Although most first readers of A Tale of Two Cities know its rough outlines—the father locked away in the Bastille, the beautiful, dutiful daughter who helps him to find comfort once he is released, the frenzied slaughter of the revolution, Carton the Gothic hero, handsomely imperfect, who finds real life in his sacrificial death (the “far, far better thing that I do . . .” under the blade of the Guillotine)—these readers might believe that they are opening the pages of a political or, say, historical novel. Its title sounds geographical, as if the novel were about size and distance. Like most of Dickens’ novels, it begins in the past, so it seems to be concerned with history. And the first words intoned by the narrative voice make up that famous sentence about the times, the age, the epoch, the season, and the fate of people in general—the “we” who regarded life as either bleak or salvational. Royalty is speared on the nib of Dickens’ pen—“a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face”—and Dickens swats at the governing bodies in Paris and London. He then tightens his focus, from the fate of all humankind to the fate of the characters in his novel. And then, tightening further, he conjures Jarvis Lorry who, as his last name suggests, is to be a vehicle for the conveyance of characters and plot between England and France.
But to Dickens, all life is domestic, no matter on what scale he writes it, and no matter its political or historical context. As with all his work, the novel begins in him. And we can see it in the privacies of his writing notes and the intimacies of his emotional life. In a notebook he called “Memoranda,” Charles Dickens wrote story ideas, suggestions for titles, names he might use for characters in his books, and wisps of suggestion as delicate as cobwebs that, somehow, grew thicker and stronger until, years later, they resulted in his large, powerful novels. In 1855, he asks himself in his notebook, “How as to a story in two periods—with a lapse of time between, like a French Drama?” Below this question, he lists possible titles for such a work, and all twenty-two have to do with time. Four years later, when events and the machinations of his imagination dictate, he finally does write the book. But he joins ideas of time to ideas of space, giving the novel a geographical name, A Tale of Two Cities; Dickens illustrates how time can keep us apart as he attaches to chronological distances the mile upon mile of ocean and earth that can separate cities, nations, and the sad lovers within them.
A few pages later in the memorandum book, he writes an entry about “The man who is incapable of his own happiness. One who is always in pursuit of happiness.” And, later, he enters this enigmatic notation: “WE, fettered together.” It seems entirely possible that he refers here to his long, fecund, and increasingly unhappy marriage to Catherine, who bore ten children (nine who lived) and who grew stout and unglamorous at a time when her husband hungered for quite the opposite. As to the note about unhappiness, Dickens, who could always be extremely sensitive to his own interior needs while attending to those of his characters and his audience, often commented about what we might now call his depressed state. As he wrote to his friend Mary Boyle concerning his dark moments, “I seem to always be looking at such times for something I have not found in life.”
If we combine marital misery, a wretched searching for something nameless, elusive, but essential, and the idea of lovers separated by great gulfs of time and space, we have almost arrived at the critical mass of elements that resulted in the dark, brilliant Tale of Two Cities. We are in 1857 as Dickens in his sour marriage returns from France, where he’s been writing Little Dorrit, and, back in London, hurls himself into the second vast section of that novel as well as the preparations for a public performance, in the converted schoolroom of his London house, of the play The Frozen Deep, written by his friend Wilkie Collins.
Dickens loved to perform publicly, whether in plays or readings of his works, for he could watch his audience react to his language and personality. He hungered for such reaction, and in the case of The Frozen Deep even more