SOURCE: “The Carlylean Vision of A Tale of Two Cities,” in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp. 23-35.

[In the following essay, first published in 1976, Marcus compares aspects of Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution with A Tale of Two Cities.]

A Tale of Two Cities is the most disparaged and least understood of Dickens's late novels. Overwhelmingly, the critics have judged the work a failure and dismissed it as intellectually superficial. According to this view, Dickens held only the most simpleminded view of history, and although the novel fictionalizes events whose memory haunted the Victorian era, it never places those events in the context of a coherent understanding of the processes of social change; the book is an amalgam of romantic melodrama based on Dickens's experience as an actor in Wilkie Collins's Frozen Deep and fragments taken from Carlyle's French Revolution, a work from which Dickens unsystematically borrowed details but not any conceptual framework. Thus understood, the novel splits in two; its connection between romance and the French Revolution seems tenuous and contrived. As Georg Lukács complains, “neither the fate of Manette and his daughter, nor of Darnay-Evrémonde, the least of all of Sidney Carton, grows organically out of the age and its social events.” Taylor Stoehr's very different approach to the novel also admits this split by disregarding Dickens's political ideas and interpreting the historical events as a ritual expiation through violence for the sexual violation that is the original cause of the action.

But in fact, the two plots are closely related, and that relationship points toward a much more complex vision of history than criticism has so far allowed. My discussion of this relationship will also suggest that Dickens's conceptual debt to Carlyle is much greater than recent criticism has recognized. Dickens and Carlyle share a common quest that informs the historical vision of A Tale of Two Cities: both writers seek ways in which people can socialize their energies in an age whose institutions seem at odds with any humanly valuable purpose. Dickens's exploration of revolutionary France resembles Teufelsdröckh's spiritual pilgrimage in Sartor Resartus and the exhortatory social criticism of Past and Present in the connection that it draws between the social and the psychic dimensions of historical crisis; the humane man finds himself caught in the mechanism of historical processes that move according to their own laws and that destroy any possibility of useful action. It is precisely this tie between the social and the psychic that unites the romantic and revolutionary plots of A Tale of Two Cities.

As Robert Alter has noted of the novel's French episodes, they are “intended to dramatize the ways in which human beings become the slaves of impersonal forces, at last are made inhuman by them.” But the English as well as the French episodes deal with the problem of historical dehumanization. At the end of the novel, Darnay and Dr. Manette retreat into the tranquillity of a secluded domestic circle, and that retreat has to be seen in the light of their failure as public men to influence the course of events. Thus their retreat and the quasi-religious redemption through love and self-sacrifice are actually strategies for coping with the characters' need to find a sense of fruitful relatedness in the face of the impossibility of solving social problems. For Dickens, the family and religion serve much the same function as religion and the corporate spirit did for Carlyle: they are means of humanizing the void left in the individual life by mechanistic social institutions.

In describing the relationship between Carlyle and Dickens, I am emphasizing the social and secular sides of Carlyle's works and his role as the interpreter of the Romantic tradition to Victorian England. In commenting on Carlyle's phrase “natural supernaturalism,” M. H. Abrams has said of the Romantic era that “the general tendency was, in diverse degrees and ways to naturalize the supernatural and to humanize the divine” (Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature). Certainly this description applies to Carlyle himself; for all of his explicitly religious interpretation of experience, the end result even in Sartor Resartus is a reorientation of the individual that allows him to experience a sense of purpose in his work. As George Levine has pointed out, Carlyle's contemporaries as well as many later readers saw Teufelsdröckh's spiritual pilgrimage as a call for “a moral and social as well as a religious revolution” (The Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macauley, Newman). Whether Carlyle is historically the only source of Dickens's efforts at dealing with the problem of the individual's relationship to his culture is not strictly demonstrable, although Dickens's own sense of himself as a disciple of Carlyle's certainly lends an air of plausibility to such speculation. But Carlyle did crystallize these problems for his age, and both men saw the crisis of their culture in similar terms. Thus Carlyle provides at the very least a useful model for understanding Dickens, and for seeing Dickens as the heir to the Romantic era's tendency to internalize historical phenomena. Like Carlyle and the Romantic poets, Dickens is concerned with defining the possibilities for self-fulfillment in a society whose institutions seem inimical to all that is distinctively human.

