individual subsume himself into the polity in order to speed the flourishing of, as the narrator puts it, the Republic One and Indivisible of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death. But my point is that the former cause rests upon the foundation stone of bourgeois individualism while the latter is committed to its destruction, and that Carton can only ensure the safety of Liberal society (in the form of the Darnays, Manette, Lorry, and Pross) by temporarily violating one of its fundamental tenets. To put it another way, Carton can only make the world safe for discrete subjects by temporarily ceasing to be one himself and thereby blocking the plans of a regime bent on abolishing the entire concept of the discrete subject forevermore.

Before taking up Sydney's story again, though, we must once more look briefly at the novel's orthodox denigration of Revolutionary practices. As Darnay's second trial gets underway, the Tribunal's attack upon “selfish” bourgeois individualism is in full swing. When Manette protests that he would never violate his domestic circle by denouncing his son-in-law to officers of the state—on account of his “daughter, and those dear to her” being “far dearer to [him] than [his] life”—the President reminds him that his priorities are dangerously counter-revolutionary:

“Citizen Manette, be tranquil. To fail in submission to the authority of the Tribunal would be to put yourself out of Law. As to what is dearer to you than life, nothing can be so dear to a good citizen as the Republic.”

Loud acclamations hailed this rebuke. The President rang his bell, and with warmth resumed.

“If the Republic should demand of you the sacrifice of your child herself, you would have no duty but to sacrifice her. Listen to what is to follow. In the meantime, be silent!” (p. 346)

Later, when Manette's own testament has been read and the inevitable verdict of “guilty” delivered, the narrator's account is strangely divided between horror and understanding. With biting irony, he recounts how the President suggests “that the good physician of the Republic would deserve better still of the Republic by rooting out an obnoxious family of Aristocrats, and would doubtless feel a sacred glow and joy in making his daughter a widow and her child an orphan” (p. 362). One can clearly hear in this passage the revulsion of a good Victorian—and yet, when explaining the scene as a whole, he calmly and fair-mindedly informs us that “one of the frenzied aspirations of the populace was, for imitations of the questionable public virtues of antiquity, and for sacrifices and self-immolations on the people's altar” (p. 362). For now, we will leave the book's conventional depiction of the Revolution with the surprising mildness of the phrase “questionable public virtues” still resonating and turn once more to Carton.

As Sydney takes his famous midnight walk the night before the second Parisian trial, his steps are dogged by religious images, and he repeats “I am the resurrection and the life” continually to himself as he wanders. At one point, though, he pauses to sleep, and, in a moment obviously fraught with symbolic meaning, awakes to find an analogue of his life in the motions of the Seine:

The strong tide, so swift, so deep, and certain, was like a congenial friend, in the morning stillness. He walked by the stream, far from the houses, and in the light and warmth of the sun fell asleep on the bank. When he awoke and was afoot again, he lingered there yet a little longer, watching an eddy that turned and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it on to the sea.—“Like me!” (p. 344)

When one considers that Sydney has resolved to sacrifice himself in order to thwart the collectivist wrath of the Revolution, this passage reads curiously indeed, for cutting across the obvious message concerning Carton's lassitude giving way to action, there is the further hint that to do so involves subsuming himself in a larger entity. One could perhaps suggest that he is being “absorbed” into the greater life of humanity at large or into the Christian dispensation were it not for the quite programmatic way in which “tide” and “sea” have been associated throughout A Tale with the Revolutionary mob. The “strong tide, so swift, so deep, and certain” which now appears as Carton's “congenial friend” and into which his life is “absorbed” may not partake of the violence of that which breaks against the Bastille, but the provocative choice of simile cannot help but alert us to a parallel between Sydney's path to personal salvation and the Revolution's recipe for a secular utopia beyond the constraints of bourgeois individualism.

