Dickens scholars have never been able to forgive A Tale of Two Cities its popularity—its very special kind of popularity. Pickwick Papers has survived the adulation of the special Pickwick cult; David Copperfield has survived the sentimental biography-hunting of the Dickensians; even Great Expectations may survive its selection as the Dickens work to be presented in “service courses” on the lower college level. But A Tale of Two Cities will never wholly live down the fact that it has received a kiss of death by its almost universal adoption as the Dickens work to be presented to secondary school students, usually during the tenth year of their formal education. Several factors have contributed to the persistence of the high-school syllabus-makers in prescribing the reading of A Tale of Two Cities. The first reason seems to be its compactness; it is not as long as most other Dickens works. In my own experience, it has been preferred even when David Copperfield was permitted as an alternative, purely because David Copperfield was so much longer. A second reason, which stems from the era when all novels were suspect, is the fact that A Tale of Two Cities is an historical novel, and the curse was considered removed from the “novel” because of the “history.” But the factor which probably loomed largest in the minds of the syllabus-makers was the “purity” of A Tale of Two Cities. It is wholly without the taint of immorality; it seems to be practically free of sexuality. (Can the account of the rape of Madame Defarge's sister in Doctor Manette's secret narrative be called sexuality? It is easy enough to pass over it—it is so hazily referred to; and in any event, it is a story of an occurrence in a benighted foreign country and hence a horrible example of “foreign” morality.) There is no Little Em'ly, no Martha Endell. There is no Hetty Sorrel; indeed Adam Bede was never permitted to sully the adolescent mind. Silas Marner's Eppie had the advantage of having it both ways since she was legally legitimate but, for the purposes of the story, a bastard; the legal legitimacy was enough to satisfy the academic censor. Let it not be thought that I exaggerate; I speak from experience, and although there is no time or place here for a complete documentation of my conclusions, I submit that the criterion for high school reading is usually—or at any rate used to be—one of superficial absence of any “immoral” element. Yet it is ironically noteworthy that A Tale of Two Cities, on a less superficial level, is the product of a great sexual crisis in the author's life, an upheaval in his psychosexual pattern which has been but dimly comprehended. Perhaps it would be as well to recount once again the facts as they have been clarified by recent scholarship.

On 10 February, in 1851, Dickens wrote to Wills, his long-suffering editorial assistant on Household Words, asking Wills to play the part of a servant in the comedy Not So Bad as We Seem, a typical nineteenth-century play written by the prolific Bulwer Lytton for production by Dickens' semi-permanent company of amateur actors. Dickens hastened to assure Wills that he would be in good company—among talented literary amateur actors. He playfully assumed the character of Sairey Gamp:

“Mrs. Harris,” I says to her, “be not alarmed; not reg'lar play-actors, hammertoors.”

“Thank 'Evens,” says Mrs. Harris, and bustiges into a flood of tears!¹

The over-burdened Wills found it impossible to add participation in his principal's theatrical ventures to his other duties, and he politely declined the offer. A little while later, Dickens wrote to his friend Augustus Egg, scenic designer of many of the productions, asking him if he could induce Wilkie Collins to accept the role. Collins did accept and thus began the friendship with Dickens which was to last until the latter's death. There was nearly fifteen years' difference in age between the two; their temperaments were fundamentally dissimilar; yet the influence of Collins on every phase of the latter years of Dickens' life and work is most marked, and there was ample indication that he tended, as time went on, to usurp the confidential position formerly held exclusively by John Forster, to the no small annoyance of that worthy gentleman.

In Collins, Dickens found an admirable traveling companion, one who introduced him to phases of life at home and abroad with which he had formerly been familiar by hearsay only, one who was reasonably free from Victorian prejudices so dear to the heart of John Forster. In Collins he found an equally enthusiastic devotee of the theatre, a competent and thorough deviser of complex plots (frequently of a most melodramatic character). It was Collins who put together the melodrama The Light-house, with a highly emotional leading role which Dickens delighted to play. It was he who was entrusted with the task of dramatizing the very worst of the Dickens Christmas numbers, No Thoroughfare, for professional production; and it was he who concocted The Frozen Deep, that queer melodrama in which Dickens played his last performance on the amateur stage. This play opened at Tavistock House on the twentieth birthday of Dickens' oldest son. It was a most elaborate affair, with one set designed to represent a scene near the North Pole, “where the slightest and greatest things the eye beheld were equally taken from the books of the polar voyagers.” It was repeated several times, one outstanding series of performances being given in Manchester. Dickens writes of it in his preface to A Tale of Two Cities:

