Dickens' Tale of Two Cities is renowned most for its beginning dichotomy ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"). Fortuitously enough, a similar device can be used to evaluate Dickens' manner of prose.
Indeed, it is the best of forms; it is the worst of forms.
Beneficially, his sentences are layered dissections of his subject. Foreign to the present Twitter generation that demands its literary material (and everything else) condensed and microwaveable, the bard of the Victorian Age slow-roasts his prose, dedicating time and ink to every nuance of the matter at hand. Take for example his description of the French peasantry at the time of the Revolution's outbreak, ground into misery and want by the aristocracy. Dickens portrays these poor masses as a
people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill… The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off… (Two Cities, 64, NOOKbook)
Dickens goes for sentences, paragraphs and pages more on the same train. The peasants of France were poor and miserable and he does not move on from this point until he has described each and every detail that makes it so.
This advantageously illuminates his subject for the reader in its complete totality while also penetrating it with a microscopic lens, revealing to them every nook and nuance therein. He does everything for the reader. The flow and course of events of the plot are given a firm foundation because he takes the time to illuminate the salient details that cause them. In Two Cities nothing can explain the extremely arbitrary and wanton brutality of the Revolution as well as the meticulous portrait Dickens paints of the equally extreme hunger, oppression and misery that precursors it.
Indeed, Dickens portrays the victims of revolutionary-French society in terms equally as pathetic as he portrays those of pre-revolutionary society. Witness his tragic description of the prisoners of La Force and the contrast between their present (low) and past (high) state:
So strangely clouded were these refinements by the prison manners and gloom, so spectral did they become in the inappropriate squalor and misery through which they were seen, that Charles Darnay seemed to stand in a company of the dead. Ghosts all! the ghost of beauty, the ghost of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed by the death they had died in coming there. (282)
The mill that had ground the French peasantry into squalor and death had been given new grist, achieving the same result. Extreme circumstances bred extreme circumstances; Dickens masterfully depicts both.
There is a Paris to this London though. In dedicating such copious amounts of prose to totality and dissection, Dickens commits the occasional folly of dedicating copious amounts of prose to minimal expanses of plot. For this I have in mind the third chapter of Book the First in which Dickens digresses into philosophical ruminations about the secrets and mystery that each human life represents to each other. After this he moves on to the Tellson's messenger and his journey after he delivers his message to Mr. Lorry – the relation between the two being that since each human life is a mystery to each other "the messenger on horseback had exactly the same possessions as the King, the first Minister of State, or the richest merchant in London" (47).
This is all well and good but non- germane to the plot of Two Cities. To travel so deeply down this dead-end, and away from the central flow of Dickens' scintillating plot, is as frustrating as it would have been had Shakespeare followed the soothsayer after Caesar's boast that "The Ides of March are come" (Act 3, Scene 1) and not followed Caesar himself, directly documenting the fate that awaited him.
At the very least such lateral movement is ungenerous to all but the most patient, devoted reader who is willing to indulge Dickens' in his reflective flights of fancy.
If he is to be credited for doing everything for his reader, as he must be, Dickens must also then be debited for perhaps doing too much.
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