On 15th March 2013, we will be launching an exciting new reading and blogging project, following Wilkie Collins’s sensational 1862-63 novel No Name week-by-week in the pages of All the Year Round, as the original readers would have done.
You can access the weekly parts, via Dickens Journals Online, here
We do hope you’ll be able to join us!
Apologies for posting this so late in the day. Events in life are occasionally as contorted as in the story.
It has been a long journey. Hung up my coat, cleaned off my boots and indulged in a tall, china mug of tea. All that is left is sit by the fire and contemplate where I have been and why.
The why is easy, besides having done a bit of work for DJO it had been more than sixty odd years since I had last travelled the mud covered roads from London to Paris and back again. And what an exciting road it was, sitting at a long polished oak table in the Co-op library above the Co-op grocer or trudging the roads of North Durham.
I don’t suppose a year has passed since then when I haven’t heard someone quote both opening and closing lines from the Tale so reading the whole story again in its original serial form was a challenge I could not resist.
The journey itself was not quite how I had imagined it. Riding the mail down to Dover was as disconcerting as it had been, with the sight of Jerry muffled up in thick woollen scarf and riding cape (not the cringing wimp in the Phiz illustration, more of a Robert Newton on a bad day in Hatter’s Castle) making my heart stop as he appeared out of the fog and the mad dreams punctuated by ruts in the road giving me nightmares when I fell asleep.
Guts turning over at the wine shop scene, sadness and anger as an old man made shoes. Edge of the seat when young Jerry was chased by coffins (I avoided walking through the cemetery for two weeks after that, even though it added a long walk around the village to get to school) Some lovey-dovey stuff then the thrill of the Bastille. As for the rest; a determined French woman crying vengeance, a kangaroo court, prison, escape and Carton. He was a hero at a time when there had been lots of heroes in the war like the young DLI rifleman who, despite having parts of him missing, carried on firing a two pound gun so that his mates could make a safe retreat.
The closing lines have always struck me as something of an epitaph for those who had made such a sacrifice.
Getting back to the subject, the book I have just read is not the same book I read sitting on a hard wooden chair. Nothing in the words has changed, nothing in the writing has changed but the meaning has changed radically. Over the first fifteen weeks I was content to renew acquaintance with half forgotten characters such as Miss Pross, the Vengeance, Jerry and more, whose names, and sometimes roles, had long slipped through the sieve of my memory. The discipline of ‘not knowing‘ what came next in the story was frustrating at times but provided the same opportunity for discussion and reflection on ‘the story so far’ as its Victorian readers had and digging into more detail than a straight reading would allow for. There were times however when blogs and comments tended to indulge in the mediaeval ecclesiastic sport of counting how many angels were dancing on the head of a pin and I was happy to take part in the game. However at week sixteen I sensed that something was not quite as it should have been and by week twenty I had so many nits chewing at me that I knew that I was not on the same wavelength as others and I didn’t know why.
A more leisurely re-reading of the parts that had left queries in my head lead me to the first of several breadcrumb trails Dickens had left inside the story.
It is this point I should confess, I did not read from the DJO site but from the Penguin 1994 edition which is conveniently divided up in sections as per the weekly instalments. Reading from the transcription is awkward for me as with the short lines I find myself reading in a cross between blank verse and a nursery rhyme. This time I checked the facsimile pages which don’t bother me so much.
Had I been using the transcript, I may have picked up on this earlier because someone else somewhere in the past had queried two sentences. These are on page four of the facsimile. When reading from the transcription the first column of the facsimile is visible and one line has been marked in pencil. When the page is expanded to full size immediately beside the marked section, which records Jerry’s thoughts as he watches the mail get underway, there is another mention, almost a repetition, of what he is thinking as he rides back to the bank.
Whether the pencil marks were made by some student following through the original text, God forbid, or possibly by the first owner of the volume also queried it, I would like to think so, doesn’t really matter. What is important is that it brought me up short and I knew I had walked into one of those sleights of literary magic Dickens throws out in his stories, misdirecting attention from what is actually going on to something different
When I first read these I dismissed them as being the thoughts of a working man wondering what would happen to him, and his wages, if indeed the dead were recalled to life and the labour market became over saturated. As it is these are the beginnings of the line of crumbs leading through Mrs Crunchers head being banged on a wall, Jerry sucking rust from his fingers and Mr Lorry’s comment about graves to the “The Honest Tradesman” where his Resurrection business is revealed
From there I have followed several breadcrumb trails which have changed the whole story for me.
Where once Lucie was a boring, weepy girl I see her know as a strong character directing and supporting three strange men to the extent of spending hours a day for more than a year standing outside a prison wall to bring comfort to the man she loves. If Leander could swim the Hellespont and Penelope unpick her tapestry why is Lucie waiting outside La Force a silly idea?
