[In the following essay, Rosen explores the religious imagery surrounding the acts of the revolultionaries in A Tale of Two Cities.]

At the Royal George Hotel in Dover, Mr. Lorry encounters, for the second time in his life, the heroine of the novel.

As his eyes rested on [her], a sudden vivid likeness passed before him, of a child whom he had held in his arms on the passage across that very Channel, one cold time, when the hail drifted heavily and the sea ran high. The likeness passed away, say, like a breath along the surface of the gaunt pier glass behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were offering baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the feminine gender—and he made his formal bow to Miss Manette.¹

The moment is epiphanic. Mr. Lorry is not alone in feeling the past's mysterious, even ghostly, influence on the present. The pier glass, which, taken by itself, might suggest simply an innkeeper's fondness for exotic decor, circumscribes Lucie in a particularly sinister manner. The “short, slight, pretty” Frenchwoman, with her “quantity of golden hair, [and] pair of blue eyes” (52), contrasts sharply with the deformed—threatening, perhaps—pagan figures behind her. For an instant, Dickens has raised his action to the level of myth; he has also expressed many of his novel's main concerns in microcosm. His analysis of the French revolution in A Tale of Two Cities operates primarily on two grounds—myth and metaphysics—and his critique of the insurgents is ultimately a religious one. The germs implicit in this passage proliferate in the succeeding narrative.

In The Golden Bough, first published some thirty years after A Tale of Two Cities, Sir James Frazer traces the genesis and morphology of ancient Mediterranean vegetation rites. As Frazer explains, Adonis, Attis, and Osiris were divine or semi-divine figures, whose violent deaths and miraculous rebirths insured the harvest's seasonal decay and growth. Since the fertility of the land was contingent on the well-being of these gods, a complex system of rituals was introduced to insure their strength:

Men now attributed the annual cycle of change primarily to corresponding changes in their deities, … and thought that by performing certain magical rites they could aid the god who was the principle of life, in his struggle with the opposing principle of death. They imagined that they could recruit his failing energies and even raise him from the dead. (324)

Not surprisingly, these rituals typically involved the shedding of human blood, as persons were sacrificed in stead of the god. The Greek cult of Dionysus (the Roman Bacchus) was particularly colorful: like the Egyptian Osiris, Dionysus was cut to pieces by his enemies, only to rise reborn from the earth. His worshippers, often in a state of wild intoxication, would devour their victim (in later years, a bull), after treating him to a similar demise. Frazer discusses the myth of Pentheus, familiar from Euripides' Bacchae:

The [legend of Pentheus' death] may be … [a distorted reminiscence] of a custom of sacrificing divine kings in the character of Dionysus and of dispersing the fragments of their broken bodies over the fields for the purpose of fertilizing them. It is probably no mere coincidence that Dionysus himself is said to have been torn to pieces at Thebes, the very place where according to the legend the same fate befell king Pentheus at the hands of the frenzied votaries of the vinegod. (392)

Dickens, writing long before Frazer, seems to understand both the significance and the enduring power of such rituals; in his hands, the French revolution follows the pattern of pagan fertility rites.

The centuries of aristocratic rule have left France a wasteland. In the most palpable, physical sense, the rapacity of the nobility has emptied the national coffers, and left the countryside barren. The Parisian elite has the “truly noble idea, that the world was made for them. The text of [Monseigneur's order runs] ‘The earth and the fulness thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur’” (135). As a result, the provinces—and the Evrémonde estate in particular—are desolate:

Patches of poor rye where corn should have been, patches of poor peas and beans, patches of most coarse vegetable substitutes for wheat. On inanimate nature, as on the men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent tendency towards an appearance of vegetating unwillingly—a dejected disposition to give up, and wither away. (143-44)

