Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0065/00652.txt

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$Title{(A) Tale Of Two Cities
Introduction By Winterich}
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Title:       (A) Tale Of Two Cities
Book:        Introduction By Winterich
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Introduction By Winterich

How This Book Came To Be

     On the evening of January 6, 1857 (Twelfth night), a little group of
amateur actors assembled in the home of Charles Dickens in Tavistock Square,
London.  The group included "the ladies of Mr. Dickens's family"
(specifically his daughters Mamie and Kate, aged nineteen and eighteen
respectively); Mark Lemon, editor of Punch; Augustus Egg, Royal Academician
and whilom painter of stage scenery, and Wilkie Collins, novelist.  They were
about to present, on the drawing-room stage which had been erected under
Dickens's own skilful and devoted supervision, a new play by Mr. Collins, The
Frozen Deep.

     A playwright is usually an actor's severest critic, particularly when the
actor is playing in the playwright's own play, but after the Tavistock Square
opening Mr. Collins had nothing but praise for his star's efforts. "Mr.
Dickens himself played the principal part," he reported later, "and played it
with a truth, vigor, and pathos never to be forgotten by those who were
fortunate enough to witness the performance." Of these there could not have
been more than one hundred, since that was the capacity of the house. But the
full hundred were probably there, since any presentation at Tavistock House
was certain to be a sellout, or a giveout.

     In June, 1857, Douglas Jerrold, playwright, humorist, and a founder of
Punch, died suddenly, and Dickens immediately set plans in motion to send The
Frozen Deep on tour as a benefit for his family.  This, be it remembered, was
in a day when a sprained ankle was almost enough to set off a benefit.  Mrs.
Jerrold, however, was somewhat put out by the attention; her husband had not
left her in affluence, but neither had he left her penniless, and she did not
care to be held up before all England as a subject for charity, however good
the intention.  But Dickens wanted to go on the stage again, born actor that
he was, and the idea of a benefit provided an excellent excuse.  The tour was
preceded by a command performance of The Frozen Deep before Queen Victoria at
the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street, which set the seal of royal
approval on the benefit program.  The tour itself was a notable success,
artistically and financially - at one of two Manchester performances there
were three thousand enthralled spectators.  Speaking of this high point in the
play's progression, Wilkie Collins was again lavish in his praise: "Dickens
surpassed himself.  The trite phrase is the true phrase to describe that
magnificent piece of acting." The benefit netted two thousand pounds, and Mrs.
Jerrold did not turn it down.

     The Frozen Deep mirrored the lively interest of the author (and of all
England, for that matter) in the fateful expedition of Sir John Franklin in
search of the Northwest Passage.  In the play, Richard Wardour (Charles
Dickens) and Frank Aldersley (Wilkie Collins), officers on an Arctic-bound
ship, are both in love with Clara Burnham, a young lady who is endowed with
the somewhat embarrassing faculty of second sight.  She leans toward Frank
Aldersley.  The two men are trapped on an ice-floe, and Wardour saves
Aldersley, to his own grave hurt.  After an elaborate series of involvements,
both emotional and geographical, Wardour dies in the leading lady's arms, his
sacrifice complete, and the lovers are reunited.

     For the road performances, "the ladies of Mr. Dickens's family" were
replaced by professional actresses.  Clara Burnham was played by Maria Ternan,
and the much less important part of Lucy Crayford by her younger sister Ellen.
But disregard the importance of the respective roles and keep your eyes on
Ellen Ternan.  Charles Dickens did.

     If Dickens had died in 1858, his fame would have been as secure as it is
today, although the world could then never have enjoyed A Tale of Two Cities,
Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, or guessed at the denouement of the
truncated Mystery of Edwin Drood.  But it could still have read, as it will go
on reading forever, Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old
Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David
Copperfield, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit.

