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Dickens and Connections When A Tale of Two Cities was first published, literary critics wrote scathing reviews of the novel, stating that Dickens didn’t have the skills or education to write good historical fiction. .
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Dickens and Connections When A Tale of Two Cities was first published, literary critics wrote scathing reviews of the novel, stating that Dickens didn’t have the skills or education to write good historical fiction.
Sir James F. Stephen's review (1859): ”It would perhaps be hard to imagine a clumsier or more disjointed framework for the display of the tawdry wares which form Mr. Dickens's stock-in-trade. The broken-back way in which the story maunders along from 1775 to 1792 and back again to 1760 or thereabouts, is an excellent instance of the complete disregard of the rules of literary composition which have marked the whole of Mr. Dickens's career as an author. No portion of his popularity is due to intellectual excellence. . . .”
Stephens cont.: “The two main sources of his popularity are his power of working upon the feelings by the coarsest stimulants, and his power of setting common occurrences in a grotesque and unexpected light. . . . [W]ith a little practice and a good deal of determination, it would really be as easy to harrow up people's feelings as to poke the fire. The whole art is to take a melancholy subject, and rub the reader's nose in it" (41). Stephen ridicules ATTC because it engages the readers' emotions rather than appeals to their sense of reason.”
Critic Henry James (1865) criticized Dickens for lacking the breadth to address historical topics. Dickens responded to this censure by stating that he didn’t have much formal education (he had to leave school at a young age to support his family after his father was thrown in jail for debt), but that he did thoroughly research his topic.
Dickens asked his friend, the historian Thomas Carlyle, what he should read to prepare for writing A Tale of Two Cities. As a joke, Carlyle had the London library send Dickens 2 cart loads of books about the French Revolution. Dickens read them all! Of course, he had already read Carlyle’s book on the topic.
Dickens, like Carlyle, believed that history should report facts accurately and focus on real people rather than memorials or records. Dickens depicts facts of history as well as the psychology and suffering of the commoners by mingling fictional and real characters and events. He used personal experience, such as an execution by guillotine he witnessed in Rome in 1845, to add to realism.
Dickens’s technique of writing fiction based on historical facts is seen in his description of the murder of Joseph-Francois Foulon who was "a counsellor of state to Louis XVI" (Vovelle 88). According to Owen Connelly, Foulon's "crime was that at one time in his life he had said that the people could eat hay. . . . More importantly, he was accused of withholding grain and food from the people, an action which was more of a crime" (128).
Ironically, as Foulon's dead body is "dragged through the streets; his head goes aloft on a pike, the mouth filled with grass" (Carlyle 207). Dickens borrows his description from Carlyle but portrays Madame Defarge as the initiator of this murder: “Instantly Madame Defarge's knife was in her girdle, the drum was beating in the streets, as if it and a drummer had flown together by magic; and the Vengeance, uttering terrific shrieks, and flinging her arms about her head like all the forty Furies at once, was tearing from house to house, rousing the women.
“From household occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from their children, from their aged and sick crouching on the bare ground famished and naked, they ran out with streaming hair, urging one another, and themselves, to madness with the wildest cries and actions. Villain Foulon taken, my sister. . . . Foulon who told my old father that he might eat grass, when I had no bread to give him. Foulon who told my baby it might suck grass, when these breasts were dry with want... Hear me my dead baby and my withered father: I swear on my knees, on these stones, to avenge you on Foulon!
“Husbands, and brothers, and young men, give us the blood of Foulon, rend Foulon to pieces, and dig him into the ground, that grass may grow from him” (252). Dickens does want an emotional response. We can tell this from the Phiz illustrations that accompanied the original publication and from his use of dialogue and drama. He also presents social issues (fear of revolution, oppression promotes rebellion, etc.) and accurate history.
Dickens was also historically correct about reporting real events like the storming of the Bastille—unlike many newspaper accounts of the time. Only 7 people were actually released: 4 forgers who had been moved there because of crowding, a crazy Irishman who thought he was Julius Caesar and God but was kept as a spy, a crazy man who had tried to assassinate the king, and a man whose family had him imprisoned for committing incest.
For further connections, for more specifics ways Dickens used Thomas Carlyle’s history book French Revolution (1837) in writing his novel, look at the Carlyl’e s French Revolution PowerPoint. Click on each picture; each picture will link you to a specific thing Dickens borrowed from Carlyle.
Olymphe de Gouges 1745-1793 ~~Poorly educated daughter of a butcher and washerwoman ~Author of 30 revolutionary pamphlets ~Feminist ~Sent to guillotine because opposed bloodshed, Robespierre, and Marat
For more on Olymphe de Gouges, see her “Declaration of the Rights of Women” (1791) and her letter to her son, written the night before she went to the guillotine. To help put the French Revolution, the events of A Tale of Two Cities, revolutionary activities in England, and Dickens’s life in perspective, see the timeline on the next slide. You may also add dates to the timeline from the plot and history and timeline handouts.
Despite what the critics said, Dickens gave an historically accurate depiction of the French Revolution and made many connections to events in his own time.
