Introduction

Margaret Atwood opens her talk-through of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities with her own history with the book: she first read it in the tenth grade, at 14, and later specialized in Victorian literature as a Harvard graduate student. She sets the French Revolution up as the most influential event of the last 250 years, the model for Mexico, Russia and China, and reads the novel as Dickens's warning to England that the conditions behind the Terror were present at home too.

The turn is her rule for historical fiction: all historical novels are about the time of the writer, whenever they're set. She also tells you what to track from page one, twins, roads, footsteps, shoes, and a coffin, contents unknown. Lucie Manette gets called the womanly ideal with a raised eyebrow; Madame Defarge, she says, could take up a whole book to herself. You leave with a reading list of motifs and a warning about the style: take it slowly, or read it out loud.

Transcript

Hello, I'm Margaret Atwood. Welcome to this Rebind reading of Charles Dickens's Tale of Two Cities, which I've really enjoyed working on. I hope you'll have fun, or at least some thrills and chills, as we dig deeper and deeper and deeper into the text. Who knows what we'll find? A coffin, guaranteed, but what will be in it?

I'm a writer. I'm really old, and that could mean I'm very wise or suffering from a brain malfunction. There's a character like that in this novel too, so I'm qualified to understand. I've been a writer almost all my life. I've published over 50 books, starting in the 1960s. I've also written for film, television, opera, and singing commercials, like Dickens. I've supported myself doing it, like Dickens. Some are better than others, like Dickens. I sometimes make bad jokes and use slang. Nobody's perfect, except possibly Lucie Manette in this book, but we'll come to that.

I first read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, the 10th grade, I believe, when I was 14. It made a deep impression on me, although I certainly didn't understand all of it at that time. Then when I grew up, I was a graduate student at Harvard specializing in Victorian literature, and what a strange literature it is. The 19th century gave us Frankenstein and Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and H.G. Wells's Time Machine, and many stories about twins, good and evil. Keep your eyes on the twins, because TTC, as we call it, is full of those.

I read a lot of Dickens then, and shortly after that I was teaching him in a Victorian literature class. I didn't teach TTC, however. I taught Great Expectations, which, however, shares a lot with TTC: prisons, criminals, violence, social inequalities, badly behaved women, secrets, insanities of various kinds, revelation scenes, and making people cry. Dickens loved that.

If you're a writer, you've been a reader first, guaranteed. I was a child who read under the cupboard with a flashlight. I was told it would ruin my eyes. Something did, but I think it's genetic. I certainly read Dickens's Christmas Carol, for instance, but also much else, with no distinction about genres. I'd read the backs of cereal boxes if there was nothing else. Obviously, I think reading and writing are important, especially now, when efforts are being made in some countries to control or indeed eliminate education and public libraries. Reading in totalitarianisms has been a lifeline for many. Fiction is perhaps the closest we can come to knowing and understanding other human beings. With stories, a friend of mine says, you are never alone.

I chose A Tale of Two Cities because I feel it is especially relevant to our times. It's set during the French Revolution, a radical experiment, burning a society to the ground in order to build a new and better social order. This is probably the most influential event of the last 250 years, the model for the Mexican War of Independence, the three 19th-century French revolutionary events, the Russian Revolution, the German experiment and right-wing reorganization, the Chinese Revolution, and more. The patterns of idealism followed by purges and terror are familiar to us.

We are seeing something of that burn-it-all-down sort being attempted in the United States right now, the country that inspired the French Revolution with its own revolution of 1775. But TTC is also a cautionary tale, urging English society to avoid the conditions of poverty, misery and injustice that in Dickens's mind led to the Terror. That is the background. In the foreground are several love stories emphasizing self-sacrifice and redemption, and also a very compelling hate story of murder, crime, and vengeance. Because it's Dickens, love wins over hate. If it were Thomas Hardy, things would not turn out so well, but Hardy is a hard realist, and at his core, and despite the realism of his details, Dickens is a romancer.

He is the foremost voice of his own age, the high Victorian age, an age of social change in which the middle class rises in importance and sympathy grows for the underdogs, the oppressed, and the neglected. These tendencies are pronounced in Tale of Two Cities, where, despite being set in the 18th century, TTC is a 19th-century novel. All historical novels are about the time of the writer, no matter when they are set. Modern readers might have some trouble with the ornamentation of the style. Take it slowly, or read it out loud, and the voice becomes clear.

We might also flinch a bit at the standard fainting, clingy and physically weak kind of womanly ideal that appears twice in this book, but never fear. There are a couple of very strong women too. You wouldn't want to go up against either of them in a hand-to-hand match.

Let's get into the plot and character, hopefully without giving anything away. The setting is, well, two cities, London and Paris, that represent on the one hand English ideas of its own freedom, and on the other hand French misery and repression under the Ancien Régime, and then, when that cuts out, absolute mayhem. England had a rather self-satisfied idea of itself at this time. But Dickens is pointing out that although the two cities are contrasted, they're also very much alike. The conditions for what's been happening in France are present in England, and not only in the England of the 18th century, but in the England when Dickens was writing the book.

As we travel along, watch out for all the roads and travels and footsteps and shoes. In this book, you'll meet many different sorts of characters. The helpful and modest Mr. Lorry. Lucie Manette, the womanly ideal. Her father, the doctor turned cobbler, imprisoned in the Bastille by wicked aristocrats, who keeps many secrets. The Defarges, discreet wine shop keepers by day, fervent revolutionaries by night, fighting for the oppressed, smoldering with vengeance, dealing out ruthless justice once they get the chance. But Madame Defarge might take up a whole book to herself. She crackles with concealed menace and electric energy.

As we tackle Book One, we'll notice Dickens's setup is placing mysterious markers and hints that he'll pick up and explain later in the book, or else he'll keep some until the end, when he can pay them off with dramatic revelations and flourishes. As you make your way through the book, you'll be able to interact with my original commentary on the Rebind platform. I hope you enjoy it. To get you into the right revolutionary mood, I've made a little playlist for you: original revolutionary songs and film clips, and later music influenced by the revolutionary period.

Above all, please enjoy Dickens's baroque coincidences and twists of plot in this classic work, a story of revolutions, personal, political, and far-reaching, that resonates with us today as we find ourselves in the midst of a huge rearrangement of social order.