     Toward the end of 1858 Dickens began midwifing a new weekly periodical to
replace Household Words, which had been established eight years before.
Household Words had become the crux of a magnificent row between Dickens and
his publishers, Bradbury and Evans, and was discontinued, with each party to
the dispute going his separate way with a new magazine.  Bradbury and Evans
started Once a Week and Dickens All the Year Round.  The first number of
Dickens's new periodical appeared at the end of April, 1859.  Naming it had
given him considerable difficulty.  He had at first leaned strongly toward
Household Harmony, but friends had pointed out to him that not only was this
pretty close to Household Words, but that it was also, in view of the
circumstances in which Household Words had come to its end (and in view of the
situation in Dickens's own household, about which there will be more to say),
a little too pointedly ironic.  So Dickens threw it aside and considered The
Hearth, The Forge, The Crucible, The Anvil of Time, Charles Dickens's Own,
Seasonable Leaves, Evergreen Leaves, Home, Home-Music, Change, Time and Tide,
Twopence, English Bells, Weekly Bells, The Rocket, and Good Humour.  John
Forster, Dickens's most detailed biographer (who nevertheless left out several
details that subsequent biographers have had to dig out for themselves), says
that these rejections were only "a few" of the titles which were considered.
Naming a magazine is a much greater problem than naming a baby.  Dickens
fathered ten children, and had no trouble naming a single one of them.  As
they are infrequently recapitulated, it may be worth while to list them here:
Charles Culliford Boz (1837-1896), Mary Angela (1838-1896), Kate Macready
(1839-1929), Walter Landor (1841-1863), Francis Jeffery (1844-1886), Alfred
Tennyson (1845-1912), Sydney Smith Haldimand (1847-1872), Henry Fielding
(1849-1933), Dora Annie (1850-1851), Edward Bulwer (1852-1902).  The final
survivor of this company, Sir Henry Fielding Dickens (he was knighted in
1922), lived well into the gasolene age and became a victim of it - he died as
the result of injuries sustained when he was struck by a motorcycle.

     For his new magazine Dickens projected a new serial by himself in order
to give the periodical a good sendoff.  Here again he ran into tittle-trouble.
When he had first conceived the idea for "a story in two periods - with a
lapse of time between, like a French drama," he had set down Time!, The Leaves
of the Forest, Scattered Leaves, The Great Wheel, Round and Round, Old Leaves,
Long Ago, Far Apart, Fallen Leaves, Five and Twenty Years, Years and Years,
Day After Day, Felled Trees, Memory Carton, Rolling Stones, Two Generations.
Some time later he jotted down still other possibilities: One of These Days,
Buried Alive, The Thread of Gold, The Doctor of Beauvais. And then, on March
11, 1859, he wrote Forster: "I have got exactly the name for the story that is
wanted; exactly what will fit the opening to a T.  A Tale of Two Cities." It
was, of course, perfection.

     Once a book title is established, nobody would ever want to have it
called anything else.  Suppose Thackeray had stuck to his original intention
of calling his first novel Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society - a
designation he retained until composition was well under way, when a nighttime
inspiration (he was actually in bed) whispered "Vanity Fair" into his mind's
ear.  Suppose James Henderson, editor of Young Folks, had not suggested to
Robert Louis Stevenson that Treasure Island might be a little more provocative
a label than The Sea Cook, which was what Stevenson had written at the top of
a manuscript of piracy and blood and gold.  Suppose Longfellow had stuck to
his first choice of Manabozho (which he held to during a month of actual
production) and foregone The Song of Hiawatha. Well, we should probably have
gone right on reading them just the same.  And while Pencil Sketches of
English Society does not sound like something to go ringing down the ages, The
Sea Cook and Manabozho would have served the purpose, and, had they been
chosen, such names as Treasure Island and The Song of Hiawatha would sound
rather fanciful today.

     Dickens's own original title suggestions for the story that became A Tale
of Two Cities fall into two groups not only in point of time, but in point of
aptness.  No member of the first group seems at all suitable.  With the
exception of One of These Days, any member of the second group could have
served.  Dickens got warmer as he went along.  And when he finally reached A
Tale of Two Cities, he was hot with a heat that even Dickens never surpassed.
I have taken no poll in the matter, but I have an idea that A Tale of Two
Cities may be the best-known book title in the English language, that it is
identifiable by many people who could not name a single play of Shakespeare,
and that everyone who knows the title (which means, in effect, everyone)
associates it with Charles Dickens.  Above everything else he ever
accomplished, that title is the sign manual of Dickens's immortality.

