A Tale of Two Dickens

I’ve just finished A Tale of Two Cities, and my reaction is pure astonishment.  I confess that I like Dickens. I read and greatly enjoyed Great Expectations, and A Christmas Carol, and yet I am astonished that Dickens could write such good novels set in London, and yet how his touch deserts him when he attempts to write about France. Is this the same novelist?

I’m afraid it is, and it gets worse. Critics fall over themselves to point out the comparisons in the book, between London and Paris, between Lucie and Madame Defarge, and, let’s face it, between the French people and the English people. If Dickens is revered as the novelist who created a sense of “Englishness”, then it’s also true to say he created a sense of “Frenchness”, and it’s not a pretty sight, not in this novel.  All Dickens’ stereotypes are here marshalled not to depict the English man or woman we love, but the French man or woman we distrust or dislike.

Why do we dislike the French so much in this novel? My flippant answer is because the women knit, but knitting is an example of Dickens’ method. I’ve never before thought there was anything wrong with knitting, but in this novel, Madame Defarge is seen as suspicious because of the way she knits. She keeps a pistol and a knife in her belt, and somehow all three seem to conjure up an image of “unwomanliness”, the very opposite of Lucie, the feeble virginal English heroine. Characters in Dickens are often all good or all bad, but in this novel, the effect is so pronounced that it is difficult to read without flinging the book into the nearest dustbin. In France, it would appear that every lower-class character is called “Jacques”, which makes the reporting of dialogue somewhat challenging, even for a novelist of Dickens’ stature.

It gets worse still. Not content with creating a stereotyped view of the French, Dickens compounds his crime by slavishly following Carlyle’s reactionary, horrified vision of the French Revolution. Fear of the mob is one thing, but the complacent and smug attitude of the English characters produce a grotesque one-dimensional feeling to the book.  Keynes memorably said that much of our thinking is unconsciously derived from “some defunct economist”, and unfortunately, the same is true here for Dickens. He seems to have adopted Carlyle’s political viewpoint but with none of Carlyle’s stylistic achievement. You might read Carlyle for the style, passing over the politics in silence, but with A Tale of Two Cities, the politics are grossly distorted by the novelist as a result (it would appear) of having read just one book, by a Scotsman, about the French Revolution, while the style represents Dickens at his worst.

There's a lovely anecdote in the TLS about how Margaret Thatcher gave President Mitterrand a copy of A Tale of Two Cities during an official visit.  For some reason, this novel by Dickens has never sold as well in France as his other works. It suggests that the revered Mrs Thatcher had never read the novel, or she would not have insulted the French with such a slanted, one-dimensional vision of Frenchness.