When I was acting, with my children and friends, in Mr. Wilkie Collins's drama of The Frozen Deep, I first conceived the main idea of this story. A strong desire was upon me then, to embody it in my own person; and I traced out in my fancy, the state of mind of which it would necessitate the presentation to an observant spectator, with particular care and interest.

As the idea became familiar to me, it gradually shaped itself into its present form. Throughout its execution, it has had complete possession of me; I have so far verified what is done and suffered in these pages, as that I have certainly done and suffered it all myself.²

Much of the idea of The Frozen Deep seems to have originated with Dickens himself rather than with Collins. It was Dickens who inserted the “comedy relief,” Dickens who wrote the verse prologue which Forster spoke from behind the curtain before the opening, closing with these words:

But, that the secrets of the vast Profound
Within us, an exploring hand may sound,
Testing the region of the ice-bound soul,
Seeking the passage at its northern pole,
Soft'ning the horrors of its wintry sleep,
Melting the surface of that “Frozen Deep.”(3)

The plot of the play whose hero Dickens so greatly longed to “embody in his own person” is worthy of being examined closely, when we consider how much it meant to him during his composition of A Tale of Two Cities and how clearly it constituted a turning point in his life.

The first act makes us acquainted with four young ladies living in Devon, each of whom has a lover serving with a Polar expedition. Clara Burnham not only has her betrothed out in the icy regions, but the rejected lover who was sworn to kill him wherever and whenever they meet, though he does not even know the name of his rival. Clara, haunted by the fear that some mysterious influence may reveal them to each other, tells her story to Lucy Crayford. As she does so, a crimson sunset dies away to grey and Nurse Esther goes about the house murmuring of scenes that come to her from “the land o' ice and snaw.” She stands, as night falls, by the misty blue of the window, describing to the young ladies her bloody vision from the Northern seas. Lucy Crayford shudders and calls for lights: Clara Burnham swoons.

The second act is set in the arctic regions. The stranded men are in a hut deciding who is to go and seek relief. Frank Aldersley is chosen by lot, and when somebody else falls out, Richard Wardour has to accompany him. Just before they start Wardour discovers that Aldersley is his hated rival.

The third act takes place in a cavern in Newfoundland. The girls, smartly dressed in crinolines, their Scotch nurse, and some members of the expedition are present, but neither Wardour nor Aldersley. Presently a ragged maniac rushes in and is given food and drink. He has escaped from an ice-floe but is not too demented to recognise and be recognised by Clara Burnham, who suspects him of having murdered her Frank. As soon as he understands this he goes off, returning a few minutes later with Aldersley in his arms to lay at Clara's feet. “Often,” he gasps, “in supporting Aldersley through snow-drifts and on ice-floes have I been tempted to leave him sleeping!” He has not done so and is now exhausted to death.⁴

Dickens played Wardour; and Collins, Aldersley. Purposely for the “part,” each of them grew a substantial beard which he kept in later life. During the early private showings and at the special performance for the Queen, the women's roles were played by lady amateurs. However, when it was decided to repeat the play at Manchester for the benefit of the late Douglass Jerrold's family, it became apparent that the size of the house (it held three thousand spectators at one performance) would require the engagement of professionals for the women's roles. It was on the recommendation of a friendly theatrical manager that Mrs. Ternan and her two daughters, Maria and Ellen, were engaged for the production. Mrs. Ternan played the Scottish nurse; Maria Ternan played the leading role of Clara Burnham; and Ellen played one of the other girls, probably Lucy. Now it must become at once apparent that the tale which pictures Ellen in tears in the wings of the theatre, in agony over the scanty costume she was to wear in The Frozen Deep (!) must be apocryphal. As a matter of fact, Dickens had known Ellen at least since the spring of 1857 when he had met her, really in tears in her dressing room because she was to play the role of Hippomenes in Talfourd's Atalanta, a part in which she might well be alarmed at having “to show too much leg.” However, it was during the brief period of rehearsals at Tavistock House, with Maria and Ellen rushing in and out of his study, Ellen perching on the arm of his chair and turning soulful eyes upon him as he instructed her in the interpretation of her role, that young love began to spring anew in the breast of the forty-five-year-old author. Collins was enthralled by Dickens' brilliance during the Manchester performances. “Dickens,” he wrote, “surpassed himself. He literally electrified the audience.”⁵ And well he might, for the clock had turned back. He was once again the eighteen-year-old who was going to make his fortune as an actor in Covent Garden.

