example, is Jerry Cruncher, the sinister night watchman and messenger at Tellson’s bank who moonlights (literally) as a grave robber. Sometimes even ardent Dickensians must feel that the novelist is going through the motions and creating comic stereotypes. Sometimes, however, from the moment he presents one of his characters to us, we sense Dickens firing on all cylinders. And such is the case with Cruncher.
“His surname was Cruncher, and on the youthful occasion of his renouncing by proxy the works of darkness, in the easterly parish church of Houndsditch, he had received the added appellation of Jerry.” All the superb Cruncher scenes—the domestic ones, where he growls at his religious wife, “You’re at it agin, are you . . . What do you mean by flopping yourself down and praying agin me;” his sinister life as a grave robber, a “Resurrection man;” and the fiction fed to his young son that these nocturnal expeditions are for fishing—could only have been written by Dickens.
More central, of course, to the whole story, and indicative of the whole Carlyle-Dickensian view of Revolution, are the characters of the Defarges. Monsieur runs the wine shop in the Saint Antoine district of Paris, which is to be the scene of some of the most terrible spectacles of violence. His wife, calmly knitting in the shop when first encountered, is calmly knitting as mayhem breaks out and blood runs on the cobblestones.
Carlyle appreciated that the Terror was instituted by the formerly peace-loving Robespierre as a panicky response to the English declaration of war. Just as in some of the later revolutions of history, it was under the cover of war that the true bloodbaths began. For Dickens, however, the story is reduced to personalities and to personal terms. The novel could very easily be an opera, really. Its closing scenes are not really political. Cynical, drunken Sydney Carton, because of his close resemblance to Charles Darnay, is able to take his place on the guillotine. But by then, all the finer shades of dispute with Stryver about the cause and effect of revolution have been forgotten. The revolutionary mob is simply a hateful thing, a backdrop for individual deeds of heroism, but no longer to be justified or even explained.
Thus, although the story of how Dr. Manette became incarcerated in the Bastille for so long, and the violent revenge exacted for that wrong by the Defarges, nicely reflects in miniature the whole story of the Revolution itself, the book cannot really be seen as a serious reflection on the French Revolution as such. Rather, it is a frightened Victorian’s idea of what happens when mob violence gets out of control. Liberals such as W. E. Gladstone were perpetually aware of the fact that the injustices in Victorian society could easily erupt into political violence; and Gladstone on more than one occasion admitted that were this to happen, the only way of suppressing it was by measures even more terrible than those of the mob. Blood must be shed to preserve order. The privileged classes, Gladstone once wrote, “have got to govern millions of hard hands; that it must be done by force, fraud or goodwill. . . .”
The idea for A Tale of Two Cities came to Dickens in 1857, a year that will always be indelibly associated in Victorian history with a potentially revolutionary moment—not in England, but in India. In October 1857, after he had heard of the massacre of English women and children at Cawnpore, Dickens wrote to his friend the philanthropist Angela Coutts that were he commander in chief of the Indian army he would “exterminate the race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested.”
Certainly there were few enough complaints when the Indian Mutiny (as it was called by the English) was suppressed with the utmost severity. The reprisals were terrible. William Howard Russell, the first modern war reporter, who had covered the Crimea and would write up the American Civil War, described Muslims being stripped and branded all over their bodies, or sown into pigskins. On another occasion he saw Sikhs and Englishmen calmly looking on while a bayonetted prisoner was slowly roasted over a fire.
Dickens, in common with most of the British at the time, reacted with absolute panic to the Indian Mutiny, and it must be this which accounts for the incoherence of his ideas concerning the French Revolution. Carlyle at least was consistent. He sat like an old prophet in Chelsea, seeing and expecting that one dark