The blight is also spiritual and psychological. By attempting a sort of timeless permanence, and thus denying biology, the aristocratic ethos runs counter to normal, fertile human instinct. Monseigneur's drawing room is a menagerie wherein “charming grandmammas of sixty [dress and sup] as at twenty,” and “it [is] hard to find … one solitary wife, who, in her manners and appearance, [would own] to being a mother” (137). The life of peasants is also unfruitful. In perhaps the novel's cruellest scene, soldiers play upon a common taboo and allow an executed man's blood to run into a village well, knowing that the community will be obliterated: “He is hanged there forty feet high—and is left hanging, poisoning the water. … It is frightful, messieurs. How can the women and children draw water!” (201).² Within a few years, the Evrémonde estate, formerly in decline, is empty:

Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but desolation. Every green leaf, every blade of grass and blade of grain, was as shrivelled and poor as the miserable people. Everything was bowed down, dejected, oppressed and broken. Habitations, fences, domesticated animals, men, women, children, and the soil that bore them—all worn out. … Monseigneur had squeezed and wrung it, … had made edifying spaces of barbarous and barren wilderness. (256-57)

Dickens comments, in an ironic aside, that the aristocracy is “a great means of regeneration” (153); in the most ghoulish and literal sense possible, he is right. Even in their less bloodthirsty moments, the revolutionaries resemble dionysian maenads. The unearthly dance Darnay observes as he enters the country—

After long and lonely spurring over dreary roads, they would come to a cluster of poor cottages, not steeped in darkness, but all glittering with lights, and would find the people, in a ghostly manner in the dead of night, circling hand in hand round a shrivelled tree of Liberty, or all drawn up together singing a Liberty song (278)

—expands later into the Carmagnole, a “dance of five thousand demons” (307). When the mob turns homicidal, its impulse is plainly cannibalistic, with its victims often torn limb from limb. Jacques Three, the most savage of Defarge's cohorts, is at Darnay's second trial a “life-thirsting, cannibal-looking, bloody-minded juror” (345). Later, he relishes the thought of Lucie's beheading: “Ogre that he was, he spoke like an epicure” (388).³ After his first trial, Darnay is astonished by the affection of people who,

carried by another current, would have rushed at him with the same intensity, to rend him to pieces and strew him over the streets (314)

During the La Force massacres, the murderers' “hideous countenances [are] all bloody and sweaty, awry with howling, and all staring with beastly excitement and want of sleep. … Some women [hold] wine to their mouths that they might drink” (291). The “vortex” of the insurgence, naturally enough, is a wine-shop.

The long sequence surrounding the death of Foulon brings the action closest to its primordial roots. As in Euripides' play, the most brutal Bacchantes are women. Dickens's paganism (starting with the Royal George pier-glass) is largely a matriarchal affair; here the reaction of the women to Foulon's discovery bears no trace of civilization (Gilbert 256):

The drum was beating in the streets … and The Vengeance, uttering terrific shrieks, and flinging her arms about her head like all the forty Furies at once, was tearing from house to house, rousing the women. The men were terrible … but the women were a sight to chill the boldest. … They ran out with streaming hair, urging one another, and themselves, to madness with the wildest cries and actions. … With these cries, numbers of the women, lashed into blind frenzy, whirled about, striking and tearing at their own friends until they dropped into a passionate swoon, and were saved only by the men belonging to them from being trampled under foot. (252)

At the height of the delirium, the women's deepest motive comes out:

Give us the blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon, Give us the heart of Foulon, Give us the body and soul of Foulon, Rend Foulon to pieces, and dig him into the ground, so that the grass may grow from him. (252, italics mine)

And so, he is dismembered, and his mouth stuffed with grass. As Dickens puts it, the Terror “has set a great mark of blood upon the blessed garnering time of harvest” (283).

Although pagan in origin, the revolutionaries' acts are disconcertingly close, formally, to Christian sacrament. As Frazer recognizes, both Christianity and vegetation cults commemorate, through the symbolic or literal consuming of flesh and drinking of blood, the sacrifice of a man-god whose death and resurrection have delivered the community (360, 481). Indeed, as the revolution progresses, its practices seem both to parallel and reverse those of Christianity. The first Parisian scene hints already at the confusion to come; the breaking of a wine-cask, at first a cause for celebration, gradually develops ominous, eucharistic overtones:

Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, … scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-less—BLOOD. 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.

