In a notebook he called “Memoranda,” Charles Dickens wrote story ideas, suggestions for titles, names he might use for characters in his books, and wisps of suggestion as delicate as cobwebs that, somehow, grew thicker and stronger until, years later, they resulted in his large, powerful novels. In 1855, he asks himself in his notebook, “How as to a story in two periods—with a lapse of time between, like a French Drama?” Below this question, he lists possible titles for such a work, and all twenty-two have to do with time. Four years later, when events and the machinations of his imagination dictate, he finally does write the book. But he joins ideas of time to ideas of space, giving the novel a geographical name, A Tale of Two Cities; Dickens illustrates how time can keep us apart as he attaches to chronological distances the mile upon mile of ocean and earth that can separate cities, nations, and the sad lovers within them.

A few pages later in the memorandum book, he writes an entry about “The man who is incapable of his own happiness. One who is always in pursuit of happiness.” And, later, he enters this enigmatic notation: “WE, fettered together.” It seems entirely possible that he refers here to his long, fecund, and increasingly unhappy marriage to Catherine, who bore ten children (nine who lived) and who grew stout and unglamorous at a time when her husband hungered for quite the opposite. As to the note about unhappiness, Dickens, who could always be extremely sensitive to his own interior needs while attending to those of his characters and his audience, often commented about what we might now call his depressed state. As he wrote to his friend Mary Boyle concerning his dark moments, “I seem to always be looking at such times for something I have not found in life.”

If we combine marital misery, a wretched searching for something nameless, elusive, but essential, and the idea of lovers separated by great gulfs of time and space, we have almost arrived at the critical mass of elements that resulted in the dark, brilliant Tale of Two Cities. We are in 1857 as Dickens in his sour marriage returns from France, where he’s been writing Little Dorrit, and, back in London, hurls himself into the second vast section of that novel as well as the preparations for a public performance, in the converted schoolroom of his London house, of the play The Frozen Deep, written by his friend Wilkie Collins.

Dickens loved to perform publicly, whether in plays or readings of his works, for he could watch his audience react to his language and personality. He hungered for such reaction, and in the case of The Frozen Deep even more seems to have been at stake. He was to play Richard Wardour, who loves a woman with a profound passion yet who will sacrifice his life to save the life of the man who is his rival for her affection. The part seems to have conformed with his sense of, or wish for, heroism. And among the professional actresses with whom Dickens and his friends joined in presenting the play, there was a handsome, shy, intelligent eighteen-year-old with golden hair. Her name was Ellen Ternan, and the forty-five-year-old Dickens was to love her desperately until the end of his life. After the despairing passions of the performance, Dickens and Collins repaired to the resort city of Brighton for a rest, where an actor read aloud to them a play called The Dead Heart, described by Peter Ackroyd, Dickens’ most recent biographer, as “a tale of self-sacrifice at the time of the French Revolution which leads to a substitution at the foot of the guillotine, strangely corresponding with the self-sacrifices of Richard Wardour.”

Now, in 1859, two years after he has heard The Dead Heart, and after his performance in The Frozen Deep, after he has met Ellen Ternan and has, under scandalous circumstances, separated from his wife, after the notebook entries about separations by time, during his restless forties, in the grips of his powerful hungers for the nameless element missing from his life, Charles Dickens breaks with his former publishers, terminates the magazine Household Words, which he edited, and begins a new journal, All the Year Round, for boosting the sales of which, his businessman’s instincts tell him, he must have a new serialized novel.

He again reads Thomas Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution, as well as other histories suggested by Carlyle. And then, between April and November, in weekly parts, there appears in his journal A Tale of Two Cities, which is a tale of one man driven by a dour restlessness, and which is also the story of another man buried in time. Shining like the sun for both of them is a golden-haired woman, Lucie Manette, daughterly and good and, to Sydney Carton, unattainable, and absolutely worthy of the sacrifice of his life. Dickens is some of each man, and Ellen Ternan, I think, is much of Lucie Manette.

They are also fictive creatures, separate from their creator, and they are characters in one of his darkest novels. While he champions the French peasantry and despises the French ruling class for its oppressions, he also fears revolution, as he showed in Barnaby Rudge (1841) and as he showed in Hard Times (1854), where even the threat of labor action by working-class characters to whose cause he wished to be loyal dismayed him. And therefore A Tale of Two Cities is memorable for its nightmare scenes of bloody revolution, and the downtrodden in revolt become, to Dickens, downright revolting; he turns them into effigies wearing false moustaches and false eyebrows, their faces “all bloody and sweaty, and all awry with howling, and all staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of sleep . . . and what with dropping wine, and what with the stream of sparks struck out of the [sharpening] stone, all their wicked atmosphere seemed gore and fire.” They have turned Paris into hell, Dickens tells us, forgetting for the moment the hell he showed us that had been created by the nobility.

Madame Defarge is not only a revolutionary and the cunning keeper of underground resistance secrets: she is Lady Macbeth, according to the dark vision of this novel; she is everything bloody and dangerous, and she is contrasted to the angelic, endangered Lucie Manette. Madame Defarge is the soul of this revolution. She is a French Victory, which is represented, always, as a woman; but she is not merely the emblematic, heroic national spirit one sees in, for example, Victory Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix. Dickens describes her this way: “Lying hidden in her bosom was a loaded pistol. Lying hidden at her waist was a sharpened dagger.” She walks “with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown sea-sand.” Dickens suggests a near nakedness, though she is clothed, and he locates threatening weapons at her breasts and her belly so that her very sexuality is threatening. This, he says, is how nature is overturned by revolution: nurturance and fertility are, now, about wounding and death. Sex is part of the general terror.

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.