[In the following excerpt, Gross gives A Tale of Two Cities a mixed assessment, criticizing Dickens's lack of a sense of humor and his thin portrayal of society.]

A Tale of Two Cities ends fairly cheerfully with its hero getting killed. …

A Tale of Two Cities is a tale of two heroes. The theme of the double has such obvious attractions for a writer preoccupied with disguises, rival impulses, and hidden affinities that it is surprising that Dickens didn’t make more use of it elsewhere. But no one could claim that his handling of the device is very successful here, or that he has managed to range the significant forces of the novel behind Carton and Darnay. Darnay is, so to speak, the accredited representative of Dickens in the novel, the ‘normal’ hero for whom a happy ending is still possible. It has been noted, interestingly enough, that he shares his creator's initials—and that is pretty well the only interesting thing about him. Otherwise he is a pasteboard character, completely undeveloped. His position as an exile, his struggles as a language-teacher, his admiration for George Washington are so many openings thrown away.

Carton, of course, is a far more striking figure. He belongs to the line of cultivated wastrels who play an increasingly large part in Dickens's novels during the second half of his career, culminating in Eugene Wrayburn; his clearest predecessor, as his name indicates, is the luckless Richard Carstone of Bleak House. He has squandered his gifts and drunk away his early promise; his will is broken, but his intellect is unimpaired. In a sense, his opposite is not Darnay at all, but the aggressive Stryver, who makes a fortune by picking his brains. Yet there is something hollow about his complete resignation to failure; his self-abasement in front of Lucie, for instance. (‘I am like one who died young. … I know very well that you can have no tenderness for me … ’) For, stagy a figure though he is, Carton does suggest what Thomas Hardy calls ‘fearful unfulfilments'; he still has vitality, and it is hard to believe that he has gone down without a struggle. The total effect is one of energy held unnaturally in check: the bottled-up frustration which Carton represents must spill over somewhere.

THE FATES OF CARTON AND DARNAY

Carton's and Darnay's fates are entwined from their first meeting, at the Old Bailey trial. Over the dock there hangs a mirror: ‘crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been reflected in it, and had passed from its surface and this earth's together. Haunted in a most ghastly manner that abominable place would have been, if the glass could ever have rendered back its reflections, as the ocean is one day to give up its dead’ (bk. II, ch. 2). After Darnay's acquittal we leave him with Carton, ‘so like each other in feature, so unlike in manner, both reflected in the glass above them’. Reflections, like ghosts, suggest unreality and self-division, and at the end of the same day Carton stares at his own image in the glass and upbraids it: ‘Why should you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing in you to like: you know that. Ah, confound you! … Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow’ (bk. II, ch. 4). In front of the mirror, Carton thinks of changing places with Darnay; at the end of the book, he is to take the other's death upon him. Dickens prepares the ground: when Darnay is in jail, it is Carton who strikes Mr Lorry as having ‘the wasted air of a prisoner’, and when he is visited by Carton on the rescue attempt, he thinks at first that he is ‘an apparition of his own imagining’. But Dickens is determined to stick by Darnay: a happy ending must be possible. As Lorry and his party gallop to safety with the drugged Darnay, there is an abrupt switch to the first person: ‘The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us; but so far, we are pursued by nothing else’ (bk. III, ch. 13). We can make our escape, however narrowly; Carton, expelled from our system, must be abandoned to his fate. …

Drained of the will to live, he is shown in the closing chapters of the book as a man courting death, and embracing it when it comes. ‘In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease—a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them’ (bk. III, ch. 6). It is Carton rather than Darnay who is ‘drawn to the loadstone rock’. On his last walk around Paris, a passage which Shaw¹ cites in the preface to Man and Superman as proof of Dickens's essentially irreligious nature, his thoughts run on religion: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life.’ But his impressions are all of death: the day comes coldly, ‘looking like a dead face out of the sky’, while on the river ‘a trading boat, with a sail of the softened colour of a dead leaf, then glided into his view, floated by him, and died away’ (bk. III, ch. 9). His walk recalls an earlier night, when he wandered round London with ‘wreaths of dust spinning round and round before the morning blast, as if the desert sand had risen far away and the first spray of it in its advance had begun to overwhelm the city’ (bk. II, ch. 5). Then with the wilderness bringing home to him a sense of the wasted powers within him, he saw a momentary mirage of what he might have achieved and was reduced to tears; but now that the city has been overwhelmed in earnest, he is past thinking of what might have been. ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done’—but the ‘better thing’ might just as well be committing suicide as laying down his life for Darnay. At any rate, he thinks of himself as going towards rest, not towards resurrection. …