The insurrection takes hold, and the two fluids become almost interchangeable. At the grindstone, “what with dropping blood, and what with dropping wine, … [all the murderers'] wicked atmosphere seemed gore and fire” (291; Glancy 108-10). By the culmination of the novel, during the terror, the sacrament has been perversely realized. At the scaffold, human “wine” is miraculously transformed into blood; tumbrils “carry the day's wine to La Guillotine” (399). In a brilliant extended metaphor, Dickens compares the Conciergerie's basement to a wine cellar:

The Condemned … gentle born and peasant born; all red wine for La Guillotine, all daily brought into the light from the dark cellars of the loathsome prisons, and carried to her through the street to slake her devouring thirst. (304)

The guillotine, as the official center of revolutionary ritual, is itself of course sanctified. First a “sharp female, newly born” (383), then “canonized” as the “Little Sainte Guillotine” (307), and finally a goddess, the “retributive instrument” (404) replaces the Cross as the symbol of, and means towards, national fruition.

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.

Vegetation myths reach from the rebellion's faith, to annex the forms of Catholic worship (Glancy 117).

While the presence of these myths in the deep structure of Dickens's narrative is beyond dispute, the matter of how they got there is not. Dickens's education was not wide, and as seen, Frazer's revelations were, in 1859, three decades away.⁴ All attempts to explain this phenomenon—a creative response to the depiction of blasphemy? a strong connection to peasant (or pagan) culture? pure coincidence?—must, with one exception, remain unsubstantiated. The only extant paper-trail, evident as early as the novel's preface, leads to “Mr. Carlyle's wonderful book” (29), The French Revolution. Dickens's reliance on Carlyle for facts and imagery has long been documented; an overwhelming amount of telling detail is transferred intact from one work to the other. Madame Defarge is a near relation to “brown-locked Demoiselle Théroigne” of the “haughty eye and serene fair countenance” (I. 204). Her husband probably corresponds to “Cholat the wine-merchant,” who at the Bastille becomes “an impromptu canoneer” (I. 154-55).⁵ The broad outlines of Dickens's mythic conception are clearly perceptible, furthermore, in the earlier book. Carlyle, too, recognizes in the revolution's most violent moments the replacement of Christianity by heathen matriarchy. While “sullen is the male heart, … vehement is the female, irrepressible” (I. 200); the women are “dancing Bacchantes” (I. 232), a “menadic host,” possessed by “inarticulate frenzy” (I. 205). During the massacres at La Force, “the doomed man is … [conducted into] a howling sea; forth under an arch of wild sabres, axes and pikes; and sinks, hewn asunder” (II. 152). A basis of the insurgence, Carlyle writes, “seems to be the primitive one of Cannibalism: that I can devour Thee” (I. 44). Civilization, he speculates, may simply be a “wrappage, through which the savage nature … can still burst, infernal as ever” (II. 328). He clearly perceives, finally, in the abolition of Christianity, the possible return to primitive devotion (Baumgarten 168-69). “Man is a born idol-worshipper, sight-worshipper, so sensuous-imaginative is he; and also partakes much of the nature of an ape” (II. 312). And yet, the depth and consistency of Dickens's portrait are hardly explained by Carlyle's history. While Carlyle hits upon ample and natural metaphors to describe savagery—Maenads, Bacchantes, Cannibalism—those metaphors are not unified into a single vision. That much of the Tale's symbolic vocabulary has been drawn from The French Revolution is obvious; its synthesis, however, has not. The intuition that the French are following a particular, ritual, sacrificial pattern, a pattern that both departs from and parallels Christian custom, belongs, it would seem, to Dickens alone.⁶ Whereas Dickens departs from fact, and portrays pre-revolutionary France as an infertile wasteland, Carlyle assures us that the harvest in 1789 was bountiful (Oddie 80). The connection, so explicit in the novel, between bloodshed and regeneration, is similarly absent from the History. The earlier work fails, finally, to include a strong thematic counter-example to balance the general destruction.

