with commentary by Margaret Atwood
Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities in 1859, seventy years after the French Revolution it describes. He wrote it for an English audience that was still frightened by what France had become: frightened, specifically, of what their own country might become if the same conditions were met. It is not a comfortable book. Margaret Atwood, who chose it for her Rebind commentary, did not pick it by accident. “We are living in a paradigm shift age like the French Revolution,” she says. “Who wouldn’t be interested in the French Revolution?”
The novel spans roughly twenty years, from 1775 to the Terror of the early 1790s, and moves between London and Paris. It follows a small group of characters caught in the machinery of history: a French physician who spent eighteen years in the Bastille, his devoted daughter, the aristocrat she marries, the dissolute English lawyer who loves her, and a wine-shop owner and his wife in the heart of revolutionary Paris. It is, on its surface, a love story and a historical novel. Underneath, it is a warning.
The Structure: Recalled to Life
Dickens called Book I “Recalled to Life” and the phrase is the architecture of the whole novel. Dr. Alexandre Manette spent eighteen years in the Bastille, imprisoned without trial or charge. When the story opens, he has been retrieved by a London banker named Jarvis Lorry and is being slowly returned to the world by his daughter Lucie Manette. He is, as Atwood puts it, “a man buried alive in his own city.”
The resurrection motif runs through everything. Manette gets recalled to life. Charles Darnay, an aristocrat who renounced his title and his family name, is acquitted at trial twice, each time pulled back from death. Sydney Carton, the book’s real emotional center, undergoes a different kind of resurrection: not from prison but from the wasted life he has made for himself. “There are many kinds of resurrection in the book,” Atwood says in her Rebind commentary. “Dr. Manette gets recalled to life. And Charles Darnay gets recalled to life twice. And Sydney Carton undergoes a different kind of resurrection because he does a redemptive thing at the end of the book, and the Bible is quoted at that point.”
The Warning: England Is Not Above This
What distinguishes Atwood’s reading from a standard account is her insistence on reading the novel as Dickens’s warning to his own readers. He was not writing about France for English readers to shudder at from a comfortable distance. He was writing about England, using France as a mirror.
“Pay attention, English aristocracy,” Atwood reads many passages as saying. “You are a mirror image in your own way of the ancien régime in France which came to such a bad end.” The crowd that pays admission to watch Darnay’s treason trial at the Old Bailey is the same crowd that will fill the Place de la Révolution to watch heads fall. “Don’t be smug, England,” Atwood says. “You have the capability to do this too.”
This is the argument Dickens had been making since A Christmas Carol and Nicholas Nickleby. “The whole book is a warning to the British establishment,” Atwood says. “Treat people this way and you’re going to get the French Revolution in some form.”
The Characters: Who They Are and What They Mean
Dickens’s characters are never purely individuals. They are also positions, functions, and arguments.
The Marquis d’Evrémonde, who crushes a child under his carriage and considers the matter settled with a gold coin, speaks, in his final scene, the language of the Enlightenment philosophes: “Better to be a rational creature and accept your natural destiny.” Atwood catches this precisely: “Rational creature — this is Voltaire.” The ideas that were supposed to dismantle the old order had been absorbed by it, turned into the justification for everything they were meant to challenge.
Sydney Carton is the character Dickens was really writing toward from the first page. Drunken, self-loathing, brilliant, and in love with a woman he knows he cannot have, he is the figure who gives the novel its emotional authority. As Atwood says: “The real hero of A Tale of Two Cities is Sydney Carton — the desolate, drunken reprobate.” An outgrowth of the Enlightenment: self-conscious and way too smart for its own good.
Madame Defarge, the wine-shop keeper’s wife who knits a death register into her needlework, is, in Atwood’s reading, the novel’s actual female center. “Sydney Carton is the male center of the book and Madame Defarge is the female center.” She is the figure in whom the Revolution’s legitimate anger and the Revolution’s murderous excess are held in the same body, until they can’t be anymore.
Why It Still Matters
Atwood chose this novel because the pattern it describes is running again. The French Revolution went from moderate to extreme very quickly, then went pear-shaped very quickly. Robespierre championed free speech on the way up and shut down the printing presses on the way down. The revolution that was supposed to liberate everyone killed mostly the people it claimed to represent: only twenty percent of those executed in the Terror were aristocrats.
“The United States is doing right now what the French Revolution did back in the 18th century,” Atwood says in her Rebind commentary, “including rearranging the calendar.” The burn-it-all-down impulse, the statue-tearing, the rhetorical move from reform to revolution to terror: Dickens mapped it in 1859, from events of 1789, and Atwood reads it as a guide to the present.
The problem with burning it all down, as she notes, is that afterward there isn’t anybody left who knows how to do anything. That is the novel’s most durable warning, and the reason Atwood picked it up now.