This hint of a parallel between Sydney's desideratum and that of the Jacquerie is reinforced as his plan of rescue gets underway. On the evening after Darnay has been condemned, Carton urges Manette to try his influence with the judges one final time. Lorry, watching the doctor depart, opines that he has “no hope” that the old man will succeed. Carton agrees, and explains why he has sent him on what must be a futile mission. What is striking about this passage is that since Sydney has already made up his mind to replace Darnay upon the guillotine, but has not told the banker of his plan, he and Lorry have two different individuals in mind when they employ the pronouns “his” and “he”:

“Don’t despond,” said Carton, very gently; “don’t grieve. I encouraged Doctor Manette in this idea, because I felt that it might one day be consolatory to her. Otherwise, she might think ‘his life was wantonly thrown away or wasted,’ and that might trouble her.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” returned Mr. Lorry, drying his eyes, “you are right. But he will perish; there is no real hope.”

“Yes, He will perish: there is no real hope,” echoed Carton. And walked with a settled step, down-stairs. (p. 367)

This sharing of pronouns, causing momentary confusion about who is being referred to, is reminiscent of nothing so much as those passages in which Jacques speaks to Jacques. It is as if Carton had already ceased to be a discrete subject, his personality commingling with that of Darnay's as he approaches his salvational moment. This process of merging reaches its climax during the scene in Charles's cell, where the two, having already exchanged boots, cravats, coats, and ribbons, write what amounts to a joint letter to Lucy, Carton dictating as Darnay holds the pen. As the latter scribbles, Sydney gradually applies his hidden narcotic, so that we see Charles's individuality diffusing itself too, his consciousness drifting beyond its normal boundaries as he attempts to record Carton's sentiments:

“What vapour is that?” he asked.

“Vapour?”

“Something that crossed me?”

“I am conscious of nothing; there can be nothing here. Take up the pen and finish. Hurry, hurry!”

As if his memory were impaired, or his faculties disordered, the prisoner made an effort to rally his attention. As he looked at Carton with clouded eyes and with an altered manner of breathing, Carton—his hand again in his breast—looked steadily at him.

“Hurry, hurry!”

The prisoner bent over the paper, once more.

“‘If it had been otherwise;’” Carton's hand was again watchfully and softly stealing down; “‘I never should have used the longer opportunity. If it had been otherwise;’” the hand was at the prisoner's face; “‘I should but have had so much the more to answer for. If it had been otherwise—’” Carton looked at the pen and saw it was trailing off into unintelligible signs. (p. 381)

As any reader will attest, it is nearly impossible to read this passage without backtracking, for Dickens makes it especially difficult to keep the speakers straight for any length of time. And it is not only we who are confused as to who is being referred to, for soon afterwards Basard finds Sydney's unorthodox use of pronouns disconcerting:

“Have no fear! I shall soon be out of the way of harming you, and the rest will soon be far from here, please God! Now, get assistance and take me to the coach.”

“You?” said the Spy nervously.

“Him, man, with whom I have exchanged.” (p. 382)

Although Carton exchanges literal freedom for imprisonment in this scene, he simultaneously effects his escape from Dickens's solipsistic City of Dreadful Night, for the entombing barriers surrounding the discrete subject of Liberal society have momentarily been shattered. Furthermore, the imagery and wordplay here associate Sydney with the self-subsuming Jacquerie at the very moment when he prevents the Tribunal from executing the man Madame Defarge defines as the last of the “race” of Evrémondes.

That Dickens was aware at some level of the parallels he had drawn can be deduced from the violent reaction which occurs in the novel's final pages, for there he takes pains to insist that although Carton is in one sense just another face among a crowd of the condemned—one more victim of what is essentially a mass murder—he nevertheless stands out as a distinct individual whose personality will remain intact even beyond the grave. This reaction begins as the narrator follows his protagonist from cell to guillotine. After emphasizing that the prison officials are exclusively concerned about the “count” in the tumbrils—that there be fifty-two bodies in it—he goes on to provide us with a catalogue of the condemned's deportment which makes it clear that they are all quite discrete personalities:

