I recently read A Tale of Two Cities, which is Dickens' other historical novel, after Barnaby Rudge. Again, another petrifying depiction of mob violence, particularly in the street lynching of a heartless aristo:
Once, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the rope was merciful, and held him, and his head was soon upon a pike ...
I don't know much about Dickens' background, but this has made me wonder what he'd seen before writing these passages.
What surprised me was Madame Defarge, who I had assumed from various passing depictions in movies and such to be a cackling hag, madly knitting while the heads roll. Instead Dickens made her beautiful and implacable, motivated by the persecution and near-extermination of her family by the uncle and father of the hero, Charles Darnay. She's fanatical enough to want to see the (innocent) Charles and his four-year-old daughter executed for those crimes. It's striking how much the ideologically intoxicated "justice" of the revolutionary government resembles reports of similar regimes in China, the Soviet Union and other states: the paranoia, the witch-hunting and the lethal absurdity
We think of Dickens' as a broad writer, but I particularly liked one of the recurring details in A Tale of Two Cities, which is the idea that people often cope with agony by busying their hands. Charles' father-in-law, a doctor, insists on working at a shoe-making bench whenever he's overcome by hard memories of his 19-year imprisonment in the Bastille. The doctor's friends become concerned whenever he calls for the bench, as this indicates that his mind is crumbling.
Madame Defarge, of course, uses her knitting to encode information about enemies of the People (an intriguing idea for cryptography buffs; I'd like to see images of what such a code might look like), but the other women in her neighborhood, Saint Antoine, knit to take their minds off their own misery:
All the women knitted. They knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the jaws and the digestive apparatus: if the bony fingers had been still, the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched.
This did make me wonder how someone without money for food could afford yarn, but I still love the parallel to Dr. Manette. In the doctor's case, his recourse to the bench is heart-breaking, but the women of Saint Antoine, with their never-still hands, are all menace.
Joan Walsh
Kerry Lauerman
Mary Elizabeth Williams
Scott Rosenberg
Heather Havrilesky
caitlin shamberg
Salon.com
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