     The first number of All the Year Round appeared on Saturday, April 30,
1859, and the first instalment of A Tale of Two Cities was in it.  Dickens had
great faith in the future of All the Year Round, a faith which was justified
by events, but he also had great faith in the green-wrapped monthly part
issues in which all of his longer stories had appeared.  Now he saw a way of
doing two things at the same time - or almost the same time.  In the same
letter in which he told Forster about the title which would "fit to a T," he
told him of his plan:

     I have struck out a rather original and bold idea.  That is, at the end
of each month to publish the monthly part in the green cover, with the two
illustrations, at the old shilling.  This will give All the Year Round always
the interest and precedence of a fresh weekly portion during the month; and
will give me my old standing with my old public, and the advantage (very
necessary in this story) of having numbers of people read it in no portions
smaller than a monthly part.

     The monthly parts began appearing in June, 1859.  Serialization in All
the Year Round was concluded November 26, 1859; the final (double) monthly
part appeared early in December.

     We have the best authority in the world for the debt which A Tale of Two
Cities owes to The Frozen Deep.  The authority is Dickens himself.  The
preface to the original edition of A Tale of Two Cities reads, entire:

     When I was acting, with my children and friends, in Mr. Wilkie Collin's
drama of The Frozen Deep, I first conceived the main idea of this story.  A
strong desire was upon me then, to embody it in my own person, and I traced
out in my fancy, the state of mind of which it would necessitate the
presentation to an observant spectator, with particular care and interest.

     As the idea became familiar to me, it gradually shaped itself into its
present form.  Throughout its execution, it has had complete possession of me;
I have so far verified what is done and suffered in these pages, as that I
have certainly done and suffered it all myself.

     Whenever any reference (however slight) is made here to the condition of
the French people before or during the Revolution, it is truly made on the
faith of the most trustworthy witnesses.  It has been one of my hopes to add
something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible
time, though no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr.
Carlyle's wonderful book.

     The Frozen Deep ends on a note - a rather protracted note - of sacrifice
and self-abnegation.  A Tale of Two Cities ends on a note of sacrifice -
probably the most memorable such scene in all Victorian literature.

     The debt to Carlyle is handsomely acknowledged.  Actually the extent of
that debt embraced more than a single "wonderful book," though Dickens may
certainly be excused from any obligation to set forth the whole story in a
brief preface.  It is quite true that the historical background for the Paris
of A Tale of Two Cities was supplied mainly by Carlyle's French Revolution.
But Carlyle gave more help than that.  Dickens asked him for additional
material - to wit, one book.  Carlyle sent two cartloads - all his reference
volumes, Dickens told James T.  Fields, the Boston publisher, and added that
he had "read them faithfully." But Dickens himself was much more deeply
acquainted with French life, French history, and the French language than a
good many of his readers have given him credit for.  Although he had passed
through Paris on his way to and from Italy with his family in 1844 and 1845,
and in 1846 on terminating a Swiss sojourn (they travelled by coach, which is
the next best way after walking to see a country), he did not actually stop in
Paris until 1847, when he lived there for three months save for a brief
emergency return to London necessitated by his having underwritten one of the
monthly parts of Dombey and Son by two pages.  In his description, in a letter
to Forster, of King Louis Philippe riding in from the country and driving down
the Champs Elysees, one has a possible foreshadowing of Monseigneur's
breakneck journey through the Quartier St. Antoine in A Tale of Two Cities:

     There were two carriages.  His was surrounded by horseguards.  It went at
a great pace, and he sat very far back in a corner of it, I promise you. It
was strange to an Englishman to see the Prefect of Police riding on horseback
some hundreds of yards in advance of the cortege, turning his head incessantly
from side to side, like a figure in a Dutch clock, and scrutinizing everybody
and everything, as if he suspected all the twigs in all the trees in the long
avenue.

     It was one of Louis Philippe's last rides as a reigning monarch; a year
later he was an exile in England.  Dickens explored Paris as intensively as he
had ever explored London, and observed it as keenly and to as good purpose.
He spent the summers of 1853, 1854, and 1856 at Boulogne; he was in Paris for
two weeks in February, 1855, and again from November, 1855, to April, 1856,
his longest sojourn.  Altogether he passed at least two years of his life on
French soil, of which nearly a year was spent in Paris.