From the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens concentrates on the difficulty of understanding public events for those immersed in them. The famous opening paragraph presents the reader with a series of neat antitheses that in sum offer confusion rather than clarity:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the age of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

At first, this passage seems to be a direct authorial commentary, but the attribution of these extreme opinions to some of the age's “noisiest authorities” invites us to question whether the noisiest and most extreme authorities of any age are to be trusted. The patterned rhetoric of the passage reveals confusion rather than understanding. The difficulties of reaching any clear knowledge of one's own era emerge through the novelist's explicit comparison of the past to the present and through the irony that both history and the novelist lend to the eighteenth-century's view of itself: “In both countries [England and France] it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever” (bk. 1, chap. 1). As Dickens points out immediately afterwards, the year is 1775, and with both the American and French Revolutions impending, things in general are anything but settled forever. As the novel's first paragraph makes clear, both the age's noisiest authorities and its powers that be are unaware of the significance of the historical forces that are shaping the future.

Only in retrospect do events assume a clear order. The novel's French episodes invite the reader to view every incident in the light of his historical knowledge and to recognize events as pieces in a larger pattern that is known a priori. All of the French action appears first as a foreshadowing and later as a realization of the Revolution, and Dickens eschews subtlety in favor of a directness that always keeps before the reader the relationship of each action to larger historical forces. Thus the opening French scene with its broken wine cask flooding the street suggests in its sacramental overtones the blood that will one day flow in the streets; but Dickens is not content to leave matters at the level of suggestion: “The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there” (bk. 1, chap. 5). Taylor Stoehr's rhetorical analysis of this and succeeding French episodes very thoroughly points out the linguistic methods through which Dickens creates a strong sense of the links among all of these events. Even the novel's web of closely interrelated characters is only a transformation of French historical forces into personal terms.

Similarly, the French characters have no individuality but exist only to play their roles in the revolutionary drama. They are defined exclusively in terms of their class. Our first glimpse of the Marquis is at a reception at which he is singled out only after a very Carlylean critique of a degenerate aristocracy whose only function has become self-aggrandizement: “Military officers destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly … all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments” (bk. 2, chap. 7). Although the marquis is out of Monseigneur's favor, he is nevertheless the perfect aristocrat: he can respond to others only in terms of their class and recognizes no common bonds of humanity. His carriage kills a child, and he can see the event only in terms of his contempt for the poor: “I would ride over any of you very willingly, and exterminate you from the earth” (bk. 2, chap. 7). To his nephew Charles Darnay, he laments the deterioration of the power of the aristocracy: “Our not remote ancestors held the right of life and death over the surrounding vulgar” (bk. 2, chap. 9). The Marquis despises Darnay for his humane feelings. And of course, there are the events related in Dr. Manette's prison diary in which the Marquis and his brother destroy a peasant family in order to exercise their droit du seigneur.

If the French Revolution is a form of retribution for such distortions of humanity, it is also paradoxically a continuation of them; the new order merely perpetuates the dehumanizing class-consciousness of the old. Just as the Marquis and the society he represents were trapped within a system that allowed them to perceive others only in terms of their position within the social system, so too are the revolutionaries trapped within their own inversion of that system. Charles Darnay's journey into France most clearly dramatizes how little the overthrow of the old institutions has changed the premises behind French society's judgments of human beings. As he prepares to leave England, Darnay comforts himself with the belief that his renunciation of his social position and his efforts to assist his impoverished tenants will protect him (bk. 2, chap. 24); but the reader, who has seen the condemnation of the Evrémonde race by Defarge and his fellow conspirators, recognizes that Darnay's very reasonable point of view is a misunderstanding, a projection of his own humanity into a very inhumane situation. To the new order, Darnay can be nothing more than the representative of a doomed aristocratic family.