Aghast for a moment after the first emotional shock had passed, Dickens tried to run away from himself again, this time with Collins. The trip is the one described in their joint literary effort known as The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices. When it was over, the problem was solved and Dickens had cast Victorian morality to the winds and was an ardent suitor for the favors of the young lady. A word as to the choice between the two sisters. It was Maria whose acting ability had most impressed the critical director, and he wrote of her performance in the glowing emotional orgy of a letter to Miss Burdett-Coutts. Yet it was to Ellen that he was sexually attracted. After all, there are limits to the extensions of a real-life Maria. Two of them (Maria Beadnell and Mary Hogarth) had passed into agonizing oblivion. The Mary-figure, the virgin-mother, was still the dominant image, but a little disguise, a little displacement of the emotional tone was clearly needed—and the choice fell upon the sister-image, Ellen. After all, the Superego in the irrational Unconscious might be lulled into a sense of security by the pretense that it was to Mary's sister that he was still being “true”!

It was in such troubled days that A Tale of Two Cities was conceived and, for the most part, written. It was the work used to launch the new publication All the Year Round, which succeeded Household Words after Dickens' break with his former publishers, occasioned by his frantic desire to suppress the Ternan scandal. The whole work is impregnated with the spirit of the theatre. Its structure is dramatic and Dickens is reported to have sent proof sheets to Henri Regnier with a view toward immediate dramatization for the French theatre. The work has a complicated plot-structure which yet stands up better under analysis than any novel since Barnaby Rudge, with which it at once compels comparison. Like that former work, it is markedly deficient in humor. There seems to be no room in it for both the old comedy and also the new Collins-inspired melodrama. There is not even as much comedy in the new work as in Barnaby Rudge, the former novel of revolutionary days, for Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher cannot bear even so much of the burden as was formerly shared by Miss Miggs and Sim Tappertit.

The compulsive quality of the writing of A Tale of Two Cities is revealed in the preface quoted as moment ago. Whenever we find an author stressing such compulsions, we can safely conclude that we are dealing with “repressed” inspiration from unconscious sources. The most striking effect upon the novel of the emotionally disturbed period which produced it lies in the Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde aspect of its leading male character. The word “character” is used in the singular intentionally, for in A Tale of Two Cities Dickens developed even more fully than was usual for him the tendency to embody his own ideal of himself, his own Fantasy-Hero in two or more characters (multiple projection). Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton are two plainly delineated faces of the same coin. Their names are extensions of a familiar pattern. The fortunate-unfortunate French nobleman bears his author's Christian name with a surname which uses the first initial of Dickens to bear out the fantasy of noble birth in disguise, since Charles is said to have assumed the name Darnay upon dropping the hated appellation Evrémonde, adapting his new surname from his mother's noble name of D'Aulnay, eliding the aristocratic de in deference to British taste. In the name Sydney Carton the trend is more hidden; yet it too is a simple cipher, easily susceptible of solution—as it is meant to be. The Charles element is transferred to the Car- syllable of the last name; in the first syllable of Sidney, we have the same softening of Dick- which may be noticed in the name Jarndyce (pronounced Jahn-diss) in Bleak House, here reversed (another reversal) to form Syd. The implication is apparent. Both Carton and Darnay are Dickens (not literally, of course, but in fantasy); the point is further stressed by the fortuitous fact that they look alike.