Mr Lorry is no longer a genial old buffer who bounces around the story. He is a man of secrets who once fell in love with a woman he could never marry but found happiness as an adopted member of her daughter’s family.
As for Carton he is nothing like the DLI Rifleman. A talented man who can’t cope with his own history and wastes himself in drink and self pity and eventually finds a way to commit suicide without carrying the stigma of what was then a crime.
Those famous last words belong to Dickens, not Carton, as he ruminates on the recent events in his life.
Whilst most of the writing is fine I now find the story is trite and not the old adventure I loved. My copy will go back on its shelf and I don’t think I will be tempted to read it again.
As our blogging journey comes to an end, we would just like to thank all of you who have read, commented and bloggged with us since April. It has been a wonderful and fascinating experience and I think we have all learnt something new about Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and All the Year Round.
This seems like the perfect moment for you to share your feedback with us, so please use the comments below to let us know your experiences — good, bad and otherwise! Also, if you haven’t already then please do take a moment to complete our users’ survey. There are only 10 questions and it will only take 5-10 minutes. We have had such fascinating and useful responses so far:
A Tale of Two Cities Blog User’ Survey
Those of you familiar with Household Words and All the Year Round will know that the last page often featured small adverts for new novel serialisations. So, in that spirit…
COMMENCING IN THE NEW YEAR
A NEW WEEK-BY WEEK BLOG!
FEATURING A ‘SENSATIONAL’ VICTORIAN NOVELIST
Available from all good internet providers
If you would like to be kept up-to-date with details of the new blog then please either check back here in the New Year, or send us your email (djo@buckingham.ac.uk) and we will contact you.
Now that the dust has settled and we can look upon the novel as a whole, it occurs to me that we’ve just had three weeks of ATOTC where Lucie barely figures – when she does, it is largely through the report of others, she has only two lines of dialogue in the last three instalments. This is quite troubling given that early on we were identifying her as the heroine of the piece given the consistency of her presence in most of the instalments.
The lack of her presence come the end of the story (or reduced presence perhaps, is fairer to say), does hint at greater concerns about the character,who is hugely significant to the plot, but doesn’t actively instigate much action herself. She does two great deeds – going to France to save her father, and then going to France again to save her husband (although, in the end, she doesn’t do that much to save him). The rest of the time her significance as a plot device is in inspiring action and emotion in others – her presence itself is the greatest factor in her father’s recovery she also is the subject of three proposals, and it is for her that Carton lays down his life – if he’d not met her, if Darnay had married someone else, then we’d be looking at a different fate for Charles I fancy. I’m not suggesting Lucie deliberately and maliciously kept in touch with Carton just so she could use him one day to save Darnay – that would be crazy – but her influence has a lot to answer for both as a positive and negative force.
We’ve talked about contrasting her with Madame Defarge, so consider the significance of this pairing. Madame actively goes out and facilitates change, consciously inspiring others to terrible deeds and deliberately setting out her machinations to entrap the Manettes and Darnay - Lucie, as the flipside to this, is arguably no less a dangerous character, albeit one who acts without awareness of the impact she is having on others around her. That her personality is benevolent does not detract from the chaos in her wake. I don’t think Dickens intended this, but just as Ben was talking about the subsequent use of Carton as an inspiration for men to seek noble deaths, so too in creating a character so lovely and loved, Dickens has created an unintentional monster of sorts, a nineteenth-century Helen of Troy.
A Tale of Two Cities has been adapted many times and in many different formats. Here are a few of the cinematic and televisual representations of Sidney’s last moments.
To start with, some fantastic footage from a silent American adaptation of 1911:
Please do let us know about your experience of the blog and of reading A Tale of Two Cities week-by-week. Even if you have only just discovered this blog, or you have only been dipping in and out, or you have been reading but not posting, we want to hear from you! Any and all feedback will be incredibly useful. The survey only consists of 10 questions and will take less than 10 minutes to complete:
Click here to take our A Tale of Two Cities Users’ Survey
If you have any further comments or feedback about any aspect of the project, then please do email us: djo@buckingham.ac.uk.
Also, please email us your contact details so we can keep you updated about our new blog… Watch this space!
. . . gulp . . . What a pay off for thirty one weeks of loyalty. If the journey has ever felt long or weary, now we are well rewarded for our efforts. I’m very aware of writing into the poignant hush left by what are surely some of the finest last words on record.