One's position as a citizen subsumes all other ties, and revolutionary France has as little respect as the late Marquis for the feelings that bind families together. Dr. Manette's belief that his suffering now has value as a means of saving his son-in-law from the guillotine proves an illusion; the Revolution is unconcerned with the purely personal. The populace has revived the “questionable public virtues of antiquity,” so that the President of the court that is about to condemn Darnay draws cheers from the crowd by telling Dr. Manette “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” (bk. 3, chap. 10). Madame Defarge plots to destroy the remaining members of the Evrémonde family—Lucie, her child, and Dr. Manette—by using their human feelings against them; she is going to accuse them of grieving for Darnay, and in revolutionary France even grief is subject to legal regulation: mourning for a victim of the guillotine is itself a capital offense (bk. 3, chap. 12).

Dickens emphasizes the inhumanity of the French Revolution not merely for sentimental reasons but as a means of distinguishing social upheaval from substantive change. On the one hand, social upheaval comes about as the inevitable result of oppression and exploitation. As the tumbrils roll through the streets of Paris toward the guillotine, Dickens gives a direct warning: “Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms” (bk. 3, chap. 15). On the other hand, substantive change can occur only when people discard the “mind-forg’d manacles” within which they are trapped, the state of mind that remains long after the external exploiters and oppressors have been destroyed. Of course, such change can occur only within the individual, but that is not to say that Dickens is naive: for if the true instrument of oppression is a state of mind, what possible institutional solution is there? Dickens's lack of faith in political action and the inward direction of his social criticism is more than the Victorian fear of revolution. He is the heir to the inward turning that took place in Wordsworth and Coleridge in the wake of the failure of their faith in the French Revolution. As Carlyle counseled his readers in Past and Present,

It were infinitely handier if we had a Morrison's Pill, Act of Parliament, or remedial measure, which men could swallow, one good time, and then go on in their old courses, cleared from all miseries and mischiefs! Unluckily we have none such; unluckily the Heavens themselves, in their rich pharmacopoeia, contain none such. There will no “thing” be done that will cure you. There will a radical universal alteration of your regimen and way of life take place; there will a most agonizing divorce between you and your chimeras, luxuries and falsities, take place … that so the inner fountains of life may again begin, like eternal Light-fountains, to irradiate and purify your bloated, swollen, fouler existence, drawing nigh, as at present, to nameless death.

Without such an inner transformation, the new order in France can only perpetuate the old oppression by continuing the inherited class-based assumptions about what human beings are. For Dickens, revolution is institutional, but change is psychic.

The religious transformation that takes place within Sidney Carton illustrates both this concern for the inner life of the individual as the only possible means of change and Dickens's use of religious motifs as a way of talking about that inner life. As Carton stands at the guillotine ready to die, he has, according to the observers that Dickens places at the scene, “the peacefullest man's face ever beheld there” (bk. 3, chap 15). He is in the grip of a prophetic vision, one that even offers him a form of redemption through Lucie's as yet unborn child: “I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away” (bk. 3, chap. 15). But Carton's vision secularizes the religious theme of immortality by substituting the continuity of generations for religious mystery. There is no suggestion that he will survive in any other sense; he refers to his coming death as a “far, far better rest … than I have ever known” (bk. 3, chap. 15). Carton's vision simply asserts the newfound sense of relatedness that has led him to sacrifice his life; he now feels himself linked by human ties to a future that he will not personally see. He is no longer the “disappointed drudge” who cares for no one and is cared for by no one (bk. 2, chap. 4). The spirit of optimism in his prophecy arises not out of a faith in God but from a faith in the best that men can become.