     Forster, it seems to me, underestimates Dickens's knowledge of French:
"He never spoke that language very well, his accent being somehow defective;
but he practised himself into writing it with remarkable ease and fluency."
Coming from a Frenchman, this criticism would have some validity; coming from
a fellow-Englishman, and an extremely English Englishman, it seems to me to
have no validity at all.  It is obvious, from Dickens's own accounts of his
Paris experience, that while he probably had an accent that betrayed his
origin with the first syllable he uttered, he had no trouble being understood
in France, and no trouble understanding, not merely in shops and hotels and
restaurants, where most foreigners can get along with no French at all, but at
the theatre, at dinner parties, in dingy corners which Dickens sought out
above all else and which the tourist rarely visits, and in his contacts with
work - people and small shopkeepers (not the Rue de la Paix variety), whom he
found "more like (and unlike) Americans than I could have supposed possible."
Forster quotes a long letter, most of it in flawless French, written on this
visit and signed "Charles Dickens, Francais naturalise, et Citoyen de Paris."
Altogether Dickens was well equipped to supply the authenticity and
verisimilitude required for the background of both of his two cities.

     Writing a novel in monthly parts had always been chore enough for
Dickens.  Writing a novel in weekly parts was a vastly more irksome chore. It
must have been something like walking railroad ties when railroad ties are the
only things to walk on and one's errand is urgent - progression is real but
maddening.  "The small portions drive me frantic," Dickens wrote Forster on
July 9th, by which time ten snippets of the story had appeared in All the Year
Round and two monthly parts had been issued.  "But I think," he added, "the
tale must have taken a strong hold.  The run upon our monthly parts is
surprising, and last month we sold 35,000 back numbers."

     In August he sent Forster proofs of four advance weekly instalments
(indicating that he was getting on satisfactorily by now with the "small
portions") and added the comment:

     I hope you will like them.  Nothing but the interest of the subject, and
the pleasure of striving with the difficulty of the form of treatment, -
nothing in the way of mere money, I mean, - could else repay the time and
trouble of the incessant condensation.  But I set myself the little task of
making a picturesque story, rising in every chapter, with characters true to
nature, but whom the story should express more than they should express
themselves by dialogue.  I mean in other words, that I fancied a story of
incident might be written (in place of the odious stuff that is written under
that pretence), pounding the characters in its own mortar, and beating their
interest out of them.  If you could have read the story all at once, I hope
you wouldn't have stopped halfway.

     Later, Forster notes, somebody (it turned out to be Bulwer-Lytton)
expressed doubt whether the feudal cruelties detailed in the narrative "came
sufficiently within the date of the action to justify (Dickens's) use of
them." Dickens's reply to this criticism provides admirable evidence of the
depth of his research:

     I had of course full knowledge of the formal surrender of the feudal
privileges, but these had been bitterly felt quite as near to the time of the
Revolution as the Doctor's narrative, which you will remember dates long
before the Terror.  With the slang of the new philosophy on the one side, it
was surely not unreasonable or unallowable, on the other, to suppose a
nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas, and representing the time going out as
his nephew represents the time coming in.  If there be anything certain on
earth.  I take it that the condition of the French peasant generally at that
day was intolerable.  No later enquiries or provings by figures will hold
water against the tremendous testimony of men living at the time.  There is a
curious book printed at Amsterdam, written to make out no case whatever, and
tiresome enough in its literal dictionary - like minuteness, scattered up and
down the pages of which is full authority for my marquis.  This is [Louis
Sebastian] Mercier's Tableau de Paris.  Rousseau is the authority for the
peasant's shutting up his house when he had a bit of meat.  [See A Tale of Two
Cities, Book the Third, Chapter X, "The Substance of the Shadow."] The tax -
tables are the authority for the wretched creature's impoverishment.

     The composition of A Tale of Two Cities coincided with the aftermath of a
highly disturbing emotional crisis in Dickens's life.  He and his wife had
separated in May, 1858, when Dickens went to the incredible length of
publishing in Household Words what Stephen Leacock calls "a sort of manifesto"
concerning his domestic situation.  The excuse for the publication of this
amazing document was the usual one advanced whenever intimate concerns are
aired - rumor had outrun fact, so here were the facts.  Of course, in such
situations, the facts are never all the facts.  They are, instead, an
extremely ex parte presentation.  The truth of this statement is unaffected by
Mrs. Dickens's agreeing to the publication.  Mrs. Dickens's acquiescence in
everything Dickens proposed was one of the factors that had helped in bringing
about the separation.