In A Tale of Two Cities, that counter-weight is provided by Sydney Carton. If the revolutionary cult has adopted blasphemously the forms of Catholic sacrament, Carton's life and death follow true Christian typology. Although Carton is obviously a double for Charles Darnay, he has even deeper, if less transparent, affinities to his moral opposite, Madame Defarge. Dickens plants minor details that bind the “catechist” (208) of revolution and its main sacrificial victim together. Besides similar biographies—the traumatic and formative death of a family member, their own violent, parallel deaths—they have similar talents. Both are distinguished by their retentive memories: Stryver's nickname for Carton is “Memory” (118). Carton explains to Darnay the full effect of his dissipation: “The curse of these occasions is heavy on me, for I always remember them” (236). In Paris, he recalls Barsad, whom he has not seen in seventeen years: “You have a face to be remembered, and I remember faces well” (327). Mr. Defarge, similarly, boasts of his wife's mnemonic capabilities: “Jacques, … if madame my wife undertook to keep the register in her memory alone, she would not lose a word of it—not a syllable of it” (202). Both also have the knack of seeming oblivious to their surroundings, while perceiving them minutely (Glancy 80). Just as Carton spends most of Darnay's first trial staring at the Old Bailey's ceiling, yet discerning his own facial similarity to the accused, and moving the narrator to comment, “this Carton took in more of the details of the scene than he appeared to take in” (107), so the hyper-observant Madame Defarge “knitted with nimble fingers and steady eyebrows, and saw nothing” (66). Dickens's technique of portraying ethical opposites as formally analogous bears fruit by novel's end.

The sequence of events immediately preceding (and following) Carton's death tells of spiritual conversion, and emulation of Christ (Hutter 20). Where he spends the first three quarters of the book in dissipation, as, interestingly, a young man of “Bacchanalian propensities” (116), his “fervent and inspiring” (374) behavior at the end, unlike that of the rabble, is not fueled by alcohol:

For the first time in many years, he had no strong drink. Since last night he had taken nothing but a little light thin wine, and last night he had dropped the brandy slowly down on Mr. Lorry's hearth like a man who had done with it. (368)

As he wanders the streets, he contemplates his own demise in Jesus' words from John 11:

I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die. (342)

—words that return to him on the scaffold. Shortly before execution, the seamstress comments, “[I should not] have been able to raise my thoughts to Him who was put to death, that we might have hope and comfort here today. I think you were sent to me by Heaven” (402). And indeed, though the guillotine is the profanest of crosses, Carton's death is a sort of crucifixion, occurring, like Jesus', at 3:00 in the afternoon. His final vision even promises a vague second coming: another Sydney Carton will return to this spot, as the “foremost of just judges” (404). Dickens sets the seal on Carton's conversion, at the very moment of death:

The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces, the pressing on of many footsteps in the outskirts of the crowd, so that it swells forward in a mass, like one great heave of water, all flashes away. Twenty-Three.

If the number seems random, one need only recall any Christian funeral:

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff comfort me. (Psalm 23:4)

Sydney Carton manifests the sacramental, sacrificial norm, from which revolutionary paganism has departed (Fielding 200).

This pattern of sacrifice and redemption is repeated, less dramatically, by several other characters. During the La Force massacres, Manette finds that his eighteen years of suffering have allowed him an odd power over the murderers. Miss Pross, who is as willing to give her life for Lucie as Carton is, suffers a similar destiny: her deafness is a variation on his death, and her description of the disaster prefigures his beheading. “There was first a great crash, and then a great stillness, and that stillness seems to be fixed and unchangeable, never to be broken … ” (399). And of course, the novel is saturated with the theme of resurrection. As countless commentators have recognized, Manette, Darnay (twice), Cly and Foulon (ironically) and Jerry Cruncher (satirically) all resemble Carton in this fashion.

