[In the following essay, Nelson argues that elements of The Substance and the Shadow, a romance by John Frederick Smith, influenced Dickens while writing A Tale of Two Cities.]

A Tale of Two Cities took Dickens a long time to tell, if we count the year and a half which John Forster says passed between the first ‘vague fancy’, which struck him while he was acting in Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep in August 1857, and March 1859, when ‘he fairly buckle[d] himself to the task he had contemplated so long’.¹ On 30 January 1858 it was not clear that he had anything more in mind yet than to distract himself from his domestic unhappiness:

If I can discipline my thoughts into the channel of a story, I have made up my mind to get to work on one: always supposing that I find myself, on the trial, able to do well. Nothing whatever will do me the least ‘good’ in the way of shaking the one strong possession of change impending over us that every day makes stronger. … Sometimes, I think I may continue to work; sometimes, I think not. What do you say to the title, ONE OF THESE DAYS?²

Nothing in that title suggests A Tale of Two Cities, and it is ‘a story’ he would begin, not ‘the story’. A year later he was still struggling to find a way into his material: ‘I cannot please myself with the opening of my story, and cannot in the least settle at it or take to it’.³ He was much absorbed then in his dispute with Bradbury and Evans, and in his plans for the new journal for which he had only recently settled on the name All the Year Round. For his novel Dickens did not reach that stage, so necessary to him before he could really get on, until 11 March: ‘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’.⁴

What Dickens says of his opening in both of these letters—first that he has not got it yet, then that he has—implies that he does now have the essentials of the story in prospect. Some part of the whole he had already in March 1858, clearly, when he sent Forster a short list of possible titles: Buried Alive, The Thread of Gold, The Doctor of Beauvais.⁵ How much, then or a year later, is impossible to say; Forster does not record that Dickens gave him a prospectus for A Tale of Two Cities of the sort that he did for Dombey and Son in July 1846. But even such a sketch would be no more than ‘the stock of the soup’, to which ‘all kinds of things [would] be added’, in the course of ‘all the branches and off-shoots and meanderings that come up’ (as Dickens wound up his summary of Dombey and Son to Forster).⁶ Dickens's number plans show how much had still to be invented from month to month, or week to week, even though he knew the general shape and substance of his story; and the Book of Memoranda Dickens began keeping in January 1855 indicated to Forster, as to others since, that he was no longer so confident inspiration could be counted on to produce the necessary material on demand.

It is plausible, then, that during this period in early 1859 Dickens should be looking about him for ideas as he struggled to get started. I think he found some imaginative stimulus—and indeed, at least two specific details—in a hack romance by John Frederick Smith, The Substance and the Shadow, then being serialized in the weekly Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper. Smith's title turns up first as a thematic image in chapter 4 of Book the Second, where ‘the abstraction that overclouded [Dr Manette] fitfully, without any apparent reason’, in his new life in England was ‘as incomprehensible to those unacquainted with his story as if they had seen the shadow of the actual Bastille thrown upon him by a summer sun, when the substance was three hundred miles away’.⁷ In chapter 3 of Book the Third, ‘The Shadow’, it is Madame Defarge whose menace shades Lucie and her hopes (p. 298). Finally, Smith's title turns up only slightly transmuted as the title of chapter 10, Book the Third; here ‘The Substance of the Shadow’ on Dr Manette's mind and soul is revealed in his narrative of his ordeal, introduced in evidence at Charles Darnay's second trial before the revolutionary court.

The other detail, corroborating that these are echoes of Smith's title and not just coincidental use of a common phrase, is Madame Defarge's companion The Vengeance, the otherwise nameless ‘short, rather plump wife of a starved grocer’ of Saint Antoine (Book the Second, chapter 22, p. 251). In Smith's serial a woman freed from the Bastille after years of imprisonment names herself Vengeance.⁸ She does not otherwise resemble the grocer's wife, and although she turns out to have some importance to the plot, it is not that but the way she comes before Smith's readers which makes me think she caught Dickens's eye and was transformed into one of his ominous knitters before the guillotine. I shall explain this shortly, in the course of my argument for the likelihood that Smith's serial would have attracted Dickens's notice.

