Josephine McDonagh

Charles Dickens, A tale of two cities and the French Revolution

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors List of Abbreviations Introduction: A Tale of Two Cities in Context C.Jones, J.McDonagh & J.Mee The New Philosophy: The Substance and the Shadow in A Tale of Two Cities M.Philp The Redemptive Powers of Violence? Carlyle, Marx and Dickens G.Stedman Jones A Genealogy of Dr Manette K.Baker From the Old Bailey to Revolutionary France: The Trials of Charles Darnay S.Ledger Face Value in A Tale of Two Cities K.Elliot Counting on: A Tale of Two Cities J.Bowen Mimi and the Matinee Idol: Martin-Harvey, Sydney Carton, and the Staging of A Tale of Two Cities , 1860-1939 J.Marsh Sanguine Mirages, Cinematic Dreams: Things Seen and Things Imagined in the 1917 Fox Feature Film A Tale of Two Cities J.Buchanan with A.Newhouse Two Cities, Two Films C.Barr Afterword M.Wood Bibliography Index

On Settling and Being Unsettled: Legitimacy and Settlement around 1850

In Bleak House, Charles Dickens’ great anti-law novel of 1852–3, Esther Summerson, the heroine-narrator, inquires of the restless ‘ward of Chancery’, Richard Carstone, whether he feels ‘settled’ in his new profession of the law: ‘How do you mean, settled?’ returned Richard, with his gay laugh. ‘Settled in the law,’ said I.1

Introduction: A Tale of Two Cities in Context

On 15 October 1859 Charles Dickens wrote to his friend, the French actor Francois Regnier, giving advance warning of a parcel that he was sending him. It would contain ‘the Proof sheets of a story of mine that has been for some time in progress in my weekly journal, and that will be published in a complete Volume about the middle of November’. The ‘story’ was A Tale of Two Cities. ‘I want you to read it for two reasons’, wrote Dickens: First because I hope it is the best story I have written. Secondly, because it treats of a very memorable time in France; and I should very much like to know what you think of its being dramatized for a French theatre. If you should think it likely to be done, I should be glad to take some steps towards having it well done. The Story is an extraordinary success here, and I think the end of it is certain to make a still greater sensation. (Letters, IX, 132) By this time, Dickens was already the best known and most successful writer in Britain, the author of a dozen novels and an established literary celebrity, whose work had begun to achieve international renown. He had recently launched a series of public readings of his works — for the first time, for his own profit. These were beginning to consolidate his celebrity across Britain and Ireland and in America.1

Opium and the Imperial Imagination

The peculiar relationship between Romanticism and addiction has long been explored. Literary criticism’s treatment of drugs ranges from biographically-oriented studies which examine poems as the symptoms of addiction, to those that read addiction as the symptom of Romanticism.1 More recently historicist critics have argued that not only is addiction a defining interest of Romantic writing, but that literary criticism often repeats the structure of the Romantic aesthetic in which the subject is overwhelmed and transported by the compelling powers of the poem.2 To resist the seduction of the opiate — Art — addiction must be historicised, that is, restored to the culture it always effaces. This essay investigates the meanings of opium addiction in the 1830s and 1840s, that point of transition between the heady days of high Romanticism and high Victorianism. This period is of interest for it is also one of transition for opium itself; social historians locate here opium’s shift from its position as a relatively benign recreational drug to a social and physiological menace.3 Given opium’s significance as a defining element of the Romantic imagination, it is possible that its altered formation is somehow implicated in the new post-Romantic aesthetic.4 In the works of Thomas De Quincey, the notorious opium-eater, whose writings and addiction straddle Romantic and Victorian periods, we can determine shifts in the conception of the powers of opium; likewise we can trace the emergence of a new theory of representation that counters Romantic mourning for the lost object of desire with an assertiveness that wilfully substantiates absence through aggression.