The difference between Carton's and Miss Pross's Christ-like sacrifices, and the bloodletting exacted by the revolution is a simple one: the former work, and the latter fails. Carton's death is an effective fertility-rite in the simplest way: he not only saves the lives of Darnay and Lucie, but allows them to have more children (Gilbert 263). The Terror, however, leaves France even more barren than before. Madame Defarge, dedicated to the “extermination” (369) of the entire Evrémonde family, is conspicuously childless. In a moment of high irony, Lucie begs her “as a wife and a mother, … [to] have pity on me and [not] exercise any power that you possess against my innocent husband. … Oh sister-woman, think of me. As a wife and mother!” At that moment, of course, Madame Defarge is contemplating the slaughter of Lucie's daughter. The post-revolutionary landscape is as blasted as ever—“impoverished fields that yielded no fruits of the earth, … diversified by the blackened remains of burnt houses”—and the concluding image of tumbrils cutting through the Paris mob, in a travesty of tillage, is profoundly pessimistic:

As the sombre wheels of the six carts go round, they seem to plough up a long crooked furrow among the populace in the streets. Ridges of faces are thrown up to this side and to that, and the ploughs go steadily onward. (400)

As a means, in the deep pagan sense, of regeneration, the revolution has failed. As foreshadowed at the Royal George Hotel, the revolutionaries have cultivated

Dead Sea fruits, that tempt the eye,
But turn to ashes on the lips.(7)

The failure of the revolution is, of course, ethical; the climactic comic-epic struggle between Madame Defarge and Miss Pross contrasts, in the plainest terms, Christian love and self-sacrifice with pagan blood-lust. As a means towards revitalization, mass murder is inevitably self-defeating: “It was in vain for Madame Defarge to struggle and strike; Miss Pross, with the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate, clasped her tight … ” (397). Dickens's analysis of the revolution's inadequacy is not confined to ethics, however, but pursues the repercussions of myth to the level of metaphysics—specifically, to the questions of time, space, and causation.

Briefly, the book's metaphysic is Augustinian. That is, it maintains an orthodox, Christian distinction between heaven and earth, the latter mutable, flawed and historical, the former eternally perfect (Welsh 118, 147-48). No Dickens novel keeps track of the passage of time quite so obsessively as A Tale of Two Cities. Almost inconsequently, Madame Defarge's mad sister rattles off the numbers on a clock (351), and Carton's party at the scaffold numbers fifty-two, matching the cycle of weeks (Alter 21). The passing seasons are noted minutely, and provide a sort of cantus firmus to the action; just as Darnay's departure for France, the beginning of his long decline, takes place on the longest of days, June 21, 1792 (270), so Madame Defarge's sister dies—spurring the great mechanism of revenge—on the darkest, December 21, 1757 (348). Even a whirling grindstone becomes the perfect metaphor for transience, “the great grindstone, Earth” (293). At the same time, heaven is “an arch of unmoved and eternal lights” (81). No one is as aware as Sydney Carton of the distinction between the two; at the guillotine, he contemplates, with the seamstress, the hereafter:

“Do you think … that it will seem long to me, while I wait for [my sister] in the better land where I trust both you and I will be mercifully sheltered?”

“It cannot be, my child; there is no Time there, and no trouble there.” (403)

By imposing an artificial mythic understanding of history onto national affairs, the revolution effectively ruptures, in two ways, the dichotomy between secular and divine time. First, in the sheer, abrupt violence of their revolt, the revolutionaries attempt to stop and restart history. On the one hand, their course is apocalyptic: the mass sacrifice of an entire class, and the destruction of its property, will definitively end an era. The burning of the Evrémonde estate—and especially the four, pale burners—evokes the Book of Revelation (Alter 18):