The novel's religious symbols follow this pattern: they reflect human attitudes and actions within social boundaries rather than a teleology. Dickens strips religion of any necessary connection with God so that it becomes simply the human potential for good or ill, for the loving self-sacrifice of a Sidney Carton or the indiscriminate destruction of the French revolutionaries. Religious feeling at its best now functions as a basis for human community, a way in which men can reach beyond themselves, experience a sense of fruitful relatedness, and grow beyond the loneliness that many other Victorian writers—Marx, Mill, Arnold, and especially Carlyle—describe as a universal malady of their age. But Dickens recognizes that this positive relatedness is only one possible recasting of Christianity in human terms. The fury of the Carmagnole—“a something once innocent, delivered over to all devilry” (bk. 3, chap. 5)—is another form of community; the Cross can also be transformed into the guillotine: “It was the sign of the regeneration of the human race. It superseded the Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts from which the cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and believed in where the Cross was denied” (bk. 3, chap. 4). In popular mythology, the French now worship St. Guillotine “for the great sharp female was by that time popularly canonised” (bk. 3, chap. 5). Thus in France, the redefinition of religious faith precludes those human values that have been traditionally associated with Christianity. As an enraged mob finally hangs the hated Foulon on a lamppost after repeated failure, the author remarks “then, the rope was merciful,” a pointed reminder of the virtue that is lacking in the mob (bk. 2, chap. 22).

Similarly, as Robert Alter points out, the four incendiaries who burn the Marquis's chateau suggest the four horsemen of the apocalypse. We do not, however, have the biblical apocalypse, but a fear that the death of the old order may also be a foreshadowing of the death of all order. The one incendiary Dickens describes at length appears in the midst of a barren, unproductive landscape and is ominously portrayed as “a shaggy-haired man, of almost barbarian aspect” (bk. 2, chap. 23). As he sleeps, the reader comes to see him through the eyes of the road-mender who is the sole observer within the scene:

Stooping down beside him, the road-mender tried to get a peep at secret weapons in his breast or where not; but, in vain, for he slept with his arms crossed upon him, and set as resolutely as his lips. Fortified towns with their stockades, guard-houses, gates, trenches, and drawbridges, seemed to the mender of roads, to be so much air as against this figure. And when he lifted his eyes from it to the horizon and looked around, he saw in his small fancy similar figures, stopped by no obstacle, tending to centres all over France. (bk. 2, chap. 23)

In each sentence, Dickens reminds us that this vision of destruction is taking place within the mind of the road-mender. Apocalypse thus acquires a social meaning in two ways: it figures the widespread devastation that actually takes place within France, but it also conveys the consciousness of that devastation, the disappearance of any faith in the stability of things. Historically and psychically, the symbolism of apocalypse is, like the symbolism of the guillotine, an inversion of tradition that leaves only the horror with none of the hope.

English society, by contrast, does offer some hope, although of a very limited sort. Dickens creates a number of similarities between Britain and France, similarities that undermine any self-satisfied confidence in the inherent superiority of British institutions and attitudes. England has no special historical foresight as the references to the American Revolution in the opening chapter and at Darnay's trial make clear (bk. 2, chap. 3). Dickens also suggests that the English have a potential for violence very like that of the French. He labels the crowd at Darnay's English trial “ogreish” in its interest (bk. 2, chap. 2). And the spectator who describes “with a relish” the gruesome penalty for high treason (bk. 2, chap. 2) is as much the connoisseur of death as Jacques Three who contemplates “like an epicure” his vision of Lucie and her daughter in the hands of the executioner (bk. 3, chap. 14). The mob that turns the supposed funeral of John Barsad, the spy, into a near riot palely but surely echoes the grotesque French mobs that dance wildly through the streets of Paris. And like both the French monarchy and the revolutionaries who succeed it, the English law indiscriminately employs the services of the executioner who can be seen “to-day taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of six-pence” (bk. 1, chap. 1).

But in England, unlike France, it is impossible to see all events as parts of a pattern. Much to everyone's surprise, Charles Darnay is acquitted in England. Moreover, there is a disjunction between public and private life. Despite his assurances that he is “a mere machine” in the service of Tellson's (bk. 1, chap. 4), Mr. Lorry does develop an emotionally rich personal existence through his acquaintance with the Manette family. In contrast to the French scenes that show the relationships of people to one another and to the events around them as controlled by the pattern of French history, the early English scenes emphasize the uncertainty of both the reader's and the character's perceptions and how little the characters know of one another. As Mr. Lorry rides toward Dover, Dickens tells us that the coach “was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but the horses” (bk. 1, chap. 2). The passengers keep themselves so separated from one another that at Darnay's English trial, Mr. Lorry is unable to say—and indeed we never learn—whether Darnay was in the coach. As Jerry Cruncher returns to London bearing Mr. Lorry's cryptic message, the narrator meditates on human isolation and concludes with a rhetorical question: “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?” (bk. 1, chap. 3). In England, there are limitations on one's ability to perceive, and in sharp contrast to France, the reader is no longer able to place data in context, to see the coherence of events.