     Dickens asked Bradbury and Evans, publishers of Punch as well as of
Household Words, to print his "manifesto" in Punch.  Bradbury and Evans wanted
Punch to be funny, but not that funny.  And while Dickens might be editor of
Household Words, he had absolutely nothing to do with Punch. Bradbury and
Evans declined the contribution.  Dickens was furious, and that fury had a
great deal to do with the demise of Household Words, and the establishment of
All the Year Round, and thus may have become one of the impulses that set in
motion A Tale of Two Cities.

     Ellen Ternan, the actress who did not play the lead in the out-of-town
performances of The Frozen Deep, was not the apex of the Dickens triangle.
Actually there was no triangle.  It was off with the old love, but not yet on
with the new.  If Ellen had never been born, the Dickens family debacle would
have come about just the same.  But Ellen did get born, twenty-seven years
after Charles Dickens.  They had met, at least once, and casually, before the
fateful road tour of The Frozen Deep.  Thereafter Dickens's course was set.
Aut Ellen aut nulla.  In justice to Ellen, it must be said that at first she
resisted seduction magnificently, made it plain that she admired and respected
the suppliant but did not love him, and did not yield to his insistence for
five or six years.

     There is a single index reference to Ellen Ternan in Forster - I am
citing the first American edition, published at Philadelphia in three volumes
in 1872, 1873, and 1874.  That reference reads: "Ternan (Ellen Lawless), iii,
561." Page 561 of Volume III turns out to be Appendix II, "The Will of Charles
Dickens." The document begins:

     I, Charles Dickens, of Gadshill Place, Higham, in the county of Kent,
hereby revoke all my former Wills and Codicils and declare this to be my last
Will and Testament.  I give the sum of pounds 1000 free of legacy duty to Miss
Ellen Lawless Ternan, late of Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, in the county
of Middlesex.

     Provision had already been made for Mrs. Dickens, and additional
provision was made in the will, which was dated May 12, 1869.  A little more
than a year later - on June 2, 1870 - a codicil left to Dickens's oldest son
Charles all of his share and interest in All the Year Round.  A week later
Dickens was dead.

     Opinions of the value of Forster's biography differ widely.  Dickens's
latest (1949) biographer, Hesketh Pearson, calls it "heavy and half-told,"
echoing the view of William Harrison Ainsworth, who in 1836 introduced Dickens
to Forster: "I see he only tells half the story." Una Pope-Hennessy said: "The
first and greatest book on Charles Dickens was written seventy years ago." The
amiable Stephen Leacock admitted that Forster had a tendency to "gloss over."
George Gissing, who abridged Forster for those who did not want him in three
fat volumes, declared: "Forster's life of Dickens has its place with those
biographies which limn once for all, and transmit to posterity, the image of a
great man.  To its performance he brought a sympathy which animates every
page, and a judgment which never allowed his admiration of the man or of the
writer to become excessive or uncritical." Carlyle, who of course knew both
men, said: "So long as Dickens is interesting to his fellow-men, here will be
seen, face to face, what Dickens's manner of existing was," and he put Forster
next to Boswell. George Saintsbury regarded Forster as "a bumptious busybody,"
a status which his life of Dickens and his far less widely known life of
Walter Savage Landor "abundantly establish." James Russell Lowell, writing to
James T. Fields soon after the publication of the latter's Yesterday's With
Authors in 1872 and commenting on his reminiscences of Dickens (which took up
more than a third of the 352-page volume); said: "Your Dickens letters are a
great deal more interesting that Forster's for some reason or other.  I fancy
it is because they are more natural.  In writing to Forster, Dickens must have
felt that he was writing to his biographer, and had the constraint of sitting
before a glass.  Indeed, I was very much disappointed in Forster's volume. It
doesn't leave an agreeable impression, which is surely a fault in biography."
So much for opinion, but the writer and bibliophile Percy FitzGerald adds a
damning fact in describing the biographer's treatment of his subject's
original letters: "To save time and trouble - and this I was told by Mr.
Forster - he would cut out the passages he wanted with a pair of scissors and
paste them on his manuscript."

     Actually, Forster's Life has both the strength and the weakness of the
"official" biography.  Forster got there first with the most, and that
distinction and that advantage can never be taken away from him.  When one has
been intimately associated with a man for thirty-four years, from his hero's
twenty-fourth year until his death at fifty-eight, one cannot write about him,
immediately following his death (or at any other time) with complete
objectivity and critical detachment.  For one thing, men and women are still
alive who must be treated with circumspection, even by the boldest of
biographers, which Forster was not.  But despite his sins, which are largely
of omission, Forster remains the rock on which all subsequent study of Dickens
always has been and always will be reared.

