In a novel about father-daughter love, happy marriage, and the conversion by love of an ignoble man to nobility, there is much talk of happiness, but it may seem to the reader banal and unconvincing when compared to the wonderful prose of sorrow that Dickens achieves again and again. Musing that “every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other,” Dickens meditates on the sight of a great city at night, sensing that “every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!” While he writes of cities on separate continents, and on the gulfs of time, he tells us his most terrible discovery: that we may never, ever, know one another in spite of lust, love, or intimacy. He cuts the distance of the title and of the novel’s overture down to size, making clear that the soul itself—not continents, not epochs—is the measure of separateness.
So we are all buried away from one another, he says, as he writes his novel of Dr. Manette buried in time and in the Bastille, of Sydney Carton buried in his anguish, of Miss Pross buried in her deafened silence. Yet Dickens labors to unearth every person and every secret. Documents hidden in a cell are found, and their terrible story is told. Thanks to Jarvis Lorry and the muscularity of money and the English banking system—Dickens is never unmindful of the blessings of good credit—Dr. Manette is going to see the light of day. Thanks to Dickens’ ingenuity and the converting power of love—thanks to the angelic Lucie, that is—Sydney Carton’s buried goodness is unearthed.
In All the Year Round, Dickens later wrote: “Whenever I am at Paris, I am dragged by invisible forces into the Morgue. . . . One Christmas Day, when I would rather have been anywhere else, I was attracted in, to see an old grey man lying all alone on his cold bed, with a tap of water turned on over his grey hair, and running, drip, drip, drip, down his wretched face until it got to the corner of his mouth, where it took a turn, and made him look sly.” The genius behind finding that sly smile, where any other writer would have labored to portray sorrow, to generate pathos, is the genius who, while laboring to resurrect the men and women who live for us in A Tale of Two Cities, also gives us Jerry Cruncher and Jerry Junior. Jerry is a resurrection man: he steals corpses from graveyards and sells them to further the education of young doctors. He is the very spirit of a Victorian age in which everything—corpses, cuticles, amputated limbs, human bones—is for sale; nothing cannot become part of a transaction in the hive of commerce that the age has become. Each time Jeremiah Cruncher serves Jarvis Lorry or steals forth late at night for another resurrection, the mud of violated graves falls upon the polished floors of the great house of Tellson and Company.
And because Dickens can find the smile on the corpse in the Morgue, he can find the great comedic terror in the child’s nightmare—he is our poet of the inanimate come alive, of the terror visited on children—as Jerry Junior fancies himself pursued by the coffin at which he has spied his father working: “It hid in doorways too, rubbing its horrible shoulders against doors, and drawing them up to its ears, as if it were laughing. It got into shadows on the road, and lay cunningly on its back to trip him up. All this time it was incessantly hopping on behind and gaining on him, so that when the boy got to his own door he had reason for being half dead.”
Although Dickens writes in his Preface that his novel has “had complete possession of me” and that “what is done and suffered in these pages . . . I have certainly done and suffered it all myself,” he is also able to write in his memorable first sentence that the times, and his times, were not only the worst but the best, not only the season of darkness, but also the season of light. He, like so many other Victorians, thought it a duty to fight despair.