Consider this last point for a moment. Carton, during Darnay's English trial for treason, points out the resemblance between himself and Darnay to his senior counsel, Mr. Stryver, who uses it (so it is said) to discredit the testimony of a witness, a witness who had testified that he had seen the defendant Darnay descend by stealth from the Dover mail in order to spy upon a garrison and dockyard, admitting that he had never seen the accused upon any other occasion.

“You say again you are quite sure that it was the prisoner?” The witness was quite sure.

“Did you ever see anybody very like the prisoner?” Not so like (the witness said), as that he could be mistaken.

“Look well upon that gentleman, my learned friend there,” pointing to him who had tossed the paper over, “and then look well upon the prisoner. How say you? Are they very like each other?”

Allowing for my learned friend's appearance being careless and slovenly, if not debauched, they were sufficiently like each other to surprise, not only the witness, but everybody present, when they were thus brought into comparison. My Lord being prayed to bid my learned friend lay aside his wig, and giving no very gracious consent, the likeness became much more remarkable. My Lord inquired of Mr. Stryver, (the prisoner's counsel), whether they were next to try Mr. Carton (name of my learned friend) for treason? But Mr. Stryver replied to my Lord, no; but he would ask the witness to tell him whether what happened once, might happen twice; whether he would have been so confident, having seen it; and more. The upshot of which was, to smash this witness like a crockery vessel, and shiver his part of the case to useless lumber. (II, iii)

Now any competent trial lawyer will recognize that this is very bad cross-examination. The fact that Mr. Darnay resembled Mr. Carton does not really impeach the credibility of the witness' testimony, unless, as the presiding judge suggested, it had been counsel's intention to show that Mr. Carton was also in the neighborhood at the time. An identification by a witness may be impeached far better by his inability to pick the prisoner out of a group of people (a “line-up,” for example) who do not in any way resemble one another. Yet for Dickens it fits into a set pattern. Darnay is first accused of treason in England (treachery, betrayal of his country, let it be remembered—parallel in fantasy-life to a man's “betrayal” of his wife). He is saved by his alter ego, Carton. Seventeen years later the accusation of betrayal is renewed before another, “foreign” tribunal—foreign both geographically and in the standard of loyalty which it imposes. Now Carton is impotent. He cannot plead in the new court. He cannot answer the fatal and misguided denunciation of the destructive father-image, the Law. But he can assume the place of his double and die in his stead, making a propitiatory sacrifice of himself by which he clears and saves the innocent person of the favored hero. Never was there a more felicitously contrived scapegoat pattern.

All of the virtue which would make the favored lover worthy of his virgin is embodied in Jekyll-Darnay. All of the vice—gloomy, Byronic, objectively unmotivated and unexplained—is concentrated in Hyde-Carton (who, of course, never gets the girl), for whom it is purged away by his “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice,” not for the sins of the whole world, to be sure, but for the sinful love of one Charles Dickens for one Ellen Ternan. Even the self-satisfying sense of resurrection, an “undying” after death, is accomplished by the final picture of Sydney's mind just before the guillotine falls, envisaging the rosy future which is to follow for all concerned, even his own rebirth in his child-namesake. How can Ellen hesitate now? Her middle-aged lover is not only the most fascinating of men; he is also (by a vicarious propitiatory sacrifice) the most guiltless, and she will share that pristine state of innocence with him forever!

Lucie is basically only one more in the line of Dickensian virgin-heroines whom the critic Edwin Pugh felicitously called “feminanities.”⁶ Yet, as Professor Edgar Johnson clearly saw, there was a subtle distinction.

Lucie … is given hardly any individual traits at all, although her appearance, as Dickens describes it, is like that of Ellen, “a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes,” and it may be that her one unique physical characteristic was drawn from Ellen too: “a forehead with a singular capacity (remembering how young and smooth it was), of lifting and knitting itself into an expression that was not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, though it included all the four expressions.” … The fact that Lucie and Dr. Manette at the time of his release from the Bastille are of almost the same age as Ellen and Dickens does not mean that the Doctor's feeling for his daughter is the emotion Dickens felt for the pretty, blue-eyed actress, although the two merge perhaps in his fervent declaration [in his letter protesting the scandal, a letter which he “never meant to be published”] that he knows Ellen to be as “innocent and pure, and as good as my own dear daughter.”⁷

