Justice, Order, and Mob Rule: A Tale of Two Cities

This past week, Literary Life has been featuring chapter three of On Reading Well by Karen Swallow Prior. It’s the chapter entitled “Justice,” and the book featured by Prior to illustrate the idea is A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

After A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities is likely Dickens’ most popular work. We like and remember it for is opening statement of contrasts, for the horrific mob scenes in the Paris of the revolutionary Terror, and for the sacrifice of the ne’er-do-well lawyer Sydney Carton, substituting his life for that Charles Darnay might be saved from the guillotine. And it was a sacrifice for love; Carton loved Darnay’s wife, Lucie, and he knew it would always be an unrequited love.

I first read the story in a Classic Illustrated comic book edition. Shortly afterward, our reading teacher in eighth grade included it on our reading list, a list that also included some decidedly non-eighth-grade works like Day of the Triffids and Alas, Bablyon, both about the world after great catastrophes. Prompted by some concerned parents, the principal reprimanded the teacher, but A Tale of Two Cities stayed on the list.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

The Strangeness of “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens

It is strange to read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and see the ongoing media coverage of Charlottesville, controversies over and vandalism of Confederate monuments, and the divisions in American society becoming only sharper. I say “strange” because the story that Dickens tells is a reminder that despite our science, our technology, our educational attainments, and the growth of knowledge, our human condition remains stubbornly the same.

The first and last time I read the book was in my sophomore year of high school. Our English class dutifully carried around the paperback edition published by Dell (the publisher, not the computer maker) with a yellow-orange cover. It’s one of Dickens’s shorter works, but to 10^th grade boys, it still looked like a lot of fat book to read. Some in our class found the Cliff Notes version of the book, while others got their hands on the Classics Illustrated comic book edition. A few of us read the book itself.

And until I recently reread it, I’d forgotten what a wonderful story it is. Published in 1859, A Tale of Two Cities is one of Dickens’s later novels, which had the advantage of being written from a coherent outline. His earlier books, like Oliver Twist and Pickwick Papers, were written for magazine serialization without the benefit of the author knowing from the outset where the story was going. And it is a major reason why his later novels remain some of the most powerful works in literature – he knew from the beginning where the story was going to end.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Illustration: Madame Defarge in the wine shop, one of the illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”) for A Tale of Two Cities.

My Great Expectations

The first book by Charles Dickens that I read was A Tale of Two Cities. Actually, I didn’t read the book. I first read the Classics Illustrated comic book version of A Tale of Two Cities, when I was about 9 or 10 years old, and that was after reading We Were There at the French Revolution, checked out from the local library. A couple of years later, I read the full novel by Dickens.

Then, in ninth grade, I encountered Great Expectations. It was required reading for my English class, taught by Miss Roark. The all-boy class generally looked at the book with trepidation – it was long. And we couldn’t read the Classics Illustrated version, and you could get an F if you were caught with the Cliff Notes for the book.

So for most of my class, it was an ordeal, and far less fun than, say, writing our own James Bond spy stories, which we were allowed to do for one assignment. James Bond was big; if I recall correctly, Thunderball had hit the movie theaters that summer, recruiting an entire generation of American adolescent boys into the espionage services. Poor Dickens had to compete against Sean Connery. Not to mention the female roles in the movie. Estella, as pretty as she might be, was no match for James Bond’s girlfriends.

Nevertheless, we had to read it, and we did. Early on, I was hooked. Great Expectations had everything – an orphan, a convict, a deranged old lady roaming around in a wedding dress like a professional ghost, her young and beautiful adopted daughter, heroes, villains, and an exciting story. I loved it, the whole unabridged, full-volume, complete novel with small print and no illustrations (I had a cheap paperback version).

As she describes it in Booked: Literature for the Soul of Me, Karen Swallow Prior also met Great Expectations in middle school via an abridged version, and she was hooked as much as I was. And, if forced to admit it, Prior would say that it’s her favorite novel. She’s read it numerous times, she says, and each time learns something new.

For me, it was a life-changing book. It introduced me to a world that is still very much with me today, the world of literature. It showed me the magic of story. And, like Prior, I found it to be totally realistic.

“What I love most about Great Expectations,” writes Prior, is its sheer magic. Dickens has a way of presenting both plot and characters that are enchanting enough to set the imagination aflame but at the same time realistic enough to reflect life as it really is, or might really be, at least.”

When you grow up in New Orleans, as I did, and you have a very large extended New Orleans family, and almost all of your friends come from large, extended New Orleans families, some with exotic Spanish and French names, you will likely meet every character ever created by Charles Dickens in real life. Including the deranged Miss Havisham in her wedding dress. And the convict.

And Pip, the hero. When I read Great Expectations, I became Pip. I was 14 years old and imagining myself an orphan in 19^th century England, falling in love with a beautiful girl and knowing it would end badly, dodging villains, and trying to find my place in the world. I became Pip, I was Pip, and I was at the center of a wild rocket-ride of a story.

The next year, my English class would tackle David Copperfield, and while I like it enormously, it didn’t hold the same magic for me as Great Expectations. That novel oriented my head, and my heart, toward reading and writing in a way that nothing else has before or since.

I think it’s time to reread it.

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess is leading a discussion of Booked. Please visit the site to see what others are saying about the three chapters being covered today, on Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, and Tess of the D’Urbevilles.