Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (Bloom's Guides)

132 Pages·2007·0.68 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom’s
GUIDES
Charles Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
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Bloom’s
GUIDES
Charles Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
Edited & with an Introduction
by Harold Bloom
Bloom’s Guides: A Tale of Two Cities
Copyright ©2007 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction ©2007 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Charles Dicken’s A tale of two citites / Harold Bloom, (editor).
p. cm — (Bloom’s guides)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-9293-3 (hardcover)
1. Dickens, Charles, 1812–1870. Tale of two citites. 2. France—
History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Literature and the revolution. I.
Bloom, Harold. II. Title: Tale of two cities. III. Series.
PR4571.C483 2006
823’.8—dc22 2006031096
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Contents
Introduction 7
Biographical Sketch 10
The Story Behind the Story 13
List of Characters 18
Summary and Analysis 20
Critical Views 69
Cates Baldridge on Individualism in the Novel 69
Sir James Fitzjames Stephen on Dickens and Exaggeration 72
Edwin M. Eigner on the Character of Darnay 74
John Gross on Carton and Darnay 78
John B. Lamb on the Novel as Asylum 81
Carol Hanbery MacKay on Dickens, Carlyle, and Rhetoric 86
Leonard Manheim on the Character of Dr. Manette 89
David Rosen on the Roots of Revolution 92
G. K. Chesterton on Dickens’s European Experience 98
Sylvère Monod on Types of Narrators 99
John Kucich on Forms of Violence in the Novel 100
John Forster on Dickens and Storytelling 104
Andrew Saunders on Dickens and Paris 108
Works by Charles Dickens 112
Annotated Bibliography 113
Contributors 122
Acknowledgments 125
Index 127

Introduction
HAROLD BLOOM
Though it is, by any standard, a remarkable performance, A
Tale of Two Cities at first may seem distinctly not a novel by
Charles Dickens. Where are the great grotesques, the endless
digressions, above all the humor? Dark and unrelenting, the
Tale is pure storytelling, as economical in its way as is
Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Dickens even provides us with his Lady
Macbeth in Madame Defarge, the fiercely attractive genius of
the French Revolution, as the Taleportrays it. Nor are Madame
Defarge and her husband, the wineshop keeper Defarge, the
villains of the book. For once, Dickens has no villains, or
history itself is the villain. Though the story manifests an
obsessive dread of revolutionary violence, it also displays a
considerable loathing for the social oppression that, in part,
provoked the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.
Much under the influence of Thomas Carlyle’s visionary
chronicle The French Revolution, Dickens’s narrative shares in
Carlyle’s prophetic warning to England that economic tyranny
ensues at last in the answering tyranny of the mob. Whether A
Tale of Two Cities now can be interpreted as an admonition for
the United States, as it moves through the new Millennium, is
for the individual student or reader to judge.
If the Tale has no authentic villains, despite the colorful
menace of the Defarges and their followers, it also lacks heroes
and a heroine, though such a view would have disheartened
Dickens, who certainly intended Lucie Manette as the heroine
and Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay, the two men who love
her, as heroes. Unfortunately, the three of them together are
likely to interest us rather less than Madame Defarge does,
because they lack her intensity of being. If we read more
closely, then we will find that Carton is profoundly interesting,
though neither Lucie nor her husband, Charles Darnay, is
redeemed as a dramatic character by prolonged scrutiny.
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Carton, despite his celebrated and sentimental prophetic
thoughts that close the book, is more than the dark side of his
double and successful rival, Darnay. We can surmise that
Carton is the near-nihilist that Dickens senses he himself might
become. Whether Carton’s self-sacrifice is psychologically
persuasive is disputable, but it is dramatically convincing and
has become a permanent image of renunciation, as Dickens
intended that it should be. Though he dies as Darnay, and
considers himself to be dying for Lucie, Carton in a true sense
dies so that his creator, Charles Dickens, shall continue to live.
Madame Defarge, everyone’s favorite character in the novel,
dies a victim of her own consuming passion for revenge.
Carton’s closing prophecy tells us that Defarge and his group
will also die, by the agency of the guillotine they have
worshipped and fed. Since Dickens had little more than
Carlyle’s vision of the French Revolution to sustain him, A Tale
of Two Cities is not history and hardly asks to be taken as such.
The book is a historical romance in its genre, yet it would have
never achieved its perpetual popularity if it were entirely
composed in that mode. John Ruskin, the great Victorian critic,
rightly praised Dickens as being a master of “stage fire,” and A
Tale of Two Citiesin its essence is a melodrama, very appropriate
for dramatic presentation, whether in the theater or on screen.
The actual leaders and contending forces of the French
Revolution do not appear in the book, which so arranges
matters as to make us believe that a better-informed police
could have prevented the upheaval by one efficient raid on the
Defarge wineshop. That would be absurd history, but the
book’s identification of the Revolution with the Defarges is as
dramatically successful as Shakespeare’s concentration upon
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, while blending everyone else in
the play into a common grayness. The single image everyone
remembers of A Tale of Two Cities is Madame Defarge’s
knitting. She is the malevolent, would-be Fate of the novel, and
her knitting hints at the weaving of the Fates, a role occupied
by the witches in Macbeth. It is not too much to say that
Madame Defarge is not only the aesthetic glory of Dickens’s
Tale, but in a clear way is the symbol or emblem that unifies the
8
entire book. She is the image of death itself: remorseless, both
frightening and yet masochistically attractive, and finally to be
conquered only by heroic love, embodied (in the Dickens
manner) by the very English Miss Pross, as indomitable as
Winston Churchill or as Dickens himself. The vision of
renunciation and the resurrection that Dickens sought to
convey in Sydney Carton is far better served by Miss Pross,
who is willing to die for the Darnay family but instead lives for
them, and by her triumph allows them to live.
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