But Lucie fails to fit into the pattern of the unattainable dream-virgin of the earlier novels in at least one other respect. Most of Dickens' earlier heroine-ideals do not marry until the last-chapter summation of the “lived-happily-ever-after” pattern. Lucie is married, happily married, through much of the book. She maintains a household for her husband and her father, and she finds room for compassion, if not love, for the erring Carton. What is more, she has children, two of them. Yet she seems never to grow older. She was seventeen in 1775; she is, to all intents and purposes, seventeen in 1792. In the interim she has allegedly given birth to two Dickens-ideal infants, two of the most sickening little poppets we could possibly expect from one who, despite his experience as the father of ten children, still sought desperately to re-create infancy and childhood in an image which would affirm his own concept of unworldly innocence. Let the reader take a firm grip on himself and read the dying words of the little son of Charles and Lucie Darnay, who died in early childhood for no other reason, it must seem, than to give the author another opportunity to wallow in bathos.

“Dear papa and mamma, I am very sorry to leave you both, and to leave my pretty sister; but I am called, and I must go!” …

“Poor Carton! Kiss him for me!” (II, xxi)

Poor Carton, indeed! Poor Dickens! Little Lucie is not much better, for in Paris, after her father's condemnation, when her mother is mercifully unconscious and unaware of Carton's presence, she cries out in sweet childish innocence to friend Sydney:

“Oh, Carton, Carton, dear Carton! … Now that you have come, I think you will do something to help mamma, something to save papa! Oh, look at her, dear Carton! Can you, of all the people who love her bear to see her so?” (III, xi)

Out of the mouths of babes! At this point there is obviously nothing for Sydney to do but head straight for the nearest guillotine.

But Sydney is not to be left wholly without his own dream girl. Just as the purified Darnay is permitted to live out his life with the “attained” (and untainted) Lucie, so the dying Carton is accompanied to his execution by the virgin-victim, the innocent seamstress whom he solaces and strengthens until the final moments of their love-death, although her first glance had revealed that he was not the man Darnay whom she had previously admired.

Since the pattern of attainability is characteristic of the primary “virgin” in this novel, the figure of the decayed virgin, the older freak and enemy, is markedly absent from it. A few novels back, Dickens had had such characters in the immortal Sairey Gamp (Martin Chuzzlewit) and Mrs. Pipchin (Dombey and Son); he was to have the most horrifying of them all in his very next novel (Great Expectations) in the person of Miss Havisham. Here Miss Pross, although she has many of the elements of the “freak” in the best Dickensian tradition, is all benevolence, with her red-headed queerness overshadowed by her devoted love and affectionate care of the virgin-queen to whom she is a substitute mother, with no flaw except her unconquerable belief in the virtue and nobility of her erring brother Solomon. Just as she, the benevolent mother-protectress, is herself merely an aged virgin, so her counterpart and rival is the childless wife (also a devoted, albeit vindictive, sister), Thérèse Defarge. The word rival is used advisedly, for while there is no sign of overt rivalry between the two during nine-tenths of the novel, Dickens goes out of his way to bring them face to face at the end. He strains all of his plot structure to bring Mme. Defarge to the Manette dwelling on the day of the execution to have Miss Pross left there alone to face her. Then a melo-dramatic physical encounter ensues between the two women, neither of whom can, in any sense of the words, speak the other's language. Lucie's bad angel falls dead (accidentally, of course, by her own hand), but the good angel is not unscathed, and if, in her later life, her “queerness” is augmented by the ear-trumpet which she will no doubt use, yet all will know that she came by this crowning, though no doubt humorous, affliction in a good cause.

