Movements

The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-
long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris and his release to live in
London with his daughter Lucie, whom he had never met. The story is
set against the conditions that led up to the French Revolution and
the Reign of Terror.
McWilliams, Jr., is one of many critics to examine A Tale of Two Cities as an
historical novel. Seeking to explain the novel’s well-recognized weaknesses of
characterization, humor, and credibility, he argues that Dickens concentrated on
the domestic plot in order to avoid political issues. McWilliams, Jr., discusses
Dickens’s response to the Chartist movement (see Contextual Overview, p. 13),
noting that he favored nonviolent reform brought about by public pres sure, a
pressure that he realized is hard to sustain. Because Dickens had no confidence in
the ruling classes and he feared violent, revolutionary action in response to
Victorian England’s social problems, the novel deliberately veers away from
political questions by turning them, and their solution, into moral issues. Through
the plot, “Dickens could still control the monster of revolution by devising a tale in
which no political issue is finally pertinent either to the assumed certainty of
social progress or to the conduct of the truly virtu ous man. For another reading
that stresses Dickens as a moral rather than political writer (and praises rather
than faults him for it) see Orwell (Modern Criticism, pp. 68-70).

Thus the novel was written at a time when Dickens, fearing French invasion, could
discover no political outlet for his sense of social outrage. The power of its French
scenes, in turn, derives from Dickens’ ability to build unrelieved fear and anger
simultaneously in his reader. His descriptions of pre-Revolutionary France create a
demand for political and social action. The hunger of the masses, oppressive
feudal dues, lettres de cachet, the droit du seigneur, legalized torture, a treasure
depleted by aristocratic graf-all of these injustices induce the reader to
sympathize, not with the Jacquerie as men, but with their cause. After Saint
Antoine has risen to power, however, the persistence of mass hunger, the denial
of legal rights to the accused, confiscation of property, and mob violence con
doned by self-appointed tribunals are made to seem equally intolerable. One set
of abuses simply replaces another, with sympathy extended to the victim, be he
peasant or aristocrat. There seems to be no possibility for moderation, no way in
which legalized abuses could find legal remedy. What Carlyle called.

“the whole daemonic nature of mansurfaces in every segment of French Society –

in Saint Antoine, in Monseigneur's salon, in revolutionary tribunals and