There are also a substantial number of elements in Smith's story which have parallels, if not identical counterparts, in A Tale of Two Cities. Smith opens in 1773, and after a certain amount of groundlaying (vastly more than Dickens does in opening his novel in 1775, as there is vastly more material: Smith begins in England and ends in Ireland, with a long central segment set in France), and moves forward to 1789, as Dickens does too. Smith depends heavily in his French segment on letters de cachet, those warrants by authority of which the rich and powerful were believed to be able to keep enemies imprisoned indefinitely, to account for his characters' disappearance into prison, which his plot requires of them with great frequency; such a document figures in Dickens's plot (but only once), presumably the authority for Dr Manette's entombment in 105 North Tower for almost eighteen years. There is a father confined in Smith's Bastille too, for fifteen years (to Dr Manette's nearly eighteen). Many prisoners freed from Smith's Bastille do not remember their own names; that father, like Dr Manette, calls himself only by a number (9 April, p. 292); though on being freed, he bursts into mad laughter and announces his name is Destiny. Destiny is soon to figure in an incident that parallels Sydney Carton's service to Charles Darney. Having been freed, he becomes a gaoler himself at the prison where the young hero, whirled by the changing winds of the revolution, lands in spite of his service at the fall of the Bastille; in that capacity Destiny is able to effect the hero's escape by disguising him as himself (30 April, p. 339). The hero, as events will prove, is the gaoler's son. I shall not attempt any further opening of the plot, which is wildly complicated, and of no interest generally in relation to A Tale of Two Cities.)

If Dickens saw all or some of this claptrap, it is not out of reason to suppose him making use of usable bits. He disliked intimations that he owed any of his creations to other sources than his own imagination and his own observations, but he obviously did have such debts, both before and after he resorted to his Book of Memoranda. John Butt's chapter ‘The Topicality of Bleak House’ in his and Kathleen Tillotson's Dickens at Work (London, 1957) demonstrates convincingly how Dickens's fictional concerns in Bleak House gathered up current topics of general concern dealt with in the daily press, and some special topics developed in his own Household Words; and similar cases have been made out for Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend.⁹ Furthermore, The Substance and the Shadow began appearing 4 December 1858, and of the details I have mentioned all were in print well before any of A Tale of Two Cities appeared.

But were they in print in time for Dickens to have drawn on them in his own composing? It is not clear how far ahead of the printer Dickens was able to stay. In July, when he was actively considering a reading tour in the United States, he wrote confidently of finishing by late September, and on 15 October all six remaining parts were indeed in proof.¹⁰ But on 9 July, when the eleventh part (Book the Second, chapters 10-11) had just appeared, Dickens was no more than holding his ground—‘my old month's advance’.¹¹ It is true that he implies he had been doing better before illness and heat slowed him down, but there is no sure evidence of that. A letter to his subeditor Wills earlier still, on 30 June, indicates only that the two installments beyond the one for 2 July were in proof;¹² and on the question whether Dickens had more than the ‘old month's advance’ in hand at the outset, there is only the evidence that he enclosed with his letter to Wills of Monday 11 April ‘two more weekly parts'—so there were, then, at least three parts in hand.¹³ But this was only two weeks before the first number of All the Year Round would have been sent to the printer.

At any rate, Smith's nameless prisoner appeared in good time for Dickens to have noticed him, in Cassell's for 9 April, more than five weeks before Dr Manette is found, still calling himself ‘one Hundred and Five, North Tower’ (in part 4, published 21 May, and in the printers' hands 16 May). Vengeance appeared in the next number of Cassell's (16 April), while Dickens's Vengeance did not turn up until part 19, published 3 September: plenty of time here, too. Destiny's stratagem for the hero's escape is in Cassell's for 30 April (p. 339), and Sydney Carton's plans for Charles Darnay's escape begin in part 25, published 15 October. However, Dickens clearly laid that ground much earlier, in part 5 (28 May), when Carton (‘the wigged gentleman with his hands in his pockets', p. 92) is on hand at Darnay's trial in England to confound the prosecution with his resemblance to Darnay. So the case is not so clear-cut about this detail: only four weeks intervene between the publication of Destiny's stratagem and the number of All the Year Round in which Dickens's intent for Carton is laid down. And while Dickens regularly revised in proof, it is unlikely that such a crucial development as the means of Darnay's acquittal would have been a last-minute idea.