     There were other factors, in addition to the domestic crisis, to increase
the burden of turning out copy for A Tale of Two Cities.  Dickens's first
series of public readings in the British Isles had opened in St. Martin's
Hall, London, on April 29, 1858.  He appeared sixteen times there between that
date and July 22d, when he rested briefly before setting out into the
provinces on August 2d.  By the time he concluded this tour, on November 13th,
he had covered most of England and much of Scotland and Ireland.  In London he
made three Christmas appearances, followed by three in January, 1859, and two
more still in February.  The following October he made another brief
provincial tour, returning to London on the 29th after fourteen appearances.
The whole series included 125 readings.  The October pilgrimage was begun,
Forster relates, "immediately after his conclusion of A Tale of Two Cities."

     When he was not on tour or working on his novel (and sometimes when he
was), he kept up a running fire of directives to his sub-editor, William Henry
Wills, on the operation of All the Year Round.  The examples which follow are
taken from letters to Wills written while A Tale of Two Cities was in process:

     Wilkie Collins has a notion that if he could see what matter we have at
the printers', he might find out for himself what kind of articles would be
most useful for No. 2.  He will join us at the office at about 2 tomorrow.
Will you have your slips there?  (April 11, 1859)

     There can be no harm in your writing to as many people as come into your
mind, from time to time, some such letters as this:

     "Dear Sir: I beg, on behalf of Mr. Charles Dickens, to inform you that if
it should be compatible with your arrangements to write for his Journal, it
would afford him the greatest pleasure to secure your valuable co-operation.
Now, or at any other time, I shall be happy to pursue this subject and to
enter into details with you, if you will allow me."

     I would send this, at once, to both the Trollopes, and to George Eliot,
care of Blackwood, with a private seal on the latter letter.  I would also
address it to [Giovanni] Ruffini, with a note to Mrs. Carlyle, asking her if
she can direct the envelope.  I would also write to Mrs. Gaskell, referring
back to that story she mentioned.  (April 28th)

     [John Pyke] Hullah's daughter (an artist, who is here) tells me that
certain female students have addressed the Royal Academy, entreating them to
find a place for their education.  I think it a capital move, for which I
think I can do something popular and telling in the Register [a department in
All the Year Round].  Adelaide Procter is active in the business, and has a
copy of their letter.  Will you write to her for that, and anything else she
may have about it.  (April 28th, a second letter)

     I have corrected [Edmund] Yate's article carefully, and it really is very
good.  [Henry] Morley's so-so.  Also corrected.  [George Walter] Thornbury's
is only this moment come in, and (not having yet read it).  I cannot yet say
whether it is good or no.  I thought Mrs. Blacker's article so very good - the
Nurse's story so exceedingly well done - that I considered it best to send it
to the printers at once.  (May 3d)

     And so on, and so on.

     And he could entertain his friends as heartily as if there were no such
encumberances as novels and periodicals and reading tours.  James T. Fields
reported:

     Early in the month of July, 1859, I spent a day with him in his beautiful
country retreat in Kent.  He drove me about the leafy lanes in his basket
wagon, pointing out the lovely spots belonging to his friends, and ending with
a visit to the ruins of Rochester Castle.  We climbed up the time-worn walls
and leaned out of the ivied windows, looking into the various apartments
below.  I remember how vividly he reproduced a probable scene in the great old
banqueting-room, and how graphically he imagined the life of ennui and
every-day tediousness that went on in those lazy old times.  I recall his
fancy picture of the dogs stretched out before the fire, sleeping and snoring
with their masters.  That day he seemed to revel in the past, and I stood by,
listening almost with awe to his impressive voice, as he spoke out whole
chapters of a romance destined never to be written.  On our way back to Gad's
Hill Place, he stopped in the road, I remember, to have a crack with a
gentleman who he told me was a son of Sydney Smith.  The only other guest at
his table that day was Wilkie Collins; and after dinner we three went out and
lay down on the grass, while Dickens showed off a raven that was hopping
about, and told anecdotes of the bird and of his many predecessors.