Of the riders in the tumbrils, some observe these things, and all things on their last roadside, with an impassive stare; others, with a lingering interest in the ways of life and men. Some, seated with drooping heads, are sunk in silent despair; again, there are some so heedful of their looks that they cast upon the multitude such glances as they have seen in theatres, and in pictures. Several close their eyes, and think, or try to get their straying thoughts together. Only one, and he a miserable creature, of a crazed aspect, is so shattered and made drunk by horror, that he sings, and tries to dance. (p. 400)

Carton's own possibly “prophetic” speech at the foot of the scaffold gives us a taste of individualism triumphant, with Sydney personally persisting through the generations. He sees Lucy “with a child upon her bosom, who bears [his] name,” a child who eventually “win[s] his way up in that path of life which once was [his]” and who in turn fathers a “boy of [Carton's] name,” to whom he “tell[s] … [Sydney's] story, with a tender and faltering voice” (p. 404). Chris Vanden Bossche sums up the tone succinctly: “The image of self-sacrifice created by this speech puts the authenticity of that very self-sacrifice into question by envisioning a future that nearly effaces Darnay (only portraying his death) and foretelling a line of sons names for Carton.”¹⁵ Indeed, Sydney's “cartonage” of middle-class individuality seems so firmly and solidly back in place that not even the worm can worry it, and this sense of the protagonist's “haunting” both the place of his death and future generations is very much to the point, for it cancels out several passages in which the Revolution's practice of mass killing threatens to endorse their anti-individualist ideology by sheer weight of numbers and frequency. We have been told, for instance, that “before their cells were quit” of the fifty-two, “new occupants were appointed; before their blood ran into the blood spilled yesterday, the blood that was to mingle with theirs to-morrow was already set apart” (pp. 375-76). Earlier, the narrator informed us that death under the Revolutionary regime had become “so common and material, that no sorrowful story of a haunting Spirit ever arose among the people out of all the working of the Guillotine” (p. 343). Now haunting is the individualist pursuit par excellence—only individuals may haunt the living, not groups or classes. And thus Carton's death—and his subsequent life after death—stridently refute the collectivist ideology, insisting as they do both upon the individual's persistent influence in secular history and hinting of the spiritual indwelling which is the religious sanction for the discrete subject of Classical Liberalism, a subject conceived of as retaining its individuality even beyond the grave. As the author of A Tale of Two Cities was well aware, serious contemplations concerning the obscuring walls of the bourgeois self have “something of the awfulness, even of Death” about them.

IV

Dickens's novel of the French Revolution follows Little Dorrit in his canon, and much has been written about what attracted the author to a subject which, on the face of things, seems rather distant from his usual literary milieu. Of course we have Dickens's own words in the Preface explaining how he “conceived the main idea of the story” while acting in Collins's The Frozen Deep. The similarities between the central dramatic conflict of the play and the novel, however, tell us little as to why he chose to set his work mainly in Revolutionary Paris—after all, one may sacrifice oneself for a loved one and a rival in any number of possible situations. And then too, there is the problem of covering ground already pronounced upon—there is no other word for it—by his friend and mentor Carlyle. The obsequious tone of the Preface, in which he states that “it has been one of [his] hopes to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time” while simultaneously assuring us that “no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle's wonderful book” (p. 29) betrays the awkwardness and risk inherent in his project. I would suggest that it is possible the Revolution attracted him precisely because it allowed him to study, confront—and to some extent flirt with—modes of thought which claimed to offer a solution to what he perceived to be one of the pervasive diseases of his own society. To understand how clearly he did in fact see the endemic and secretive individualism which underlay his acquisitive culture as a blighting phenomenon, we need only glance back as far as his preceding novel. As Arthur Clennam walks the streets of London, his thoughts give rise to images which, as George Levine says, “speak with remarkable appropriateness as representative both of the plot(s) of Little Dorrit and of the texture of its world.”¹⁶ Notice again how in this passage, as in Sydney's case, opacity of character is inseparable from acquisitive activity—how nefarious economic practices are protected by the obscuring partitions which mask self from self:

