THE TWO CITIES

When I read A Tale of Two Cities as a teenager, had anyone asked me the meaning of the title I would have smiled at the oddity of the question.   Surely it was obvious?  The two cities were London and Paris, with a contrast between the right way of doing things (British reform) and the wrong way of doing things (French revolution).  The significance of ‘city’ in the paragraph that follows, bypassed me completely:

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way

across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him,

a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance.  In the fair city of

this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon

him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope  that

sparkled in his sight.  A moment, and it was gone.  (Chapter 5: ‘The Jackal).

 

            A Tale of Two Cities is not one of my favourite Dickens novels.  Sydney Carton is of interest to me primarily as precursor of the far more powerfully-achieved Eugene Wrayburn of Our Mutual Friend, and there is a child death that far exceeds in mawkishness anything in The Old Curiosity Shop. And the idea contained within the above extract seems to me to be more successful than the way in which it is expressed.   Indeed, whether or not there are two cities, there are certainly two novels within this one book:  one marked by poverty of execution (if that is not an unfortunate word in the context of the guillotine), and the other by magnificence of thematic conception.   I read the first early in life, and have only slowly come to see the significance of the second: the great potential that – like Sydney Carton’s life – might have been and never was.   

           

Let me dispose at once of my initial misreading.  British society, as depicted in A Tale of Two Cities is not markedly better than French society.  Barnaby Rudge dealt with the Gordon Riots of 1780: an event within a decade of the French Revolution that could have escalated into something comparable, and Dickens retained a horror of the power of the British mob.  The second chapter of Cities – ‘The Mail’ – creates an atmosphere of darkness, suspicion and general lawlessness.  The legal system in the novel is as arcane as in Bleak House, and far more overtly savage: but for Carton, Darnay would have been found guilty and subjected to barbaric punishment.  At the burial of the spy, Roger Cly, the mob  takes control.  It remains good humoured – it is allowed, by and large,  to do what it wants – but it could have turned nasty.

 Given all this, and the ferocious social metaphors in Dickens’ later novels – fog, prison bars, dust heaps – British society and French have little to choose between them: both are in desperate need of transformation.

            Paris and London, then, are not the cities of the novel, but simply two of the many other contrasts within it.

 

In the De Civitate Dei  of Saint Augustine there is another pair of  contrasted cities: the Earthly and the Heavenly.  But the Heavenly City is not simply the one you go to when you die.  Both ‘cities’ are active in the world and in this life: manifesting themselves in two contrasting models of behaviour.  Dante, although a Thomist, draws on this idea for the afterlife. The Inferno is a city in conflict with itself; The Paradiso, a city in harmony.

            Consciously or otherwise, Dickens also copies this model.  A Tale of Two Cities has contrast built into its structure.  Darnay and Carton (physical) and Madame Defarge and Miss Pross (character) are  images of each other.  When Madame Defarge and Miss Pross struggle together, culminating in the death of the former, Dickens describes it as the battle between hate and love.  Extend this analogy to society as a whole and you have two ‘cities’ that are neither London nor Paris, but two approaches to changing the fabric of society: violence, or the change of heart.  You can get rid of Monseigneur by assassinating him – in which case he will come back in a new form – or you can get rid of him permanently by changing him into Charles Darnay: who voluntarily renounces his privileges.  

           

Dickens has been seen simplistically as a social reformer whose function as a novelist was to attack specific contemporary social abuses.  But, even on such a reductive view, some of the targets he attacked were already in decline.  Dickens, as most careful readers of his work have perceived, was concerned less with the abuse itself than with the condition of the human heart that had allowed the abuse to arise in the first place.  Bleak House, for instance, is anachronistic; it is difficult to decide when exactly it is meant to be set.  And that sort of blurring is part of the intention: Tulkinghorn is  as timeless as the Law in The Book of Romans.  Dickens is not simply attacking the British legal system at a particular point in its history, but an inhuman legalism that could arise at any place in any age: the principle of the law creating work for itself and, in the process, of “making hay of the grass which is flesh”.

Citing Dickens as belonging to the ‘change of heart’ school, George Orwell says of him: “His whole ’message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently, the world would be decent.”

            This may, indeed, may be the only real solution for society’s ills, but it is a solution only if people act on it.  As long as there are significant numbers who wish to remain – or become – Monseigneur rather than to become Darnay, or who follow the way of Madame Defarge rather than of Miss Pross, then the good society can never be more than partially achieved. And if life in this world is to be always and forever flawed, then there is a temptation to look to the life beyond.  Hence – in what is Dickens’ most overtly-religious novel – the theme of resurrection: Jerry Cruncher as the stealer of corpses; and Carton, musing on the way to the scaffold.

            The pseudonym ‘Evrémonde’ is significant in this regard as well.  It recalls the medieval play Everyman, particularly by its mingling of English and French within the same word.  In the course of his journey, Everyman abandons his companions the Senses.  All that are left are his Good Works to take with him into the next life: which is where they will achieve their greatest significance.

            It seems to me – although I would not press the point – that there is probably another pilgrimage invoked as Carton makes his final journey.  Bunyan’s landscape may be in the background as Carton focuses on the Heavenly City, and turns away from  the City of Destruction.

 

Again I would not wish to press the point, but it seems to me that there is one more contrast implied by Carton’s vision quoted at the beginning of this essay.  Even if I am reading things that are not there, I feel that Dickens might have approved: given the sense of longing in the novel for social justice.

            In the Book of Revelation – another work with contrasts inherent in the structure –  Babylon, the type of all earthly cities, is destroyed.  The heavenly Jerusalem survives.  The river of the water of life flows down the middle of this city’s street, and within its walls is the tree of life; with leaves for the healing of the nations.