     A Tale of Two Cities was dedicated to the highest ranking statesman thus
to be honored by Charles Dickens, who did not care for most people in public
life.  Lord John Russell was an exception.  Born twenty years before Dickens,
he had become home secretary under Lord Melbourne in 1835, and in 1839 went to
the colonial office.  With Peel's retirement in 1846, Russell became head of
the government.  Backed by Queen Victoria, he forced the resignation of
Palmerston when the latter recognized Napoleon III in 1851.  Russell became
colonial secretary in 1855, and in 1859, the year of A Tale of Two Cities,
foreign minister.  In 1865 he again headed the government for a few months. He
edited the letters of the Duke of Bedford and of Charles James Fox, and the
journals of Thomas Moore; he wrote a life of Lord William Russell (who had
been beheaded for treason in 1683), an Essay on the English Constitution, and
(of interest to our present concerns) Causes of the French Revolution. He was
instrumental in securing pensions of 200 Pounds a year for Leigh Hunt and
James Sheridan Knowles - gestures which won the approval of Dickens. Dickens
regarded him as "worth a score of official men," and thought he had "more
generosity in his little finger than a Government usually has in its whole
corporation." This was high praise from one whose capsule political credo was
this: "My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my
faith in the People governed is, on the whole, illimitable."

     A Tale of Two Cities was serialized in America in Harper's Weekly
beginning May 7, 1859, a week after the initiation of the novel in All the
Year Round.  As there was no Queen Mary in that day, the sheets were
demonstrably exported well ahead of time.  The story concluded in the Weekly
for December 3d, a week after its termination in All the Year Round.  For the
privilege of publishing it in their junior periodical the Harpers paid Dickens
1000 Pounds.  The text was accompanied by sixty-four illustrations by John
McLenan.

     In its issue for December 10th, a week after the story had ended, the
Weekly printed an advertisement announcing that T. B. Peterson & Brothers of
Philadelphia were offering A Tale of Two Cities in no fewer than twenty-five
different formats, all the way from the plain text, unillustrated, in paper
wrappers, to a two-volume octavo, half calf with gilt backs, containing all
the McLenan illustrations.  One may doubt the statement in the Petersons'
advertisement that the book was issued in America "one month prior to its
publication in England in book form." The question is of technical interest
only; of universal interest is the fact that Dickens's popularity in America
was of such proportions that a new book by him, after being presented as a
serial in a magazine of wide circulation, could subsequently be issued in book
form in twenty-five different investitures, geared to every purse.

     As illustrators go, John McLenan was no great shakes, but he enjoyed one
distinction which his British opposite number, Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), did
not.  In America, McLenan was to illustrate Dickens's next novel.  In England,
Phiz was not.  Over a period of nearly a quarter of a century, Phiz's drawings
had become standard equipment for a Dickens novel.  Forster is silent on the
severance of the partnership, merely noting the fact of it in a footnote,
without explanation.  Leacock says that "Dickens broke off the connection
without a word," which is unlikely, as one cannot imagine Dickens doing
anything without a word.  Pearson surmises, with probable accuracy, that
Dickens was outraged by Phiz's neutrality in Dickens's marital difficulties
(to be neutral, of course, meant, in Dickens's eyes, to be anti-Dickens) and
that he also took Phiz's affiliation with Bradbury and Evan's Once a Week as
rank treachery.  I think that at this distance it is only fair to be
charitable, and to assume that Phiz simply wanted to get out from under, and
to have a soft place to light.

     If a novel was ever inevitably destined for dramatic presentation, that
novel was A Tale of Two Cities.  But the first adaptation for the stage, made
by Tom Taylor and produced in January, 1860, at the Lyceum Theatre, London,
fell short of satisfaction.  Not until near the close of the century was
another version attempted - a version which was a notable success, and which
held the boards, off and on, for some twenty-five years, thanks largely to the
competence of Sir John Martin Harvey, who presented it and played the part of
Sydney Carton.

