seems to have been at stake. He was to play Richard Wardour, who loves a woman with a profound passion yet who will sacrifice his life to save the life of the man who is his rival for her affection. The part seems to have conformed with his sense of, or wish for, heroism. And among the professional actresses with whom Dickens and his friends joined in presenting the play, there was a handsome, shy, intelligent eighteen-year-old with golden hair. Her name was Ellen Ternan, and the forty-five-year-old Dickens was to love her desperately until the end of his life. After the despairing passions of the performance, Dickens and Collins repaired to the resort city of Brighton for a rest, where an actor read aloud to them a play called The Dead Heart, described by Peter Ackroyd, Dickens’ most recent biographer, as “a tale of self-sacrifice at the time of the French Revolution which leads to a substitution at the foot of the guillotine, strangely corresponding with the self-sacrifices of Richard Wardour.”

Now, in 1859, two years after he has heard The Dead Heart, and after his performance in The Frozen Deep, after he has met Ellen Ternan and has, under scandalous circumstances, separated from his wife, after the notebook entries about separations by time, during his restless forties, in the grips of his powerful hungers for the nameless element missing from his life, Charles Dickens breaks with his former publishers, terminates the magazine Household Words, which he edited, and begins a new journal, All the Year Round, for boosting the sales of which, his businessman’s instincts tell him, he must have a new serialized novel.

He again reads Thomas Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution, as well as other histories suggested by Carlyle. And then, between April and November, in weekly parts, there appears in his journal A Tale of Two Cities, which is a tale of one man driven by a dour restlessness, and which is also the story of another man buried in time. Shining like the sun for both of them is a golden-haired woman, Lucie Manette, daughterly and good and, to Sydney Carton, unattainable, and absolutely worthy of the sacrifice of his life. Dickens is some of each man, and Ellen Ternan, I think, is much of Lucie Manette.

They are also fictive creatures, separate from their creator, and they are characters in one of his darkest novels. While he champions the French peasantry and despises the French ruling class for its oppressions, he also fears revolution, as he showed in Barnaby Rudge (1841) and as he showed in Hard Times (1854), where even the threat of labor action by working-class characters to whose cause he wished to be loyal dismayed him. And therefore A Tale of Two Cities is memorable for its nightmare scenes of bloody revolution, and the downtrodden in revolt become, to Dickens, downright revolting; he turns them into effigies wearing false moustaches and false eyebrows, their faces “all bloody and sweaty, and all awry with howling, and all staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of sleep . . . and what with dropping wine, and what with the stream of sparks struck out of the [sharpening] stone, all their wicked atmosphere seemed gore and fire.” They have turned Paris into hell, Dickens tells us, forgetting for the moment the hell he showed us that had been created by the nobility.

Madame Defarge is not only a revolutionary and the cunning keeper of underground resistance secrets: she is Lady Macbeth, according to the dark vision of this novel; she is everything bloody and dangerous, and she is contrasted to the angelic, endangered Lucie Manette. Madame Defarge is the soul of this revolution. She is a French Victory, which is represented, always, as a woman; but she is not merely the emblematic, heroic national spirit one sees in, for example, Victory Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix. Dickens describes her this way: “Lying hidden in her bosom was a loaded pistol. Lying hidden at her waist was a sharpened dagger.” She walks “with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown sea-sand.” Dickens suggests a near nakedness, though she is clothed, and he locates threatening weapons at her breasts and her belly so that her very sexuality is threatening. This, he says, is how nature is overturned by revolution: nurturance and fertility are, now, about wounding and death. Sex is part of the general