Hail-clouds, rolling away, revealed bright bars and streaks of sky. … East, West, North, and South, through the woods, four heavy-treading, unkempt figures crushed the high grass and cracked the branches. … Four lights broke out. … Soon, from a score of the great windows, flames burst forth. … In the roaring and raging of the conflagration, a red-hot wind, driving straight from the infernal regions, seemed to be blowing the edifice away. (259-61)

On the other hand, the sansculottes endeavor to begin time afresh, as at the creation or the flood. Their efforts lead not to renewal, however, but to an odd, static timelessness, an unreal suspension of time:

What private solicitude could rear itself against the deluge of the Year One of Liberty—the deluge rising from below, not falling from above, and with the windows Heaven shut, not opened! There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no measurement of time. Though days and nights circled as regularly as when time was young, and the evening and morning were the first day, other count of time there was none. (301-02)

Metaphorically, they have turned France into a prison. In much of Dickens's fiction, the state of imprisonment—of lost autonomy—is depicted as one in which the forward motion of time has unnaturally been halted. Both Dorrit and Clennam, in Little Dorrit, lose their sense of duration while incarcerated (hallucinating a return to the Marshalsea, Dorrit's first act is to pawn his watch), and Manette is no different: he “loses” nine days after his daughter's wedding. In retrospect, his life seems “to have been stopped, like a clock, for so many years, and then set going again, with an energy that had lain dormant during the cessation of usefulness” (300). As he enters the country, Darnay perceives exactly what France has become.

Not a mean village closed upon him, not a common barrier dropped across the road behind him, but he knew it to be another iron door in the series that was barred between him and England. The universal watchfulness so encompassed him, that if he had been taken in a net, or were being forwarded to his destination in a cage, he could not have felt his freedom more completely gone. … (275)

While ingress into [Paris] … was easy enough, egress, even for the homeliest people, was very difficult. (279)

In a self-defeating way, the stasis of France mimics heaven's permanence.

Second, since the revolutionary myth is an intensely narrative one, the uprising proceeds with a strong sense of providence, of fate: human endeavor falls into channels that have, in effect, been pre-determined. Deeds are realized rather than performed; both individual freedom and personal responsibility are strictly curtailed. If any figure in the novel believes herself an instrument in the hand of destiny, it is Madame Defarge. She is absolutely confident in the eventual fall of the nobility: “Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule” (207). She does not fear, even, being unable to take part in that fall: “‘Well,’ said Defarge … ‘We shall not see the triumph.’ ‘We shall have helped it,’ returned Madame, ‘Nothing that we do, is done in vain’” (208). Even after the bloodshed has begun, she looks forward to a further fulfillment, in the slaughter of the Evrémondes: [Defarge] “‘At last it is come, my dear!’ ‘Eh well!’ returned madame. ‘Almost’” (256). Her most common gesture is grimly portentous: “[she pointed] her knitting-needle at little Lucie as if it were the finger of Fate” (296), and her very knitting evokes perhaps the Parcae and the Norns, the Greek and Norse spinners of doom: “[Madame Defarge] knitted on with the steadfastness of Fate” (143).⁸ In the first chapter, Dickens evokes the road as a metaphor for life. Later, he populates it with figures representing destiny. By the penultimate chapter, Madame Defarge has become such an embodiment. Jerry Cruncher and Miss Pross prepare to leave Paris:

Madame Defarge, taking her way through the streets, now drew nearer and nearer to the … lodging.

And still Madame Defarge, pursuing her way through the streets, came nearer and nearer.

Madame Defarge was drawing very near indeed. (391-94)

In a situation so soaked with pre-destination, both free-will and accountability are somewhat trivialized. The irony of Madame Defarge's life is that she is committing at least as great a crime as the Evrémondes' by having Charles Darnay, whose deeds bear no relation to his punishment, who in fact has risked his life for her sake, executed.