Although the category of mother-figure is limited, there is no lack of father-counterparts, for the law-as-father has become blended with the fear of condemnation by society, which thereby also becomes a symbolic father-figure. Society and its moral sanctions constitute the only fly in the ointment of adolescent happiness in a sinful love. We have noted that, as a propitiatory gesture, Charles's wicked father-enemy is not his father (as he well might have been) but his thoroughly aristocratic twin-uncle, who, being French, is more villainous than any British father-enemy might have been. Mr. Stryver, in his vampirish relationship with Carton, is another figure of the worthless “father” who sucks the blood of his talented “son.” And since Dickens almost always maintains a balance between evil and virtuous figures in all categories, we have, on the benevolent side, Mr. Lorry, another unmarried “father,” the only living figure in the gallery of scarecrows who inhabit Tellson's Bank. Midway between the two classes is the hagridden Ernest Defarge, whose every attempt at benevolence is thwarted by his vengeful wife and her abettors, the allegorically named Vengeance and the members of the society of Jacques. This last-named group produces one brilliantly sketched psychopath, the sadistic, finger-chewing Jacques Three.

The one remaining father-figure is the most interesting, complex, and well-developed character in the whole novel, Dr. Manette. Since he could not have been much more than twenty-five years old when he was torn from his newly-wedded English wife to be imprisoned in the Bastille for nearly eighteen years, he must have been less than forty-five when we first met him in Defarge's garret. And Dickens, let it be remembered, was forty-five when he wrote of him. Here is his portrait:

A broad ray of light fell into the garret, and showed the workman, with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his labour. His few common tools and various scraps of leather were at his feet and on his bench. He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very long, a hollow face, and exceedingly bright eyes. The hollowness and thinness of his face would have caused them to look large, under his yet dark eyebrows and his confused white hair, though they had been really otherwise; but they were naturally large, and looked unnaturally so. His yellow rags of shirt lay open at the throat, and showed his body to be withered and worn. (I, vi)

Of course the appearance of great age in a middle-age man is rationally explained by the suffering entailed by his long, unjust imprisonment. Yet, nearly eighteen years later (the repetition of the number is meaningful), when he has become the unwitting agent of his son-in-law's destruction and has been unable to use his special influence to procure Charles' release, he is pictured as a decayed mass of senility.

“Who goes here? Whom have we within? Papers!”

The papers are handed out and read.

“Alexandre Manette. Physician. French. Which is he?”

This is he; this helpless, inarticulately murmuring, wandering old man pointed out.

“Apparently the Citizen-Doctor is not in his right mind? The Revolution-fever will have been too much for him?”

Greatly too much for him. (III, xiii)

Carton envisions his complete recovery, but we have some difficulty in believing it.

In the interim, however, he is pictured as a stalwart, middle-aged medical practitioner. His sufferings have caused a period of amnesia, with occasional flashes of painful recollection, as in the scene in which he hears of the discovery of a stone marked D I G in a cell in the Tower of London. We never know, by the way, whether his recollection at this moment is complete and whether he has, even furtively, any recall of the existence of the document of denunciation found by M. Defarge. The aspects of conscious and repressed memory are here handled with great skill by Dickens. Generally, his amnesia is reciprocal; he cannot recall his normal life during the period of relapse, or vice versa, especially when his relapses are triggered by events and disclosures which bring up memories of his old wrongs. His reversion to shoemaking for a short time after Charles proposes marriage to Lucie and again for a longer time following Lucie's marriage and Charles's final revelation of his long-suspected identity foreshadow the great disclosure which is to make him the unwitting aggressor against the happiness of his loving and beloved daughter.

When we consider Dr. Manette's conduct, however, we find that, whether Dickens consciously intended it to be or not, the doctor of Beauvais is a good psychiatrist, at least in the handling of his own illness. His shoemaking is superficially pictured as a symptom of mental regression and decay, but in its inception it must have been a sign of rebellion against madness rather than a symptom thereof. He relates that he begged for permission to make shoes as a means of diverting his mind from its unendurable suffering. Shoemaking, truly an example of vocational therapy, was the only contact with reality that his distracted mind, otherwise cut off from reality, possessed. It was, therefore, a means of bringing about his recovery. Lucie fears the shoemaking, but she realizes that her loving presence, coupled with the availability, if needed, of the vocational contact with reality, will serve to draw him back to normal adjustment. It would seem, then, that the act of Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, carried on furtively and guiltily, of destroying his shoemaker's bench and tools after his spontaneous recovery from the attack following Lucie's wedding, was a great error, an error against which the doctor, giving an opinion in the anonymous presentation of his own case by Mr. Lorry, strongly advises. For when he once again falls into a state of amnesia and confusion, after the realization of the damage he has done to Charles and his impotence to remedy that damage, he calls for his bench and tools, but they are no longer to be had, and he huddles in a corner of the coach leaving Paris, a pitiful picture of mental decay from which we can see no hope of recovery despite the optimistic vision of Carton's last moments.

