Tale of Two Cities, A Dickens's twelfth novel and his second historical novel, set in the time of the French Revolution. Although not generally held in high regard by critics, it is one of his most popular works, both as Dickens wrote it and in stage and screen adaptations (see dramatizations; films).
Inception and Composition
The first recorded evidence that Dickens was thinking about the book which became A Tale of Two Cities is found in a letter to Angela Burdett Coutts on 5 September 1857. Referring to the amateur theatrical production of Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep, in which he took the role of the hero, Richard Wardour, who sacrificed his life in order to save that of his rival for the woman they both loved, Dickens wrote: ‘Sometimes of late, when I have been very much excited by the crying of two thousand people over the grave of Richard Wardour, new ideas for a story have come into my head as I lay on the ground, with surprising force and brilliancy.
Last night, being quiet here, I noted them down in a little book I keep.’ As the editors of the Pilgrim Edition of Dickens's letters observe, ‘There are in fact no entries that connect Wardour specifically or the themes of The Frozen Deep’ (Pilgrim 8.432n.), but the Book of Memoranda does record an entry which conceives of ‘Representing London—or Paris, or any other great city—in the new light of being utterly unknown to all the people in the story’. The names Carton and Stryver are also recorded, along with the idea of ‘a story in two periods—with a lapse of time in between, like a French drama’, and another concerning ‘The drunken?—dissipated?—What?—lion—and his jackal and Primer, stealing down on him at unwonted hours’ (Kaplan1981).
On 27 January 1858 Dickens wrote to Forster of ‘growing inclinations of a fitful and undefined sort’ which might lead to a new book, and three days later of starting to write, ‘If I can discipline my thoughts into the channel of a story’. On 15 March he sent Forster three trial titles: ‘Buried Alive’, ‘The Thread of Gold’, and ‘The Doctor of Beauvais’, but got no further. This was a time of great personal restlessness for Dickens, marked by his growing infatuation with Ellen Ternan and the first of his public reading tours, and culminating in his separation from his wife in May (see Dickens, Catherine). A full year passed before he actually began writing, and even then he complained, ‘I cannot please myself with the opening of my new story, and cannot in the least settle at it or take to it’ (to Forster, 21 February 1859).
Soon, however, he hit upon ‘exactly the name for the story that is wanted’ (to Forster, 11 March 1859), and began consulting historical works sent to him from the London Library by Thomas Carlyle, to whom he had turned for advice (to Carlyle, 24 March 1859). ‘All the time I was at work on the Two Cities’, he told Forster afterwards (2 May 1860), ‘I read no books but such as had the air of the time in them.’ By 5 April he reported to Macready that he was ‘a little busy, and hard at work on a new story’, and on the 30th of that month the first instalment appeared.
That summer he was in ill health and able ‘to do no more than hold my ground, my old month's advance’ (to Forster, 9 July 1859), but working ‘doggedly’ he continued to ‘blaze away with an eye to October’, when another reading tour was scheduled (to Collins, 16 August 1859). He explained to Forster that A Tale of Two Cities was designed to be different from his other novels. ‘I set myself the little task of making a picturesque story, rising in every chapter with characters true to nature, but whom the story itself should express, more than they should express themselves, by dialogue.
On 27 January 1858 Dickens wrote to Forster of ‘growing inclinations of a fitful and undefined sort’ which might lead to a new book, and three days later of starting to write, ‘If I can discipline my thoughts into the channel of a story’. On 15 March he sent Forster three trial titles: ‘Buried Alive’, ‘The Thread of Gold’, and ‘The Doctor of Beauvais’, but got no further. This was a time of great personal restlessness for Dickens, marked by his growing infatuation with Ellen Ternan and the first of his public reading tours, and culminating in his separation from his wife in May (see Dickens, Catherine). A full year passed before he actually began writing, and even then he complained, ‘I cannot please myself with the opening of my new story, and cannot in the least settle at it or take to it’ (to Forster, 21 February 1859).
Soon, however, he hit upon ‘exactly the name for the story that is wanted’ (to Forster, 11 March 1859), and began consulting historical works sent to him from the London Library by Thomas Carlyle, to whom he had turned for advice (to Carlyle, 24 March 1859). ‘All the time I was at work on the Two Cities’, he told Forster afterwards (2 May 1860), ‘I read no books but such as had the air of the time in them.’ By 5 April he reported to Macready that he was ‘a little busy, and hard at work on a new story’, and on the 30th of that month the first instalment appeared.
