A Psychological Reading of A Tale of Two Cities

The originating wound is a man already removed from his own name. Above the wine shop, Alexandre Manette knows himself as One Hundred and Five, North Tower. Eighteen years in the Bastille have left the hands more reliable than the face. He makes shoes, because a mind that cannot inhabit its memory still needs a task. When Jarvis Lorry tries to wake him, recognition flickers and goes. The message that stopped the Dover mail said Recalled to Life. Recall is not return. A life can be fetched and still not be the person who was taken.

Lucie is the thread that makes a return imaginable. Her hair matches the strands he kept from his wife, and the resemblance cracks the wall without finishing the job. He can be a father in London and still fall, on the morning she marries, back onto the bench. The trigger is a private talk with Charles Darnay. The wedding proceeds. Once Lucie has gone, the shoemaker returns for nine days, and on the tenth morning the doctor is reading at the window with no memory of the work. Lorry speaks of the case as if it belonged to a friend. Then he and Miss Pross destroy the bench while the patient is away. Love here confiscates the object that once kept a man sane. The defence is not gone. It has been taken, which is why Paris can call it back.

Before any private wound can be read as only private, the street writes the other half. A cask breaks in Saint Antoine and people kneel to drink from the gutter. A finger dipped in the lees scrawls BLOOD on a wall. That is what a hungry quarter does with a spill when the spill is the only plenty on offer. Dickens is naming a mind treated as scenery until it answers in the only ink it has.

The Marquis makes the same transaction with one body. His coach kills a child. He tosses gold, as if a dead child were a bill, and a coin is flung back into the carriage. A woman knitting looks him in the face. Other people's grief, on this accounting, is a cost of motion. The murder in his bed is the street's reply, and the book does not stop at an eye for an eye. The coin fails because the injury was never a purchase. It was a statement that some lives do not count. Once that statement is loose in a city, whoever next holds the list will repeat it.

Madame Defarge is a memory with a method. She knits names, so the grievance does not depend on a mood, a court, or a husband who might soften. In the wine shop, with Sydney Carton listening, she says who she is. The peasant family in the Bastille paper is hers. That sister of the boy on the ground was her sister. That husband was her sister's husband. The unborn child was theirs. The brother was her brother. Those dead are her dead, and the summons descends to her. A harm done in a locked room appoints an heir.

Mercy therefore looks like sabotage. When her husband hesitates over the doctor, she treats the hesitation as a threat to the work. The wife and child of an Evrémonde are not spared by innocence. They are the line the curse named. A register that continues past the man who did the harm cannot stop at a child without ceasing to be itself. Justice would ask which body did which act. The summons she inherited asks only whether the name still has a face.

Sydney Carton has organised a self around waste, and the waste is a defence. At night he arrives drunk at Stryver's chambers, wraps wet towels on his head, and does the briefs. Stryver is the lion. Carton is the jackal. He has been doing other people's work since school. To want a name or a morning of his own would be to admit that the arrangement was a choice.

He tells Lucie she has been the last dream of his soul, and in the same breath that it is too late: he shall never be better than he is; he shall sink lower, and be worse. She argues for a future. He will not take it. Then he gives her the sentence the book will spend. For her, and for any dear to her, he would do anything. He already pictures the child who will look up at her. The promise is not a conversion. It is the only door he will allow himself. He can spend a life. He will not inhabit one. Love, on these terms, wants the house standing more than it wants him inside it.

Charles Darnay is the life Carton will not live, walking around in a similar face. At the Old Bailey he is tried for treason. Carton tosses a paper across, and Stryver makes the witness look from one man to the other. Allowing for a slovenly appearance, they are like enough to surprise the court. A witness who cannot be sure of a face cannot be sure of a traitor. Afterwards Carton tells Darnay he is a disappointed drudge: he cares for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for him. The line is armour, and it describes the life he has arranged. The double is not a trick saved for the last chapter. One face can stand for another, and the man who sees it first hates the proof.

Darnay's pressure runs the other way. He has refused the Evrémonde title and tutors in England. Refusal does not cancel a name a city still knows how to call. A letter from Gabelle, locked up for serving the house he left, pulls him back to Paris. He believed a private renunciation could retire a public inheritance. The evening paper at La Force will call him Charles Evrémonde, called Darnay. The life he chose is a parenthesis. The name he refused is the one that answers.