Nor do I mean to claim that the structural parallels I noted earlier do in themselves prove Dickens's indebtedness. The idea for ‘a story in two periods—with a lapse of time between, like a French drama’ had occurred to him several years earlier—it makes an entry belonging to 1855 in the Book of Memoranda—and lettres de cachet appear in Carlyle's French Revolution as well as in Smith's plot. His use of such a document in his plot does not, in fact, indicate Dickens's debt to Smith so much as their common reliance on Carlyle. Smith's dependence on him is obvious: he begins his French segment in the last days of Louis XV, which is when Carlyle opens, and his historical characters follow Carlyle. Dickens's admiration for ‘Mr Carlyle's wonderful book’, of course, is well known. In fact his idea for a story in two periods may itself owe to his long familiarity with Carlyle's handling of the chronology of the revolution and its prelude; the comparison which comes to him—‘like a French drama’—seems to me suggestive.¹⁴

But these elements in Smith's novel which eventually were paralleled in Dickens's Tale could have had their effect, given the formative stage of Dickens's creation, if Dickens had reason to look over such a journal as Cassell's. And he did have reason. Canny businessman that he was, and with All the Year Round in the planning, Dickens would surely have been looking calculatingly at the competition. Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper was certainly that. It sold for one penny (All the Year Round was to be priced at twopence), and though it was eventually to lose ground to All the Year Round, when it was founded in 1853 it quickly gained circulation and a reputation for good value. According to the Edinburgh Guardian, at the age of seven weeks Cassell's ‘already equals, if it do not exceed, the London Journal, which up to that recent date stood in this respect at the head of the weekly periodicals. … At the price of one penny it contains eight folio pages of interesting and instructive matter, crowded with illustrations, in many cases of wonderful merit. … Among the benefactors of his country, Mr Cassell, by the singular versatility and vigour of his effects in the elevation of the popular taste, must undoubtedly rank’.¹⁵

And if Dickens inspected Cassell's, he could hardly avoid The Shadow and the Substance, on the front page from the first installment in the number for 4 December 1858 until 4 June 1859, when a new Smith serial took over that spot, and The Shadow and the Substance retreated to the inner pages for its remaining five weekly parts. With his own story in mind, Dickens would have been mentally primed to pick up details that chimed with his own conception (in much the same way details registered with me, I suppose, when I was first leafing through Cassell's on the watch for something else). It would not have been literary excellence that caught his attention. Smith was ‘the great exemplar of the penny periodical romance’, first for the London Journal, then Cassell's.¹⁶ According to the notice of his death in The Athenaeum, his work ws ‘too slapdash’, but he did have ‘the faculty of invention’.¹⁷ To which the author of ‘Penny Fiction’ would have protested that his stories were all ‘identically the same’; but the two accounts agree that Smith was much the most widely read English writer of fiction.

Dickens would not have envied Smith the style which made him popular, but there was something about his presence in Cassell's which would have attracted Dickens's notice. The front page of Cassell's was mainly given over to pictorial matter: the title across the top, embellished with a picture of a family group and symbols of art and learning, and an illustration for the current serial occupying the bottom half. Given Dickens's own intensely visual imagination, and his painstaking attention to illustrations for his own novels, Cassell's front page would surely catch his eye. Glancing at the number for 15 January, then, he would have seen ‘Ruth visits her father in the prison’. (See page 96). His own novel (still without a name) by now certainly involved an old man in prison, too, if in March 1858 he had those tentative titles in mind that Forster reports: Buried Alive, The Thread of Gold, The Doctor of Beauvais. And surely Lucie Manette already existed in his conception. So this illustration would have had some mild interest for him.