Dickens treats this secrecy that shrouds every individual with characteristic ambivalence. The early coach scenes portray a social atmosphere of constant distrust and fragmentation; as Dickens tells us, “the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light” (bk. 1, chap. 1). The example of Jerry Cruncher makes abundantly clear that one's private existence is not necessarily a haven in which domestic virtue flourishes. Moreover, the narrator's commentary on the inability of people to know one another implies a loneliness that is developed more fully in the portrait of Sidney Carton. But for all these limitations, the possibility of a private identity has the great advantage of making England a culture in which personality can be multidimensional, in which the publicly visible self is but one part.

In such a society, the individual can think of himself and others in a variety of contradictory terms, and this process of conflict allows the individual to change. This most clearly takes place in the tensions that beset Dr. Manette. At his first appearance in the novel, he is a man completely stripped of his identity by the ordeal of his imprisonment; he works quietly at his shoemaking and passively submits to others. But after a period in England, another side of his personality dominates, a side that completely reverses the passivity of the prisoner: “He was now a very energetic man indeed, with great firmness of purpose, strength of resolution, and vigour of action” (bk. 2, chap. 10). This reversal of his personality does not mean that he has escaped the past, for he continues to bear the prisoner within him. At crucial moments, he reverts or attempts to revert to his shoemaking: when he suspects Darnay's true identity (bk. 2, chap. 10), when he finally learns it (bk. 2, chap. 17), and when he ultimately feels himself responsible for Darnay's condemnation by the revolutionary tribunal (bk. 3, chap. 12). Doctor Manette is able to accept Darnay and to recover from his ordeal because he thinks of himself not only as the wronged prisoner but as Lucie's father. As Darnay hints of his actual descent, the doctor responds that if there are “any fancies, any reasons, any apprehensions, anything whatsoever, new or old, against the man she really loved—the direct responsibility thereof not lying on his head—they should all be obliterated for her sake” (bk. 2, chap. 10). As the doctor's final relapse makes clear, that obliteration is an incomplete process, but he is able to achieve a new inner balance in which the old wrongs are outweighed by his love for his daughter.

Such change has effects that are felt only within the sphere of immediate relationships. It is not the result of dedication to great causes but of following the injunction that Carlyle borrowed from Goethe: “Do the Duty which lies nearest thee.” Thus Sidney Carton finds a sense of purposefulness through his devotion to Lucie to whom he has said “For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything” (bk. 2, chap. 13). Like Dr. Manette, Carton exemplifies the contradictory possibilities inherent in human nature. He has told Darnay after the courtroom scene of this sense of emotional isolation (bk. 2, chap. 4), and he tells Lucie, “I am like one who died young. All my life might have been” (bk. 2, chap. 13). But as he walks through Paris with his mind set on sacrificing himself to help Lucie and her family, a sense of relatedness returns; he remembers his father's funeral, and the words of the burial service pass through his mind (bk. 3, chap. 9). And his changed state appears to the very last not only in the dramatic act of dying in the place of another but also in the kindness that he displays toward the seamstress who precedes him to the guillotine. Carton's love for Lucie has aroused the sympathetic capacity within his nature, and by caring for another, he finally emerges from the self-imposed prison of indifference. He is finally able to respond to those around him.