The formal secret is a paper hidden where the man who wrote it can no longer reach it. In 1767 Manette writes in soot and blood and hides the sheets in the chimney of One Hundred and Five, North Tower. He says his reason is failing, and that it has not failed yet. The letter tells 1757. Two Evrémonde brothers force him to a peasant woman driven mad, repeating her husband, her father, and her brother, and to her brother dying of the wound he took for her. The boy marks them with his own blood. She dies within the week. Manette tries to report the crime. The brothers bury the witness. The letter curses the line. Years later the living doctor is useful in revolutionary Paris because of those wounds. The past that buys respect is still in the wall.

Defarge finds it when the Bastille falls. Read aloud, the doctor's own testimony condemns his daughter's husband. The acquittal purchased by the living man does not survive the buried man's curse. This is where the defence breaks. A self split between the window, the bench, and the chimney is forced into one room. He cannot unsay a document he wrote so that someone would believe him after his reason went. The crowd hears a name, not a son-in-law. Manette searches again for the bench Lorry destroyed. The tool is gone. The need is not. What the book withholds until the second trial is the fact the mind could not hold: recalling the life meant recalling the denunciation.

Fifty-two are told off for the carts. Darnay writes farewells and tries to make his courage useful to the people who will live after him. Carton drugs the wine, takes the coat, and sends the other face out of Paris unconscious. The warder will answer to Evrémonde. The city that could not tell the two men apart is now the instrument. Substitution is the likeness, used at last by the man who hated it.

A seamstress who thought she was riding with Citizen Evrémonde looks up and understands. Are you dying for him? And his wife and child. She asks to hold a stranger's hand. The crowd still wants to know which is he. The spy points out a supposed Evrémonde at the back of the third cart. She knows. They do not. A name can be paid by the wrong body, and one witness in the cart is granted the difference. Carton keeps her hand. The narration gives him the verse he has been repeating, I am the Resurrection and the Life, then the sentence he is allowed to finish: it is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. He sees Lucie's house standing. The knitting women are still counting.

The ending pays his refusal to inhabit a life, by letting him spend one. The parlour promise is kept in a coat, not in a speech. It does not close the register. Madame Defarge dies because her own pistol fires in the struggle with Miss Pross, who will not give up the door. The sister is stopped by force, not by a change of accounting. Miss Pross is left deaf. The household escapes. The summons is interrupted for one set of faces and left intact as a method. Dickens lets the last private sentence sound like peace. The city is still ploughing a furrow to the blade.

The anxiety the book keeps returning to is inheritance without consent. Darnay can renounce a title and still be called by it when a list is read. A spouse or a child becomes the available face of a harm done before they were in the room. Modern life has faster registers than a knitting needle: a name that travels, a category that outlives the act, a public that would rather know which is he than ask what he did. The crowd is a description of attention trained to sort faces into the already guilty and the not yet counted.

Beside that is the private stall the jackal makes familiar. A person can be brilliant at someone else's brief, and sincere in a love that asks only to be remembered, not received. Carton's bargain, anything except becoming someone who stays, is a recognisable modern pause. So is Manette's bench: the task that once held a shattered mind together, then becomes the door back into the shatter. The book shows the cost of calling a buried self back, and of finding that the city kept the papers.

Dickens wrote in 1859, out of Carlyle's history of the French Revolution and out of a fear that England could walk the same road if poverty stayed scenery. Recalled to Life is resurrection language before it is a clinical picture of dissociation. Carton's last verse is Christian typology as well as a psychology of substitution. A reading that stops at trauma, the double, and transmitted grievance can thin a religious ending into a case history, and can thin a political novel into a set of symptoms.

Madame Defarge's register has a cause the book itself documents: a sister assaulted, a brother killed, a family worked and starved, a witness buried for telling. To call her only a vengeance addict is to repeat the Marquis's coin in softer words, as if the original harm were a pretext and the knitting were the real disorder. The crowd at the tribunal is also a city that has been counted as surplus. Doubling Carton and Darnay is Dickens's device, useful and theatrical. Real faces are not that exchangeable, and the plot needs them to be. The seamstress sees the difference. The psychology of the book includes that she is almost the only one allowed to.

Hard Times is the nearest Dickens study of people filed as units until the filing answers. Gradgrind's children are vessels for Facts. The Marquis's child is a cost of a coach. Both books ask what a mind does after it has agreed that some lives are scenery. Great Expectations is the nearer study of a man living inside someone else's plot. Pip spends years as a gentleman paid for by a source he cannot bear to know. Carton spends years as the jackal of another man's reputation, then pays a name he does not own. Neither look gives the wasted years back. One of them is allowed to call the spending a rest.