The story itself, this week, would not have had. But next week, the illustration was a scene at the royal court of France (‘Presentation of Miss Macnamara to Louis XV’), as Smith moved his action to France; and the first sentence was such as now to attract Dicken's attention to the story itself, too: ‘The eighteenth century propounded a problem which its successor, the nineteenth, has not yet succeeded in solving, at least satisfactorily—the French revolution’ (22 January, p. 113). After this there is a chunk of historical background larded with rather arch commentary before the plot resumes. And from here on, through the rest of the months that Dickens was shaping his own novel and writing the early installments, Smith's story was unfolding in France. The letters de cachet appear on the average of once a week; in the installment for 19 March Smith moved the action through the years following Louis XV's death, and reached 1789 in the next number; the attack on the Bastille came in the part published 2 April; and the following week the old prisoner was discovered who says he has no name, only a number, and then with a manic laugh takes the name of Destiny (9 April, p. 292).

The illustration for this number reinforces the impression made by the one of the young woman and her father (see page 100). Here ‘the son succeeds in discovering his father's dungeon’ (though he does not know who the prisoner is), a doubling, as it were, of the theme: an idea of such interest to Dickens as to make the corresponding scene in A Tale of Two Cities, Lucie Manette meeting her father in Defarge's garret in Saint Antoine, the subject for one of the illustrations in the monthly part edition (it appears in the Penguin English Library edition, p. 77). There is, however, another detail about this incident which anticipates something in A Tale of Two Cities. The old man (Destiny) is not discovered among the regular prisoners, but in a secret dungeon, access to which is from the Prevot's Tower. When the Bastille is overrun in A Tale of Two Cities (Book the Second, chapter 21), Defarge demands the meaning of ‘One Hundred and Five, North Tower’, and is led to the remote secret cell where (as is revealed at Darnay's fatal second trial in Paris) he finds the manuscript containing Dr Manette's narrative. (Dickens cannot have found the germ of this in Carlyle, as he did for such memorable scenes as the sharpening of weapons by the maddened mob during the massacres.¹⁸

There is a still more striking development, however, in the next installment (16 April): the appearance of the counterpart to Dickens's character The Vengeance. Smith's Vengeance has been in the Bastille for years (by authority of a lettre de cachet, naturally), and takes her distinctive name on hearing of the old man who calls himself Destiny. Having been introduced and named, she is sent offstage until the end of the week's installment, when she is discovered standing at the foot of the scaffold (p. 308). That, in fact, is the moment depicted in the week's illustration the first thing to catch a reader's eye (see page 102).

But the explanation of what she is doing there comes in the 23 April installment. To the question ‘What seek you here?’ she replies, ‘I wait’.

‘Have you ever seen the vulture perched immovably upon the branch of some blasted oak, overhanging the ravine below’, demanded the female, in a harsh, disagreeable voice, which reminded her hearers of the croak [sic] bird she named.

‘More than once’.

‘And never wondered what it was waiting for?’

‘It was unnecessary to do so; for its prey’.

‘And yet the fool asks me what I am waiting for!’ screamed the woman, with a hideous, mocking laugh.

‘I do not understand you’.

‘I wait for mine’.

The words were uttered in a tone so cold and passionless, that Redmond [the young hero] felt a chill of terror creep through his veins as he listened to them. (p. 321)

The value of finding a source for something in Dickens is not in adding to the list of such sources, but in seeing how he transformed it to his own use. Thus a river scavenger in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, interested in salvage of every kind, becomes Gaffer Hexam in Our Mutual Friend, a specialist in a more thematically resonant work, dredging the murky Thames for the bodies of the drowned. Here in Smith's The Substance and the Shadow is a character who I feel sure, from the complex of evidence I have been sketching, is the original for Dickens's character The Vengeance. The names are the obvious point of identity. But the singular quality of Smith's Vengeance—‘I wait for mine’—is given to another character, Madame Defarge. Like Vengeance, she carries implacable rage in her heart, and she too waits for her prey; unlike her, whose voice is rarely ‘so cold and passionless', Madame Defarge normally conceals her ruling passion, her demeanor calm, serene, and composed. Both of them, and Madame Defarge's admiring lieutenant The Vengeance, embody the driving force of the revolution as Carlyle saw it: ‘disimprisoned Anarchy’, how it ‘bursts-up from the infinite Deep, and rages uncontrollable, immeasurable, enveloping a world …’.¹⁹