Clearly Dickens is not giving us any formula for the regeneration of the human race; the most radical effect that individual change brings about is reconciliation within families. This emphasis on intimate relationships does imply a view of society, but that view is largely negative: the individual must not be excessively burdened by his social identity, he must have room to develop with the contradictory fullness that is distinctively human. But even within a culture that offers that possibility, society does not offer any encouragement to the best human impulses. If Doctor Manette is recalled to life from the grave of his imprisonment, John Barsad parodies that same theme in his mock funeral and reappearance in France as precisely what he has always been, a spy. If Charles Darnay uses the freedom from the past that England offers him to make a new and productive life, Sidney Carton, the character who so uncannily resembles Darnay, is too paralyzed to realize either his emotional or professional capabilities except in his final self-sacrifice. The love of Lucie Manette acts as a regenerative force, but not all women have that power. Miss Pross maintains an unquestioning loyalty to her brother, a loyalty that has no effect other than relieving her of all her property, and Jerry Cruncher remains through most of the book insensible to his wife's prayers. Lucie is clearly a force for the good, but the French episodes, with their portrait of the bloodthirsty Madame Defarge and her companions, effectively undercut any notion that Dickens uncritically idealizes women as moral forces. In A Tale of Two Cities, no external circumstance can do more than create an atmosphere in which change is possible; the individual's readiness is all.

A Tale of Two Cities does not pose domesticity and religion as remedies for the great social problems of the nineteenth century; at most, Dickens's versions of faith and family offer the individual some refuge from the void left by the futility of public action. For whatever solutions Dickens offers are given with the same awareness that is the basis of Carlyle's social criticism: the old clothes of society—its beliefs, its institutions, its politics—are worn out and no longer fill human needs. Thus the novel's tale of private romance becomes a confession of public despair. At the end of the book, the characters retreat into domesticity only after both Darnay and Dr. Manette have tried to influence the course of public events and have clearly failed. Institutions seem impervious to human effort: good men waste their lives if they engage in activism. What Dickens can do on a miniature scale—redefine traditional institutions so that a small group can be based on human values—he cannot do for his culture. Like the author of Sartor Resartus, Dickens recognized the death of the old world but could not visualize the birth of a new.

Certainly as so many critics have claimed, this novel leaves the reader dissatisfied, and part of that dissatisfaction is rooted in Dickens's tendency toward facile moralizing. But the novel also deliberately engenders dissatisfaction through its presentation of the extreme disparity between public and private life. Institutions exist not only as social mechanisms but also through the states of mind they create within their culture, and to destroy the mechanisms cannot in itself bring about substantive change. The old order in France had created a society of unidimensional men who in the overthrow of the past could not break away from the enslaving spirit of their history. The French Revolution abolishes the monarchy, abolishes the aristocracy, abolishes the financial exploiters, but in its perverse way, it embodies the values of these traditional oppressors.

The malaise that Dickens sees in the French Revolution is characteristic of his anatomy of society in his late novels. A Tale of Two Cities presents in its most extreme form the same inability to translate private virtue into public action that in other novels plagues English society; the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit and the Court of Chancery in Bleak House poison the will of Englishmen. These institutions work according to their own internal logic and not to fulfill any human need, and as Daniel Doyce and Richard Carstone learn, they dehumanize anyone who comes into contact with them. Such institutions respond to nothing outside of themselves. It is better, Dickens says, to retreat into a sphere of a few close relationships where action becomes meaningful, to make one's garden grow; but whatever hope Dickens offers for private life grows out of an acceptance of social despair.

Unlike Dickens, Carlyle seems to offer some hope that the process by which men change themselves and dedicate their energies to the fulfillment of their immediate duties can perhaps in the long run transform society. It is likely that this hope struck a responsive note in his contemporaries and brought Carlyle to the height of his popularity in the late 1830s and the 1840s. It is also probably the extinction of that hope that brought to the fore Carlyle's more authoritarian tendencies and that to some degree alienated him from a part of his audience. But the differences between Carlyle and Dickens should not obscure the basic similarity of their outlooks: both writers believe that man's self-realization can occur only in a social context and yet that contact with society is inherently destructive. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge in the aftermath of the French Revolution, both Carlyle and Dickens are seeking a means by which people can experience a sense of purposeful action in a society whose institutions are devoid of all human purpose and whose populace has come to reflect that inhumanity.