The opposite view of individual enterprise is assumed, quite naturally, by Sydney Carton. If Madame Defarge sees everywhere the operations of fate, Carton is well aware of chance, and treats personal behavior as a series of educated wagers. This is especially the case as he nears his end, and his life, formerly aimless, acquires a sense of purpose. The novel is saturated with gambling, symbolic and otherwise: the French wine shops are populated by domino and dice players; Jerry Cruncher's term for the Common Era is “Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who bestowed her name on it” (85). Darnay, sentenced to death, has “drawn a prize in the lottery of Sainte Guillotine” (383). Most importantly, existence seems a card game, and people cards to be hazarded and lost. We might read the book's second paragraph—

There was a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there was a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France (35)

—or indeed encounter the “Joker” Gaspard, without batting an eyelash, but by book III, chapter 8, appropriately entitled “A Hand at Cards,” the metaphor has become deadly earnest. Here Carton blackmails Barsad (and Cly), in order to save Darnay and his family. His opponent is untrustworthy, having both “[cheated] at dice, [living] by play” (98), and squandered his sister's possessions on speculation (126-27). As the title of the next chapter indicates, “the game is made.” Unlike Madame Defarge, Carton is a figure of free agency, who makes his own destiny, and knows himself answerable (to put it mildly!) for his decisions. The number of prisoners executed at the end of the novel, 52, evokes not only the weeks of the year, but also a deck of cards—a brilliant metaphor for shared fortune, and a reminder of common mortality.

The novel justifies Carton's outlook, without quite slighting the question of destiny. In a letter written shortly after composing the Tale, Dickens suggests that fiction should aspire to imitate the workings of providence. Indeed, intimations of the divine will seem to permeate the text. (Letters [W. Collins] 3:124-25) Foulon's capture:

At length the sun rose so high that it struck a kindly ray as of hope or protection, directly down upon the old prisoner's head. The favour was too much to bear; in an instant … St. Antoine had got him! (253)

Individuals are entirely free in, and responsible for, their own actions—actions that yield necessary, providential consequences (Oddie 65-66). Beginning the final chapter, Dickens returns, for the last time, to the image of growth, to express this point:

All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet, there is not in France a blade, a leaf, … which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind. (339)

And so, Carton, in his limited way, defeats the purpose of the revolution (to slaughter the Evrémondes), and is able to change the world for the better. In a book so concerned with injustice and judicial reform, it is important that the Darnay's unborn son shall engage successfully in that pursuit. Conversely, the revolution, in its hubris, has managed only to repeat the crimes of aristocracy, barbarism for barbarism (Kukich 67). Dickens's seemingly casual observation in book II chapter 8, that “the watching towers of Notre Dame, almost equidistant from the two extremes, could see … both [Monseigneur's rooms and St. Antoine]” (136, italics mine), proves prophetic; by the end, the insurgents and nobles have sinned equally. Perhaps no single incident better illustrates the novel's attitudes towards fatalism and autonomy than the culminating deaths of Madame Defarge and Sydney Carton. While the former, so confident of her destiny, dies, as it were, by mischance, the latter's end has an air of fulfillment. Dickens explains this ironic reversal in his correspondence with John Forster:

I am not clear … respecting the canon of fiction which forbids the interposition of accident in such a case of Madame Defarge's death. Where accident is inseparable from the passion and action of the character, … it seems to me to become, as it were, an act of divine justice. [I oppose] her mean death, instead of a desperate one in the streets, which she wouldn’t have minded, to the dignity of Carton's. Wrong or right, this was all design, and seemed to me to be in the fitness of things (Letters 3:117)

Early into the book's composition, Dickens boasted to Forster, “I have got exactly the name for the story that is wanted; exactly what will fit the opening to a T. A Tale of Two Cities” (Letters 3:95) And yet, the title is only partly applicable to Paris and London. England, despite escaping revolution, is depicted as uncomfortably similar to France; indeed, if the novel's first paragraph signifies anything, it is that not much has changed in the succeeding seventy years. The English are as potentially “orgeish” as their counterparts across the channel:

