Dickens’ Broken World

The polarity in A Tale of Two Cities is famous to the extreme point of cliché: Dickens’ world is divided into fat bestial nobles living off the lard of the land, and half-mad, half-crazed peasants with skeletal children hungry for blood. But even through the thick purple haze of Dickens’ prose it’s possible to discern an incisive critique of modernity which was ahead of its time. The polarity of the Tale’s famous opening paragraph reveals a society completely disintegrated. Class was set against class, nation against nation, and—eventually—revolutionary against revolutionary. As Dickens tells his story, one begins to realize that it is the “best of times” precisely nowhere.

The works of Immanuel Kant probably never made their way to the coffee table of Madame Defarge, and yet the German philosopher in many ways crystallized the ethic of modernity and the Revolution. For Kant, the guide to morality was no longer “love your neighbor,” which he considered too circumstantial , but an autonomous obedience to an impersonal ethic called Reason. Reason was supposed to guide individuals’ actions apart from any direct consideration of their neighbor. The Jacquerie of Dickens’ Tale are therefore the direct, though illiterate, descendants of Kant. For the representative figure of Madame Defarge, there is no brooking of empathy for anyone—the Cause transcends all personal consideration.

Dickens portrays several examples of how modernity sapped all mutuality and love out of its members. Perhaps the first example we have is the imprisonment of Doctor Alexander Manette, held in Bastille for years by the aristocratic Evremonde family. While the Bastille often summons up images of out-dated medieval methods of punishment, the idea of solitary confinement was a decidedly modern system. Dickens had made a tour of the arch-modern prison system of the Philadelphia Quakers in 1842. What he found in those prisons disgusted him:

In its intention, I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing. I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers.

Of course, the idea was consistently modern: an individual left to himself, protected from adverse social influences, would be able to reflect on his life and reform himself according to the standard of reason which he possessed: “left alone with only their conscience, prisoners could not be influenced by the bad example of their fellow inmates.”

In the case of Dr. Manette, this progressive form of imprisonment leads to insanity. The irony of his story is that even when he is freed and held up as a hero by the Jacquerie, he is eventually manipulated by the revolutionaries in order to quench their own bloodlust. Even heroes deserve less consideration than the Cause.

The Restorative

The situation in Dickens’ England is not much better than that in France. In the opening scenes of the Tale there is very little sociality. A coach carrying several passengers is anything but communal:

Not one of the three could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of his two companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road might be a robber or in league with robbers.

Dickens’ protagonist, barrister Sydney Carton, also manifests this social disintegration, telling one person: “I am a disappointed drudge, sir. I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.” While Carton began his career in law with great promise, he fell into patterns of drunkenness and vice, with sparks of brilliance only occasionally appearing through the heavy mask of laziness. Carton falls for the beautiful Lucie Manette, daughter of the imprisoned doctor, but watches as she eventually gives herself to his rival and look-alike, Charles Darnay. Carton sees in Darnay his better self: respectable, full of good intent, selfless, and—of course—the object of Lucie’s affection. Karen Odden points out that while Carton and Darnay are “positioned initially as antagonists…. they become mirrors for each other and then, finally, as Carton takes Darnay’s place, with generosity and a spirit of self-sacrifice, identical.”

The climax of Dickens’ Tale sees Darnay taken captive by the revolutionaries for crimes he never committed, and Carton realizing that his moment of redemption has come. Using his striking resemblance to the prisoner Darnay, Carton takes his rival’s place on the guillotine’s block. Quoting the biblical promise, “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” Carton ascends the steps to his death, and has a prophetic vision as he dies:

I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day…. I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away…. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

The surface inference is clear: Carton, by his death, expiates his past sins, receives the promise of resurrection, and serves as an example to his namesake. The Christological typology is clear and, again, almost overly clichéd. And yet, Dickens’ portrayal of Carton’s sacrifice also has a more subtle social implication.

The Gift

Long before Carton dies, he promises Lucie, “For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything.” And along his path to the guillotine, the motivation of Dickens’ protagonist remains constantly personal. At first it seems too obvious to state: Carton is dying for Darnay and his wife and daughter. And yet, the personal dimension is something wholly lacking among the Jacquerie. Carton decisively counters the abstract ideologues among the Jacquerie, and also the greedy aristocrats who preceded them. Carton’s sacrifice is portrayed by Dickens as a restoration not merely from death unto life, but of greater fellowship in life. Carton’s sacrifice of love is a personal gift, and one which brings blessings to both the giver and giveé.

For Kant, an individual acts out of duty to a universal standard of reason. But for Sydney Carton, sacrifice must be personal. Love cannot be given to an abstract, nor duty to a vaporous standard of Reason. John Milbank points out:

To die for any old invisible other is the very reverse of valuing otherness, because otherness must involve not just diversity and difference but specific diversity and concrete difference. All these things have to be visibly or audibly or in some way sensorially registered.

And further, sacrifice brings the giver and the giveé into a relationship established on love, whereby both receive the blessing of resurrection. Carton, in giving himself for Darnay, resurrects his better self, and prophetically sees his namesake love him and prosper long after Carton’s own death. And so Carton’s resurrection is also a resurrection for Darnay, and for Darnay’s son.

For Dickens, this eminently Christian view of sacrifice is the hope for entire societies, not just individuals. The hope for a “peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy” society of individuals is contained in sacrifice. The modernistic ideologies competing against this Christian view always pit one group against another. Capitalism sets loose personal ambition in the hope that selfishness will inadvertently create the by-product of wealth. The aristocrats of Dickens’ novel, while often exaggerated for dramatic purposes, manifest this ideology: each person has their place, and the rich are supposedly the economic benefactors of the poor anyway. On the other hand, Marxism, like the Jacquerie, sets class against class in the hopes that the human race can be freed via an impersonal egalitarianism.

Sacrifice takes a different road. Augustine wrote that there “is nothing so social by nature as man, nothing so unsocial by corruption.” The ethic of sacrifice therefore recognizes that the investment of sacrifice works a social (mutual) resurrection.

In the end, Mr. Sydney Carton gives us a fundamentally anti-modern hero. Here is a man who does not die for an abstract. He does not ascend the altar of the guillotine as an expiation of national sins, as the Jacquerie believed. He dies for a woman, for a man, for a child. His gift brings blessing back upon himself; his resurrection is necessarily paired with the resurrection of his fellow men. And in his death, he establishes a mutual bond of love which joins individual men together in a way that liberty, brotherhood, and equality—in all their vapor—never could.