That summer he was in ill health and able ‘to do no more than hold my ground, my old month's advance’ (to Forster, 9 July 1859), but working ‘doggedly’ he continued to ‘blaze away with an eye to October’, when another reading tour was scheduled (to Collins, 16 August 1859). He explained to Forster that A Tale of Two Cities was designed to be different from his other novels. ‘I set myself the little task of making a picturesque story, rising in every chapter with characters true to nature, but whom the story itself should express, more than they should express themselves, by dialogue.
I mean, in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written, in place of the bestiality that is written under that pretence, pounding the characters out in its own mortar, and beating their interests out of them’ (25 August 1859). Forster (who gives a slightly variant transcription of the letter) calls this ‘a deliberate and planned departure from the method of treatment which had been pre-eminently the source of his popularity as a novelist. To rely less upon character than upon incident, and to resolve that his actors should be expressed by the story more than they should express themselves by dialogue, was for him a hazardous, and can hardly be called an entirely successful, experiment’ (9.2).
On 4 October he completed the novel, and two days later wrote to Wilkie Collins, explaining that he had not written in Collins's manner for fear the story would have been ‘overdone’ that way—‘too elaborately trapped, baited and prepared’. Referring to his treatment of Dr Manette, he declared, ‘I think the business of Art is to lay all that ground carefully, but with the care that conceals itself—to shew, by a backward light, what everything has been working to—but only to suggest, until the fulfilment comes. These are the ways of Providence—of which ways, all Art is but a little imitation’ (6 October 1859).
On finishing the book his confidence in it was high. ‘I hope it is the best story I have written,’ he declared to François Regnier (15 October 1859), and six months later he remained both pleased with the book and idealistic about the value of his fiction. ‘As to my art,’ he told Angela Burdett Coutts (8 April 1860), ‘I have as great a delight in it as the most enthusiastic of my readers, and the sense of my trust and responsibility in that wise, is always upon me when I take pen in hand.’
Still later, in response to a letter from his friend and fellow-novelist Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens defended his novel on two counts, one historical and the other artistic. First, he declared, although ‘feudal privileges’ had been surrendered before the time of the Terror, he was confident that they were still in use ‘to the frightful oppression of the peasants’.
On 4 October he completed the novel, and two days later wrote to Wilkie Collins, explaining that he had not written in Collins's manner for fear the story would have been ‘overdone’ that way—‘too elaborately trapped, baited and prepared’. Referring to his treatment of Dr Manette, he declared, ‘I think the business of Art is to lay all that ground carefully, but with the care that conceals itself—to shew, by a backward light, what everything has been working to—but only to suggest, until the fulfilment comes. These are the ways of Providence—of which ways, all Art is but a little imitation’ (6 October 1859).
On finishing the book his confidence in it was high. ‘I hope it is the best story I have written,’ he declared to François Regnier (15 October 1859), and six months later he remained both pleased with the book and idealistic about the value of his fiction. ‘As to my art,’ he told Angela Burdett Coutts (8 April 1860), ‘I have as great a delight in it as the most enthusiastic of my readers, and the sense of my trust and responsibility in that wise, is always upon me when I take pen in hand.’
Still later, in response to a letter from his friend and fellow-novelist Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens defended his novel on two counts, one historical and the other artistic. First, he declared, although ‘feudal privileges’ had been surrendered before the time of the Terror, he was confident that they were still in use ‘to the frightful oppression of the peasants’.
And he defended his design in making the death of Madame Defarge accidental rather than dignified, ‘which she wouldn't have minded’. ‘Where the accident is inseparable from the passion and emotion of the character, where it is strictly consistent with the whole design, and arises out of some culminating proceeding on the part of the character which the story has led up to, it seems to me to become’, he wrote (5 June 1860), ‘as it were, an act of divine justice’.
Contract, Text, and Publication History
More..http://www.oxfordreference.com/pub/views/fact-of-the-day.html?date=2011-11-17
How to cite this entry:
PVWS "Tale of Two Cities, A" Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 17 November 2011
Contract, Text, and Publication History
More..http://www.oxfordreference.com/pub/views/fact-of-the-day.html?date=2011-11-17
How to cite this entry:
PVWS "Tale of Two Cities, A" Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 17 November 2011