Dickens's special touch is first, to show that force under control, contained, ordered, and concentrated by an iron will: what makes Madame Defarge so formidable to all who know her is precisely that. Second, he picks up a suggestion in Carlyle, the ‘citoyennes' who bring their knitting to Jacobin Society meetings ‘and shriek or knit as the case needs',²⁰ and infuses that image of domesticity and practicality with the rage of ‘disimprisoned Anarchy’. Smith's Vengeance waiting alone at the scaffold becomes in Dickens The Vengeance, one of a whole company of women, knitting at the guillotine, ‘never faltering or pausing in their work’, counting their stitches as they do the motions of ‘the crashing engine that constantly whirrs up and falls …’. If Dickens saw and feared ‘disimprisoned Anarchy’, as he surely did; and how ‘corrupt worn-out Authority’ (in Carlyle's phrase) was bound to loose that anarchy on the world, as he also did; he saw too that mere discipline and order (even such order and system as he governed his own life by) are not enough to rule the rage of the unforgiving heart. Only love can do that; only Miss Pross, who will buy her beloved Lucie's safety with her own life, can conquer Madame Defarge. If Dickens found some substance in J. F. Smith's shadows to help him body forth that vision in his Tale of Two Cities, we have something to thank Smith for.

Notes

1. The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T. Ley (London and New York, 1928), Book IX, chapter ii, p. 729. Dickens's description of the original idea to Angela Burdett-Coutts does not sound like such a ‘vague fancy’, however, as Forster makes out: ‘… Sometimes of late, when I have been very excited by the crying of two thousand people over the grave of Richard Wardour [his part in The Frozen Deep], new ideas for a story have come into my head as I lay on the ground, with surprising force and brilliance’ (5 September 1857; The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter [Bloomsbury, 1938], II, 876). George Woodcock discusses the importance of that experience to the genesis of A Tale of Two Cities in his excellent introduction to the Penguin English Library edition. (Page references for quotations from the novel are to this edition.)

2. Letters, III, 5 (to Forster).

3. Letters, III, 95 (21 February 1859, to Forster).

4. Letters, III, 95 (to Forster).

5. Life, IX, ii, 729.

6. Life, VI, ii, 472-3.

7. Book the Second, chapter 4, pp. 109-10.

8. Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper, 16 April 1859, p. 306. From here on I will locate references to Smith's novel in my text, by date and page.

9. See Harry Stone, ‘The Genesis of a Novel: Great Expectations’, in Charles Dickens 1812-1870, ed. E. W. F. Tomlin (New York, 1969). On Our Mutual Friend see my article ‘Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 20 (1965-66), 207-22; and Harvey Peter Sucksmith, ‘Dickens and Mayhew: A Further Note’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24 (1969-70), 345-49.

10. Letters, III, 112 (July, to Forster) and 125-6 (to F. J. Régnier).

11. Letters, III, 110 (to Forster).

12. Letters, III, 108-9.

13. Letters, III, 99.

14. He has the Dauphin and Dauphiness, learning of Louis XV's death, fall on their knees and exclaim, ‘Heaven direct us! We are too young to reign’ (26 February, p. 196)—flattening Carlyle slightly, who has them saying, ‘O God, guide us, protect us; we are too young to reign!’ (Volume One, Book First, chapter 4).

15. Quoted in Simon Nowell-Smith, The House of Cassell 1848-1958 (London, 1958), p. 40.

16. ‘Penny Fiction’, Quarterly Review, July 1890, pp. 162-3.

17. 15 March 1890, p. 343.

18. Book the Third, chapter 2, ‘The Grindstone’, pp. 291-2, where he dramatizes a single sentence from Carlyle, Volume III, Book First, chapter 4, ‘September in Paris': ‘Man after man is cut down; the sabres need sharpening, the killers refresh themselves from wine-jugs'. There is no reference to secret dungeons in Carlyle's chapters on the fall of the Bastille (Volume I, Book Fifth, chapters 6 and 7).

19. The French Revolution, Volume I, Book Sixth, chapter 1.

20. Volume III, Book Second, chapter 5.