This volume includes two books I counted toward the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge—A Tale of Two Cities for the Set Somewhere You’d Like To Visit (a two-fer in two places, London and Paris, and a two-fer in it’s also a Classic or a Retelling) and A Christmas Carol which fit into the Classic or a Retelling (and, I guess, a two-fer since it’s set in London). I didn’t get to finish the book until after completing “The Chimes” after I completed the Winter Reading Challenge. So it counted as two books for the Winter Reading Challenge, but only one book in my annual tally. The rules are the rules, no matter how arbitrary.
Because I might go on a bit at length here, I’m going to tuck this book report under the fold.
A Tale of Two Cities
You know, I read this for Honors English I my freshman year of high school, and I remember I had to borrow the Cliff Notes for the book from the library to understand what was going on. I thought that perhaps returning to it as an adult would be easier, but, no, I can see why I was lost. I mean, I remember the first line (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”) and the last line (“It’s a far, far greater thing that I do that I’ve ever done….”) and a couple character names. But most of what happened in the book? No memory.
This is one of Dickens’ later works, and it appeared serially in his own magazine, so he probably did not have an editor to rein him in, which means that this is Dickens at the worst of his excesses. And it kind of explains both why I needed the Cliff Notes and why I didn’t remember anything: Because not much happens in most of the chapters, and it skips ahead years or decades between chapters or books.
I mean, for example: The first chapter is the prologue setting the stage. The second chapter is a lavishly described single incident: A rider catches up with a coach at night and delivers a single line message. The next chapter is a lavishly described single incident, I think: The description of a public house in a seaside town. We get a long ways and many long paragraphs in before we get the meeting of the girl (Lucie) and the shoemaker (her father)–weep for it, weep for it! We’ve got only tangentally related chapters about how the French nobility take their chocolate, seemingly random chapters of people renouncing their heritage (Charles Darnay), scenes in the court where Darnay is being tried as a spy, years passing, and….
Well, Cliff Notes: A French doctor is released from the Bastille, and an English attorney and the doctor’s daughter come to gather him up. Charles Darnay, a French heir, gives up his heritage and goes to England to make it on his own. Many years pass, and the French revolution is touched off, and a wine shop owner and his wife (the deFarges or the deBarges, whichever were not a light R&B/pop act) are local leaders of it. The revolutionaries burn the chateau of Darnay’s family, which is amazing because it had been precipitating all day before the conflagration. Although he is safe in England, Darnay returns to France when one of his employees is in trouble, only to be captured and sentenced to death. I don’t want to ruin it for you, but slow-moving melodrama occurs, and then the last line which everyone remembers. Well, old people do.
But, holy cats, the story is buried under a blizzard of descriptive prose.
My mother-in-law is a former English teacher who taught this book many times to high school students, so I let her know I was going to re-read it, and then I let her have my litany of complaints, including that the characters are ciphers. We don’t get much in terms of background of any of them, not much interior life, and not much in terms of development even though almost, what, twenty years pass from beginning to end? Sidney Carton is dissolute and alcoholic; Dr. Manette is honorable and upstanding; Lucie is a dutiful daughter and loving wife; Charles Darnay is really noble and is determined to make it on her own; the DeFarges are evil. That’s about it. We get a couple acts to show this, but mostly it’s told to us. Only Carton gets a chapter of wandering around, thinking, but it’s very in-the-moment. Madame DeFarge gets a bit of back story, and she’s really the only one who does (and, to be honest, it makes her the realist and maybe most sympathetic character in some readings).
I told her that about two-thirds of the way through the book a Charles Dickens novel emerged. It’s true: About the time Darnay returns to England, the story flips over to actual narrative, action, and flashbacks to tell the story with less description (although at one point almost two years pass between chapters, and nothing has changed amongst the characters).