As he went along, upon a dreary night, the dim streets by which he went seemed all depositories of oppressive secrets. The deserted counting-houses, with their secrets of books and papers locked up in chests and safes; the banking-houses, with their secrets of strong rooms and wells, the keys of which were in a very few secret pockets and a very few secret breasts; the secrets of all the dispersed grinders in the vast mill, among whom there were doubtless plunderers, forgers, and trust-betrayers of many sorts, whom the light of any day that dawned might reveal; he could have fancied that these things, in hiding, imparted a heaviness to the air. The shadow thickening and thickening as he approached its source, he thought of the secrets of the lonely church-vaults, where the people who had hoarded and secreted in iron coffers were in their turn similarly hoarded, not yet at rest from doing harm; and then of the secrets of the river, as it rolled its turbid tide between two frowning wildernesses of secrets, extending, thick and dense, for many miles, and warding off the free air and the free country swept by winds and wings of birds. (pp. 596-97)¹⁷

We are back in the “great city” of the Night Shadows passage, the city from which barricaded Paris, whatever its barbarous cruelties, allows Carton, his author, and us, a momentary escape. Dickens also writes in the Preface to A Tale: “I have so far verified what is done and suffered in these pages, as that I have certainly done and suffered it all myself” (p. 29). After tracing Lorry and Carton's well disguised escapes from the constricting confines of bourgeois individualism, one understands better just how secretly liberating the “doing” part of Dickens's enterprise must have seemed to him, and how truly he bespoke his deep frustration with Victorian culture in calling the era of the Revolution both the best and the worst of times.

Notes

1. George Woodcock, Introduction to A Tale of Two Cities (New York: Penguin, 1970). All subsequent citations from the novel refer to this edition.

2. See J. M. Rignall, “Dickens and the Catastrophic Continuum of History in A Tale of Two Cities,” ELH 51, 3 (Fall 1984): 575-87, and Jack Lindsay, “A Tale of Two Cities,” in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of “A Tale of Two Cities,” ed. Charles E. Beckwith (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1972), pp. 52-63.

3. See Catherine Gallagher, “The Duplicity of Doubling in A Tale of Two Cities,” DSA [Dickens Studies Annual] 12 (1983): 125-45.

4. W. J. Harvey, Character and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), p. 24.

5. Richard Dunn, “A Tale for Two Dramatists,” DSA 12 (1983): 117-24, 121, and Michael Timko, “Splendid Impressions and Picturesque Means: Dickens, Carlyle, and the French Revolution,” pp. 177-95, 186-87.

6. Gallagher, p. 141.

7. Sylvère Monod, “Dickens's Attitudes in A Tale of Two Cities,” NCF [Nineteenth-Century Fiction] 24, 4 (March 1970): 488-505, 497.

8. Rignall, p. 577.

9. Franklin Court, in “Boots, Barbarism, and the New Order in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities,” VIJ [Victorians Institute Journal] 9 (1980-81): 29-37, 34, points out that “by employing this particular stylistic device, Dickens can more convincingly present thousands of people—either the mob or the aristocracy—as a single power. The footsteps raging in Saint Antoine and echoing simultaneously in London can be viewed, therefore, as one gigantic, inanimate foot of a body that, in this instance, is the revolutionary mob.”

10. Gordon Spence, “Dickens as a Historical Novelist,” Dickensian 72, 1 (January 1976): 21-29, 25, and Robert Alter, “The Demons of History in Dickens's Tale,” Novel 2, 2 (Winter 1969): 15-42, 138-40.

11. Gallagher, pp. 133-34.

12. Albert D. Hutter, “Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities,” PMLA 93, 3 (May 1978): 448-62, 453.

13. Rignall, p. 583.

14. Rignall, p. 583.

15. Chris R. Vanden Bossche, “Prophetic Closure and Disclosing Narrative: The French Revolution and A Tale of Two Cities,” DSA 12 (1983): 209-21, 211.

16. George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), p. 166.

17. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (New York: Penguin, 1978).