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.

I wager, though, that we will remember the darkness more fondly. Great writers do not keep the darkness out. They require of us as we experience their art that we invite the darkness in. Despite the stilted nobility of the novel’s ending, as Dickens rows his musical prose toward the light, his sorrowing genius cannot help but assert itself. If we question the inhuman beauty and patience of Lucie, we can relish the sardonic bleakness of Carton, his brilliance during Darnay’s trial, his courage throughout. We can appreciate the power of nightmare, whatever its political bias, as Dickens streaks his pages with the revolution’s blood. And we can laugh with him—he cannot help finding the monstrous or wonderful or ludicrous within the everyday—as Jeremiah and Jerry Junior engage in their own grotesque version of resurrection.

In fact, I think it likely that a serious hope for resurrection, or spiritual revival, for change, may lie behind the writing of A Tale of Two Cities. I think it possible that, several years earlier, Dickens’ despair about such transformation may have been signaled when he resorted to the false—the acted—heroic self-sacrifice to which he could not resist being attracted: when he makes believe in Wilkie Collins’ play, before an audience including the woman he would have given his life to possess, on a stage in his house, that he dies in order that others might live.

His character Carton, as he goes to his death, sees Lucie’s infant, “that child who lay upon her bosom and bore my name,” grow up to become “a man winning his way up in that path of life that once was mine.” As the author of A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens sought a way to be released from the prison of self, to be reborn as a happy child, destined for a happy manhood he might, outside his novel’s pages, never quite believe he had achieved.

—Frederick Busch

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The text of this volume is taken from the “Charles Dickens” Edition of 1868-1870, which Dickens himself revised for the press, striking out or altering occasional words and making other minor changes. A few obvious errors that escaped his eye have been corrected.

Dickens originally published the novel in weekly installments in All the Year Round from April 30 to November 26, 1859, and cannily made an extra profit by also bringing it out from June through December in monthly numbers bound in his customary green paper covers. In this Signet Classics edition the end of a weekly installment is indicated by a row of asterisks, the end of a monthly installment, by a ruled line.

PREFACE TO

THE FIRST EDITION

WHEN I was acting, with my children and friends, in Mr. Wilkie Collins’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 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.