It’s an awful novel to introduce students to Dickens. I mean, why not Great Expectations or The Adventures of Oliver Twist which feature narratives that start at the beginning and whose “Orphan Makes Good” stories are basically the plot of old-timey Disney movies? Or A Christmas Carol which is a familiar story and is much shorter? Whose idea was it to make students slog through this book? Howard Zinn?
So I did come up with some defenses of Dicken’s extreme wordiness and overly lavish descriptions to start:
- This is a historical novel, set not quite a century before the book came out. So maybe he was describing how different things were in the old days compared to the modern day of the 1850s. But to a modern reader, the difference between 1770 and 1850 are much smaller than they would have been then.
- As modern readers, we already have descriptive shorthand for various things from visual media like movies and television. So an author can say “An old bookstore,” and I’ll already have a wireframe, er, framework for the scene, and the author can just then add small flourishes to it. Whereas a reader in the 1850s would not already have seen that. Maybe even moreso for rural readers who had not been to London or Paris or the French countryside.
- In the early parts of the book, Dickens uses a lot of repetition (such as when Lucie first meets her father, and delivers a speech that repeats “Weep for it, weep for it!”). I suppose this could be for being read aloud, but reading silently…. eh.
- The characters don’t talk conversationally: They deliver speeches to one another. Okay, I have no defense for it, but maybe Dickens just got the speeches into his head and had to get them out.
So I, someone who claims to like Dickens, did not like this book. This will likely be my final re-reading of this book, unless of course I find another copy of it on my to-read shelves in a couple of decades and think It couldn’t have been that bad.
A Christmas Carol
I know, I know. You’re saying, Repeats already, Brian J.? as I just read this book (and “The Chimes”) in 2008. Ah, but gentle reader, it was in this volume and it satisfied a category in the Winter Reading Challenge, so you get a report on it again.
However, given that I read it pretty soon after A Tale of Two Cities, you get an abbreviated Contrast paper on it.
For starters: The story starts with a playful, joking narrator instead of a pompous “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” chapter of pontification. take a look–the second paragraph is a joke:
Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
You get description, of course–I could almost draw Scrooge’s quarters on a map for a D&D campaign–but it does not slow down or impede the narrative.
And Dickens only goes into the lavish paragraphs-of-description mode in one instance where he’s describing a grocery store. But maybe his rural readers, again, were unfamiliar with what a London grocer looked like, so it’s justified.
At any rate, I enjoyed it a bunch more than A Tale of Two Cities and might well read it again sometime. Maybe to my grandchildren since my attempt to read it to my children and with my family at Christmas time one year many years ago did not make it very far.
As a side note, I texted my mother-in-law when I was reading this that I had the proper snack for the occasion:
A crust of brown bread. Pumpernickel, to be exact. I buy it for dill dipping, but I end up eating it plain. And as I tend to buy it marked down, day-old, this snack might have been too on point as when I sat down to read the next day, the loaf had mold on it. So I might have been eating a moldy crust of bread. Which is really an appropriate Dickens snack if there ever was one.
“The Chimes”
I didn’t mention this story much in the 2008 report:
The Chimes and The Battle of Life both offer stories, but the characters didn’t involve me as much. In the first, a runner, that is, a courier, envisions life without him or something.
As it was but one of a larger collection, but this story focuses on a porter/courier/runner, an old poor man who waits for jobs outside a large church with impressive bells (the titular chimes). He is slightly daft, and one evening, he thinks the chimes are calling him, so he goes to them and has a vision/dream/experience where his daughter grows up and old unhappy after he dies and after he refused to give his blessing to her union with a tradesman. But! He’s not alive, and he give his blessing in the end!
It’s basically a similar story to A Christmas Carol although it’s centered on New Year’s Day instead of Christmas. It features two speeches by a couple of serious men about what to do with the Poor, and their speechifying leads to the separation of the daughter and the tradesman in the alternate future. So it meditates heavily on the Poor and their Happiness, assuring us that they deserve a chance to be happy in their own way.
Not Dickens’ best, but it’s a faster read than A Tale of Two Cities anyway.
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