Still, A Tale of Two Cities is not a private nightmare, but a work which continues to give pleasure. Dickens's drives and conflicts are his raw material, not the source of his artistic power, and in itself the fact that the novel twists the French Revolution into a highly personal fantasy proves nothing: so, after all, does The Scarlet Pimpernel. Everything depends on the quality of the writing—which is usually one's cue, in talking about Dickens, to pay tribute to his exuberance and fertility. Dickens's genius inheres in minute particulars; later we may discern patterns of symbolism and imagery, a design which lies deeper than the plot, but first we are struck by the lavish heaping-up of acute observations, startling similes, descriptive flourishes, circumstantial embroidery. Or such is the case with every Dickens novel except for the Tale, which is written in a style so grey and unadorned that many readers are reluctant to grant it a place in the Canon at all. Dickens wouldn’t be Dickens if there weren’t occasional touches like the ‘hospital procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples', which Mr Lorry notices framing the mirror in his hotel (or the whitewashed cupid ‘in the coolest linen’ on the ceiling of his Paris office, which makes its appearance three hundred pages later). But for the most part one goes to the book for qualities which are easier to praise than to illustrate or examine: a rapid tempo which never lets up from the opening sentence, and a sombre eloquence which saves Carton from mere melodrama. …

THE NOVEL'S FAULTS

But it must be admitted that the Tale is in many ways a thin and uncharacteristic work, bringing the mounting despair of the 1850s to a dead end rather than ushering in the triumphs of the sixties. In no other novel, not even Hard Times, has Dickens's natural profusion been so drastically pruned. Above all, the book is notoriously deficient in humour. …

Contrary to what might be expected, this absence of burlesque is accompanied by a failure to present society in any depth: A Tale of Two Cities may deal with great political events, but nowhere else in the later work of Dickens is there less sense of society as a living organism. Evrémondes and Defarges alike seem animated by sheer hatred; we hear very little of the stock social themes, money, hypocrisy, and snobbery. …

The lack of social density shows up Dickens's melodrama to disadvantage. This is partly a question of length, since in a short novel everything has to be worked in as best it can: Barsad will inevitably turn out to be Miss Pross's long-lost brother, Defarge has to double as Doctor Manette's old servant, and so forth. But there is a deeper reason for feeling more dissatisfaction with the artificial plot here than one does with equally far-fetched situations elsewhere in Dickens. Where society is felt as an all-enveloping force, Dickens is able to turn the melodramatic conventions which he inherited to good use; however preposterous the individual coincidences, they serve an important symbolic function. The world is more of a piece than we suppose, Dickens is saying, and our fates are bound up, however cut off from one another we may appear: the pestilence from Tom-All-Alone's really will spread to the Dedlock mansion, and sooner or later the river in which Gaffer Hexam fishes for corpses will flow through the veneering drawing-room. In a word, we can’t have Miss Havisham without Magwitch. But without a thick social atmosphere swirling round them, the characters of A Tale of Two Cities stand out in stark melodramatic isolation; the spotlight is trained too sharply on the implausibilities of the plot. …

Yet despite the dark mood in which it was conceived, the Tale isn’t a wholly gloomy work; nor is the final impression which it leaves with us one of a wallow of self-pity on the scaffold. We are told of Darnay in the condemned cell (or is it Carton?) that

his hold on life was strong, and it was very, very hard to loosen; by gradual efforts and degrees unclosed a little here, it clenched the tighter there; and when he brought his strength to bear on that hand and it yielded, this was closed again. There was a hurry, too, in all his thoughts, a turbulent and heated working of his heart, that contended against resignation. (bk. III, ch. 13)

And near the end, as Miss Pross grapples with Madame Defarge, Dickens speaks of ‘the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate’. The gruesome events of the book scarcely bear out such a judgment, yet as an article of faith, if not as a statement of the literal truth, it is curiously impressive. For all the sense of horror which he must have felt stirring within him when he wrote A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens remained a moralist and a preacher, and it was his saving strength. But if the author doesn’t succumb with Carton, neither does he escape with Darnay. … Nothing is concluded, and by turning his malaise into a work of art Dickens obtains parole, not release: the prison will soon be summoning him once more.

Notes

1. playwright George Bernard