I’m not sure what to make of the fact that this marvelous closing speech is, itself, an unrealised phantom, what might have been heard of the thoughts inspiring Carton ‘if he had given any utterance to his, and they were prophetic’. That conditioning ‘if’ looms large for me, though I think Dickens wants us to see what follows as an accurate prophecy. Predictive of a post-novel future or not, these imagined last words give a fascinating psychological portrait. The aspects I’m most drawn to are the confirmation that Carton’s sacrifice has been for the whole family – “the lives for which I lay down my life” – and that it allows him to become/imagine himself as the emotional centre of the family structures of marriage and parenting. I love the image of a triadic eternal marriage of souls: ‘I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other’s soul, than I was in the souls of both’. Young Sydney Darnay embodies this three-part heritage, carrying forward his fathers’ names and his mother’s forehead. The potential rivalry of Carton and Darnay as fathers as well as husbands, which Pete mentioned last week, is here wonderfully resolved into a harmonious family of choice. Of course I can’t quite celebrate it in the way I would had Sydney been saved from the guillotine to live happily, as Mr Lorry does, as a beloved bachelor friend to the family. . .
Though Sydney does not voice this speech, it works as a powerful piece of oratory. I’m imagining all the renditions of it in households on this equivalent week 153 years ago. And since then it has been invoked in situations of national and personal emergency – at Batman’s grave, for example, or, more profoundly, during the Boer War as performed by Baden Powell to give heart to the troops during the siege of Mafeking. Joss Marsh has done some fascinating work on the popularity of the play adaptation of the novel, ‘The Only Way’ with First World War troops. At times when mass violence threatens to become overwhelming Carton’s sacrifice has offered spiritual solace, and the hope that every life has a valuable legacy for those it has touched.
‘All flashes away. Twenty-Three.’
So far I’ve shared the illustrations by Phiz that accompanied the first six monthly instalment that appeared alongside the weekly parts. With the story finishing next week (just three days to go!), the end advertisement is not for the seventh monthly part, but instead for the complete volume, with 16 illustrations by Phiz. Here then, are the remaining drawings, courtesy as usual of Victorian Web. Rest assured there are no spoilers, I promise: in fact, what’s interesting is that there are no illustrations from the last three weeks; I can only assume this is the consequence of Dickens plowing ahead with his story while leaving everyone else, his poor illustrator included, trailing behind.
Anyway, the first picture is ‘The Double Recognition’, referring back (seems so long ago now) to Miss Pross’s discovery of her brother, back in the days when she was just a minor comic character instead of heroic vanquisher of she-devils.
Bearing in mind the illustrations recently provided by Ben, its interesting to see how decidedly unstout Miss Pross appears. Otherwise it’s a well-depicted illustration, Barsad’s back to us maintaining the intrigue and allowing for our focus to rest upon the reactions of Pross and Cruncher, while still recognising the importance of the figure they are looking at by his position in centre frame.
The next picture is ‘After the Sentence’ which shows Manette in full melodramatic pose:
I really like this one – if it weren’t so close to the end of the story I would vote for this one as a cover picture. Lucie is the stereotypical sacrificial virgin in white, Carton looks suitable dishevelled and manly while holding her (and simultaneously almost like a haunting devil come vampire – that’s a very exposed neck Lucie has there…), while down in the left-hand corner among the nonchalant French there is one in particular who, leaning against the pillar, recalls that earlier illustration of Carton way, way back in ‘Congratulations’ (month two). So what Phiz is doing here, I would humbly suggest, is showing the progress of Carton from disengaged rake on stage left to passionate hero on centre stage. Looking at this I’m dumbfounded how people can write off Phiz’s contributions to this story.
Though that’s not the last illustration Phiz draws for ATOTC, it is the last one taken chronologically from the plot: there is nothing depicting any of the later events. There is, however, one final drawing included and that is the frontispiece for the whole novel – and the image he chooses to sum up the story – Phiz’s last comment on A Tale of Two Cities? Why it’s Doctor Manette of course, ‘In the Bastille’:
As we reach the end of our blog journey (break out the hankies!), we are very keen to hear from our readers and bloggers about their experiences of reading A Tale of Two Cities week-by-week and of reading and/or contributing to the blog. Even if you have only just discovered this blog, or you have only been dipping in and out, or you have been reading but not posting, we want to hear from you! Any and all feedback will be incredibly useful.
Click here to take our A Tale of Two Cities Users’ Survey
If you have any further comments or feedback about any aspect of the project, then please do email us: djo@buckingham.ac.uk.
Also, discussions are afoot to blog a different novel in 2013. Let us know your thoughts and watch this space…
I Google-d Madame Defarge (I’m such an exemplary scholar) and came across this great image by Fred Barnard, whose TOTC images we have looked at before. I’m intrigued that MD and Miss Pross look so similar – and that MD looks rather less beautiful and glamorous than Dickens portrays her!
