What the Dickens?

While I think I will probably not be adding literary impressions to my collection anytime soon, A Tale of Two Cities, which I read this week, just begged for a resurrection of my naïve and simplistic analyses.

For one thing, Dickens has a terrible habit of sentence fragments:

“Rounding his mouth and both his eyes, as he stepped backward from the table, the waiter shifted his napkin from his right arm to his left, dropped into a comfortable attitude, and stood surveying the guest while he ate and drank, as from an observatory or watch-tower. According to the immemorial usage of waiters in all ages."

Even Microsoft Word would underline that with a squiggly green line. All he needed to do was end the first sentence after “attitude,” replace “and” with “he,” and attach the floating clause:

“Rounding his mouth and both his eyes, as he stepped backward from the table, the waiter shifted his napkin from his right arm to his left and dropped into a comfortable attitude. He stood surveying the guest while he ate and drank, as from an observatory or watch-tower, according to the immemorial usage of waiters in all ages.”

It’s clearer, less cumbersome to read, and grammatically correct. Everyone wins.

I appreciated the democratic Dickensian ideal of parenting. For instance, he denigrates the Parisian nobles for abandoning their children in favor of dinner parties. “Indeed, except for the mere act of bringing a troublesome child into this world—which does not go far towards the realisation of the name of mother—there was no such thing known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close, and brought them up, and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty.”

At other points, however, Dickens’ moralizing becomes unbearably overbearing. I might share many of the Victorians’ values, but I don’t like to have them pureed and spoon-fed to me. I can chew on solid ideas myself, thank you, and I’m not going to choke if I find a bone or two of contention. By the end, I was seriously resenting his coddling, paternalistic authorial voice.

The deprecating tone Dickens assumed, moreover, fostered little sympathy in me for the protagonists. His unconvincing characters make for merely memorable caricatures of real life. Dimensionless, they seem to require little more than one-word epithets to describe them. The angelic Lucie selflessly tends to her ailing father and steadfastly trusts in the good of humanity during the atrocities of the French Revolution. Her virtuous husband renounces his claim to nobility and risks his life to rescue a family servant. The villainous Madame Defarge shows no chink in her almost motiveless hatred, and meets a melodramatic end fit for her sins.

That scene, in fact, features a particularly trite climax. The faithful handmaiden Miss Pross defies Defarge in banal womanly hand-to-hand combat. “It was in vain for Madame Defarge to struggle and to strike; Miss Pross, with the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate, clasped her tight, and even lifted her from the floor in the struggle that they had.”

Dickens writes obliquely, constantly implying where he would have done better to outright state. His descriptions never seem to end, leaving the reader unsure of time, place, or point of view. Twentieth-century Baroness Orczy’s romp through the French Revolution, The Scarlet Pimpernel, swiftly and ably eliminated the need for a pretence of historicity. Dickens tries harder to accurately evoke this time, of which he also had no direct experience, but his sentimentality, more often than not, hamstrings his story, preventing it from rising above paltry sensationalism.

There is at least one moment, though, that manages to transcend the banal, and it comes at the best point it could: the end. The single character who undergoes significant internal development over the course of the story, the dissolute Sydney Carton, prepares to sacrifice himself for another at the foot of the guillotine. Looking back over his life, and forward to the life of the one he has saved, he realizes, “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.”