The form that was to be doomed [i.e., Darnay] to be so shamefully mangled, was the sight; the immortal creature that was to be so butchered and torn asunder, yielded the sensation. Whatever gloss the various spectators put upon the interest, … the interest was, at the root of it, Ogreish. (93)

In action, similarly, the British mob yields little in mindless destructiveness to the Parisians:

The crowd being under the necessity of providing … entertainment for itself … conceived the humor of impeaching casual passers-by … and wreaking vengeance on them. … Some score of inoffensive souls … were roughly hustled and maltreated. The transition to the sport of window-breaking, and thence to the plundering of public-houses, was easy and natural. At last … sundry summer-houses [were] pulled down, and some area railings pulled up, to arm the more belligerent spirits. … This was the usual progress of a mob. (187-88)

If justice is suspended during the terror, the English over-extension of capital punishment is hardly preferable: the gallows “[took] today the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence” (37). After Darnay is condemned in Paris, the narrator calls it an immolation “on the people's altar”—exactly the phrase he’d used at the Old Bailey: “[Barsad] had resolved to immolate the traitor … on the sacred altar of his country” (96). As a sign of differentiation, the title hardly applies to the French and English capitals.

Rather it draws on a familiar trope introduced by Augustine—a trope so familiar that the title can hardly not evoke it—the two cities of man and God (Welsh 57). The earthly sphere is an ethical one, and in this book, a Christian one, in which Biblical typology is fully operative; free agency is a gift and a responsibility. By introducing a counter-myth into their revolution, the French are guilty of all sorts of blasphemy, from the immorality of their bloodlust, through the open sacrilege of their co-opting Christian forms to express this immorality, to their arrogant, and ultimately stultifying attempt to collapse the dialectic between an historical world, and the eternal, providential heaven beyond.

Notes

1. All page references to Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities, ed. George Woodcock, London: Penguin, 1970.

2. Ewald Mengel discusses the blood Taboo in “The Poisoned Fountain: Dickens's use of a Traditional Symbol in A Tale of Two Cities,” Dickensian 80, part 1 (Spring, 1984): 29. See also Frazer 227–30.

3. John Gross, “A Tale of Two Cities,” Dickens and the Twentieth Century, ed. John Gross and Gabriel Pearson (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962) 193.

4. The details of Dickens' education are recounted in John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T. Ley (London: Cecil Palmer, 1928) Book I.

5. Michael Goldberg, Carlyle and Dickens (Athens: of Georgia P, 1972) 118-19. This book best enumerates the many details transferred from The French Revolution to A Tale of Two Cities.

6. Michael Timko, “Splendid Impressions and Picturesque Means: Dickens, Carlyle and The French Revolution,” Dickens Studies Annual 12 (1983): 181.

7. Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh, pt. V.

8. See n-2, Mengel 28.

Works Cited

Alter, Robert. “The Demons of History in Dickens's Tale,” in Charles Dickens's “A Tale of Two Cities”: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Baumgarten, Murray. “Writing the Revolution.” Dickens Studies Annual 12 (1983): 168-69.

Carlyle, Thomas. The French Revolution. London: Dent, 1980.

Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Walter Dexter. Bloomsbury: Nonesuch, 1938.

Fielding, Kenneth J. Charles Dickens: A Critical Interpretation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.

Frazer, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 1890; abr. ed., New York: Macmillan, 1934.

Gilbert, Elliot L. “‘To Awake from History’: Carlyle, Thackeray, and A Tale of Two Cities.” Dickens Studies Annual 12 (1983).

Glancy, Ruth. “A Tale of Two Cities”: Dickens's Revolutionary Novel. Boston: Twayne, 1991.

Hutter, Albert D. “The Novelist as Resurrectionist: Dickens and the Dilemma of Death.” Dickens Studies Annual 12 (1983).

Kukich, John. “The Purity of Violence.” In Bloom: see Alter.

Oddie, William. Dickens and Carlyle: The Question of Influence. London: Centenary P, 1972.

Welsh, Alexander. The City of Dickens. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968.