Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth,
England in 1812. As the second of eight
children in a very poor family, he lived a difficult childhood. Eventually,
his father was sent to debtor’s prison, and Dickens himself went to work at
the age of twelve to help pay off the family’s debt. This troublesome time
scarred Dickens deeply and provided him with substantial material for such
stories as Great Expectations, Oliver Twist,
and David Copperfield. Steeped in
social criticism, Dickens’s writing provides a keen, sympathetic chronicle of
the plight of the urban poor in nineteenth-century England. During his
lifetime, Dickens enjoyed immense popularity, in part because of his vivid
characterizations, and in part because he published his novels in installments,
making them readily affordable to a greater number of people.
The Industrial Revolution, which swept through Europe in the late eighteenth
century, originated in England. The rapid modernization of the English
economy involved a shift from rural handicraft to large-scale factory labor.
Technological innovations facilitated unprecedented heights of manufacture
and trade, and England left behind its localized, cottage-industry economy
to become a centralized, hyper-capitalist juggernaut of mass production. In
tandem with this transformation came a significant shift in the nation’s
demographics. English cities swelled as a growing and impoverished working
class flocked to them in search of work. As this influx of workers into
urban centers continued, the bourgeois took advantage of the surplus of
labor by keeping wages low. The poor thus remained poor, and often lived
cramped in squalor. In many of his novels, Dickens chronicles his
protagonists’ attempts to fight their way out of such poverty and despair.
A Tale of Two Cities, originally
published from April through November of 1859,
appeared in a new magazine that Dickens had created called
All the Year Round. Dickens started
this venture after a falling-out with his regular publishers. Indeed, this
period in Dickens’s life saw many changes. While starring in a play by
Wilkie Collins entitled The Frozen Deep,
Dickens fell in love with a young actress named Ellen Ternan.
Dickens’s twenty-three-year marriage to Catherine Hogarth had become a
source of unhappiness in recent years, and, by 1858,
Hogarth had moved out of Dickens’s home. The author arranged to keep Ternan
in a separate residence.
Dickens’s participation in Collins’s play led not only to a shift in
his personal life, but also to a career development, for it was this play
that first inspired him to write A Tale of
Two Cities. In the play, Dickens played the part of a man who
sacrifices his own life so that his rival may have the woman they both love;
the love triangle in the play became the basis for the complex relations
between Charles Darnay, Lucie Manette, and Sydney Carton in
A Tale of Two Cities. Moreover,
Dickens appreciated the play for its treatment of redemption and rebirth,
love and violence. He decided to transpose these themes onto the French
Revolution, an event that embodied the same issues on a historical level. In
order to make his novel historically accurate, Dickens turned to Thomas
Carlyle’s account of the revolution. Contemporaries had considered Carlyle’s
version to be the first and last word on the French peasants’ fight for
freedom.
Dickens had forayed into historical fiction only once before, with
Barnaby Rudge (1841),
and the project proved a difficult undertaking. The vast scope and somewhat
grim aspects of his historical subject forced Dickens largely to abandon the
outlandish and often comic characters that had come to define his writing.
Although Jerry Cruncher and Miss Pross embody some typically Dickensian
quirks—exaggerated mannerisms, idiosyncratic speech—they play only minor
roles in the novel. While critics continue to debate the literary merits of
the novel, no one denies the light that the novel sheds on Dickens’s
development as a novelist. More experimental than the novels that precede
it, A Tale of Two Cities shows its
author in transition. Dickens would emerge from this transition as a mature
artist, ready to write Great Expectations
(1860–1861)
and Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865).