The basic aim of this paper has been, of course, psychological interpretation; but the psychological critic has sometimes been accused of neglecting the critical function of evaluation, and possibly a few concluding words might be added on that score.

In a lecture on criticism given at Harvard in 1947, E. M. Forster distinguished beautifully between the function and method of creation and the function and method of criticism.

What about the creative state? In it a man is taken out of himself. He lets down, as it were, a bucket into the unconscious and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experience and out of the mixture he makes a work of art. … After this glance at the creative state, let us look at the critical. The critical state has many merits, and employs some of the highest and subtlest faculties of man. But it is grotesquely remote from the state responsible for the works it affects to expound. It does not let buckets down into the unconscious. It does not conceive in sleep or know what it has said after it has said it. Think before you speak, is criticism's motto; speak before you think is creation's. Nor is criticism disconcerted by people arriving from Porlock; in fact it sometimes comes from Porlock itself.⁸

What Mr. Forster has set forth can best be understood in the light of the road which has been taken by psychological, particularly psychoanalytic, criticism in the more than twenty years which have elapsed since the delivery of that lecture in 1947. The psychoanalytic critic of today would like to think that he comes from Xanadu rather than Porlock. He cannot claim that he consistently writes before he thinks, but his thinking is to some extent based on material which the bucket lowered into the depths has brought up for him.

What can he say about the permanent literary value of the work which he is discussing? He cannot of course undertake to give any absolute final judgment; it will hardly be suitable for him to do what so many academic critics do, that is, to report the state of critical opinion in the “in-group” that usually passes critical judgment in academic circles. I have suggested elsewhere that the function of the psychoanalytic critic in evaluation is to prognosticate rather than to judge. I can do no better than to quote here my preferred authority, Norman Holland:

Saying a literary work is “good,” then, from the point of view of our model, is predicting that it will pass the test of time; that it “can please many and please long”; that it is a widely satisfying form of play; or, more formally, that it embodies a fantasy with a power to disturb many readers over a long period of time and, built in, a defensive maneuver that will enable those readers to master the poem's disturbance.⁹

A Tale of Two Cities does, it seems to me, give every indication, even apart from its past history, that it “can please many and please long.” Its use of the dynamic scapegoat pattern with the employment of the pattern of multiple projection, which it has been my aim to point out in this essay, does indeed embody a fantasy, a fantasy which was disturbing to Dickens and is still undoubtedly disturbing to many readers, and has used that device of multiple projection as the defensive maneuver that enables readers to master that disturbance. In that sense, there seems to be little doubt about the continuance of the perennial popularity of this often maligned but still frequently read novel of Dickens' later period.

But all of that is really by the way. Criticism of the kind which I have attempted is designed to furnish information rather than critical judgment, even of a prognostic nature; it is the kind of criticism which was described by Arthur Symons in his introduction to the Biographia Literaria of Coleridge:

The aim of criticism is to distinguish what is essential in the work of a writer. It is the delight of the critic to praise; but praise is scarcely part of his duty. … What we ask of him is that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves.

Notes

1. See Laurance Hutton, ed., The Dickens-Collins Letters (New York 1892), p. 6.

2. Preface to the First Edition (November 1859), reproduced in Walter Allen's Perennial Classic Edition of A Tale of Two Cities (New York, 1965), p. xvi. His text is taken from the Charles Dickens Edition of 1868–70.

3. Quoted in Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, Charles Dickens (London, 1945), pp. 361–62.

4. Ibid., pp. 362–63.

5. Dickens-Collins Letters, pp. 78–80 (2 August 1857).

6. The Charles Dickens Originals (London, 1925), p. 68.

7. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York, 1952), II, 973.

8. V. S. Pritchett, article on E. M. Forster, New York Times Book Review, 29 December 1968, VII, p. 1.

9. Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York, 1968), p. 203; originally published in Literature and Psychology, XIV, No. 2 (1964), 43–55.