A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities

by Charles Dickens

Only now have I read this classic, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. It starts rather slowly and there are many archaic words, but I am appreciating Kindle because of its dictionary feature that allows me to look up a word mid-sentence with utmost convenience. I suppose out of all the words I've looked up the one that remains with me is "tumbril," i.e., the wagons used to carry the soon-to-be-dead to the guillotine during the French revolution. The word by itself already evokes a picture of what that time was like.

Scant images of the French revolution had been impressed on me by Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, a childhood favorite. In contrast to Hugo's revolution which serves merely as a background against which Jean Valjean saves Marius, Dickens paints a far more violent picture. Dickens' Lucie reminds me of Hugo's Cosette, around whom the universe conspires to preserve happiness and love. But in the Dickens universe, there is a formidable Madam Defarge set to get her justice-vengeance regardless of who pays the price, a Madam Defarge who epitomizes the rage of the revolution and its thirst for blood (contra Javert who epitomizes the law but turns his resolute will against himself when he cannot reconcile the paradox of an escaped convict who does more good than many "respectable" men).

A reader would benefit from finishing both A Tale of Two Cities and Les Miserables, separately of course and in one's own good time. The different perspectives complement each other, united as they are by a similar good in the end: happiness in love and family.

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Having slogged through the introductory chapters, I am glad to have made the acquaintance of a Sydney Carton who made the initial slogging all worth it. Romantic characters who sacrifice for true love, albeit fictional, still move me. And while the sacrifice did not come as much of a surprise, the Jackal still reminds me of one of my favorite literary characters, Severus Snape (sorry, I read the Potter series first even if, who knows, perhaps Rowling was inspired by the Jackal while she wrote Snape). 

As is commonly the case, I think the movie  (1980) falls short of one's imagination. There is a challenge in portraying Carton and Darnay, easily differentiated in print but not on screen.