     The Harvey version, entitled The Only Way, was the vehicle which raised
Henry Miller to stardom when it opened at the Herald Square Theatre in New
York in 1899.  It ran for three years, on Broadway and on the road, and its
success may - repeat, may - have been a factor in the development of a
memorable contribution to the American argot.  I am not, I trust, violating a
confidence or divulging a secret when I say that the number Twenty-Three
(printed exactly so) is used with highly dramatic connotations in the final
scene of A Tale of Two Cities.  In the early nineteen hundreds, "twenty-three"
enjoyed a vogue that has never been surpassed, in my time, in the history of
American slang.  The number could not be mentioned, in however matter-of-fact
a connection (the price of a purchase at a grocery, a house number, the
departure time of a train, a person's age) without producing a state of
approximate collapse among the auditors.  Even the strictest disciplinarian
among school teachers, in announcing that the next day's lesson would extend
to page twenty-three, would join not too frostily in the bellow of laughter
that was certain to follow.  Used interjectionally, the phrase became a
command to retire, in the sense of go hence, on your way, avaunt, beat it,
skiddo (the last a locution with which it was frequently combined).  At the
time, the origin of "twenty-three" was widely (and, in large measure,
inexpertly) debated.  A Tale of Two Cities was frequently cited as the
probable source, directly or by rerouting through The Only Way. H. L. Mencken,
in The American Language, credits "twenty-three" to T. A. Dorgan (Tad), but
appends a footnote conceding that Dorgan's claim has been disputed, and cites
a disputant - an editorial in the Louisville Times (May 9, 1929, a date
attesting to the vitality of the phrase) assigning to Frank Parker Stockbridge
the theory that The Only Way was the means of putting "twenty-three" in
circulation.  While I do not consider the case altogether proved, and am
certain that Mr. Stockbridge was by no means the first to support the
Dickensian derivation, still I admit that the Tale of Two Cities - Only Way
theory is the most logical explanation yet advanced.  The matter today is
largely academic, perhaps, but it was not at all academic in the earliest
nineteen hundreds.  People were always saying "twenty-three," and people were
always wondering why.  Rarely has America ever been so astir with intellectual
inquiry.

     Occasionally we read a book and like it or dislike it without realizing
how deeply it has embedded itself in our memories and in our emotions.  The
realization, indeed, may never come at all, but sometimes, perhaps years
later, an unpredictable combination of circumstances will bring it out.  Such
an experience once befell me in the instance of A Tale of Two Cities.

     One Sunday afternoon during the late summer of 1918 while I was in Paris
I was continuing the casual explorations of the city which I had begun when I
was first assigned to military duty there the preceding February.  During
those six months I had come to know the town fairly well for a stranger,
poking into areas which the tourist seldom bothers about (much as Dickens had
done two generations earlier).  On this particular Sunday I had walked up the
Avenue de la Republique to the gates of Pere Lachaise (which I had previously
covered, seeking out in particular the graves of Abelard and Heloise and the
Epstein memorial to Oscar Wilde).  Thence I strolled down the Boulevard de
Menilmontant and the Avenue Philippe Auguste to the Place de la Nation, where
I was offered that bewildering variety of exits which characterizes all the
places of Paris (and all the circles of Washington).  I finally picked a
highway to the right which seemed most likely to get me back to the Grands
Boulevards.  It turned out to be a singularly uninteresting thoroughfare,
given over largely to the manufacture of furniture - a worthy and useful
pursuit, but scenically uninspiring, at least on a Sunday.  I mean that the
thoroughfare was singularly uninteresting save for its name, which was rather
earth-shaking: Rue du Faubourg St. Antoine.  The scenario of A Tale of Two
Cities began running through my mind.

     The Rue du Faubourg St. Antoine was deserted, as far as I could see,
which was not very far at that moment for the reason that the sun, low in a
cloudless horizon, was pointing down the middle of the road with the precision
of an expert rifleman, pouring its rays on both sidewalks.  Since it hung at
eye level, walking into it was as disconcerting as walking into a gale-driven
sleet-storm.

     Then, looking up between squints, I saw her.  Sitting on a plain kitchen
chair, which she had probably brought out from the tenement where she lived,
was a dark-haired, solid woman.  She was the only human being in sight, but
that was not what made her remarkable.  What made her remarkable, in the Rue
du Faubourg St. Antoine, was the fact that she was knitting.  Madame Defarge
to the life, at Madame Defarge's game, in Madame Defarge's street!  The day
was warm, or at least it had been warm up to that time.  But the knitting
needles flashed in the sun, and the day was no longer warm.  Not to me.

     She may, for all I know, have been a property piece set there by the
Dickens Fellowship or the Bureau de Tourisme.  Perhaps she had the four to
eight p.m. shift, and in an hour or so would hand on her needles to her
relief.  But what with the war, and the day, and the time of day, and the sun
boring in with open sights, I did not think so.  I still do not think so.  I
know, today, that she could only have been Madame Defarge.

     John T. Winterich