THE COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF "A TALE OF TWO CITIES"

Author(s): DEVIN GRIFFITHS

Source: ELH , FALL 2013, Vol. 80, No. 3 (FALL 2013), pp. 811-838
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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THE COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF A TALE OF TWO
CITIES

BY DEVIN GRIFFITHS

No nineteenth-century work, and perhaps no work in British litera

ture, has had its title so widely appropriated as A Tale of Two Citi
(1859)—echoed in more than a million titles, according to a recen
search.1 Iterations of Charles Dickens's title are a phenomenon in
themselves, ranging from the anonymous Crib and Fhj: A Tale of T
Terriers (1876) to the third-season premier of J. J. Abram's popul
television serial Lost (2006). Evidently, emulations are attractiv
they carry enough formulary echo to recall the original, without t
burden of specifying what connection will be made. Resonance trumps
relevance. And yet, before the title had established its popular legac
the appellation of the original novel must have seemed even more vagu
to readers. As a title, A Tale of Two Cities relied upon the traditio
of touchy Anglo-French comparativism that was endemic to Britis
discourse; by the second paragraph of the novel, the disclosure th
England and France are being compared suggests immediately th
the two cities are London and Paris. Visually, the métropoles wer
announced to a purchaser of the monthly part issue by Hablot K
Browne's elaborately illustrated wrapper, which pointedly juxtapos
among other elements from the novel, St. Paul's Cathedral in Lond
and Notre Dame in Paris—two icons that have no place in the actio
As Catherine Gallagher most pointedly reminds us, the announc
parallelism is only the overture of a novel obsessed with doublin
mirroring, and echoes.2 The logic of comparison unfolds througho
the contrapuntal opening paragraph of the novel, in lines that ar
themselves, perhaps as famous as the title. The novel uses contrast
establish an elaborate historiographie reflection:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of
wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was
the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of
Darkness . . . —in short, the period was so far like the present period,
that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for
good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.3

ELH 80 (2013) 811-838 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 8

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The single-sentence paragraph takes as its object not the comparison
between Paris and London, France and England—that comes in
the following passages—but historical perspective, embodied in the
superlative comparisons of the "noisiest authorities" of the period.
The alternating statements reach out to delimit, in their absolute
contradiction, the widest compass of opposed opinions—and take this
breadth of opinion as a criticism of historical perspective itself. As
John Kucich notes, "[T]he opening catalogue of extremes comments
more on the needs of the historical imagination . . . than on the actual
tenor of any particular age."4 The problem of historical understanding
is expressed through immoderate perspectives, which the narrator
offers as a gumbo of figurative and rhetorical languages. The direction
of Dickens's engagement is implied by the final evaluation. If these
authorities rely upon the "superlative degree of comparison only," the
narrator opens the possibility that less superlative degrees will tell
a more accurate history (a shift emphasized in the paragraphs that
follow, in which marked differences are coordinated with prominent
parallels—both kings have a "large jaw," but the face of one queen is
"plain," the other, "fair" [5]).
The logic of juxtapositional critique finds abundant expression in
A Tale of Two Cities. The chapters of the novel are divided closely
between scenes set in revolutionary France and contemporary England,
Paris and London. Widespread doublings of plot and character are a
notorious feature; besides the various substitutions of characters (the
apparent twins Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton open and close
the novel, Lucie Manette gets mistaken for her mother during her
first encounter with her father, Dr. Manette), Thérèse Defarge finds
her allegorical reflection in "La Vengeance," collaborates with a whole
series of "Jacques," and generally is contrasted with the novel's heroine,
Lucie. The mob scene at the spy's funeral in London is followed closely
by a riot in Paris, while Darnay's arraignment at Old Bailey finds its
complement much later in his hearings before the Tribunal of La
Force.5 In reading through the wide range of critical evaluations of
the novel, the one common interest seems to be the place of contrast
and comparison.6
I have a great deal to say about the sources of the novel's compara
tive strategies, but first I would like to emphasize that I mean to take
the historicist impulses of A Tale of Two Cities seriously. In doing
so, I join recent considerations of the novel that reassess the serious
revolutionary historicism of Dickens's work, aligning it with the histori
ography of his day.7 Recent studies of the novel have situated it in the

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universalist histories of the Scottish Enlightenment, identified it with
German idealist history after G. W. F. Hegel and Thomas Carlyle, and
described its response to the radical political theories of Thomas Paine
and William Godwin. But they have missed Dickens's more immediate
engagement with a historiographie project that emerged with particular
force, and with particularly far reaching consequences, at midcentury:
comparative history. In linking Dickens's novel to Carlyle's History of
the French Revolution (1837, rev. 1857) or to the political philosophy of
the revolutionary period itself, previous studies find abundant sanction
in Dickens's own statements regarding his immersion in both Carlyle
and the contemporary revolutionary accounts.8 At the same time, to
take explicit influences at face value is to overlook their fair market
value in the coinage of historical authority. Advertising his "popular
and picturesque" work in the preface to the first bound edition as a
complement to contemporary histories, particularly Carlyle's authori
tative study, Dickens offered his novel as a way to have history and
enjoy it, too (397). (Dickens's intentionally absurd boast that he'd read
Carlyle's 300,000-word History "500" times by age forty has been over
played.9 Back-of-the-bar-napkin calculations suggest this would take
Dickens a cool century if he spent one week a year reading Carlyle
sunup to sundown.) A second problem with tying Dickens's novel to
the theorists of the 1840s, much less the 1790s, is that these poles
dislocate the historiography of the novel from its moment of composi
tion and stand counter to a general recognition that the novel reflects
Dickens's anxiety over political ferment at the close of the 1850s.10 If
Dickens truly intended to think through the implications of the Sepoy
Rebellion of 1857 and the Orsini plot of 1858, why use Paine to do it?
I'm being tendentious—Richard Maxwell clearly summarizes the
abundant influence of Carlyle and a range of historical accounts on
Dickens's research for A Tale of Two Cities.11 But the point is much
larger than the novel. In asking what the influence of historiography
circa 1858 would look like, I point to a lacuna in our histories of the
nineteenth century. This essay argues that the historical imagination
projected by A Tale of Two Cities was profoundly modern in its commit
ment to a new comparative history, a method of historical inquiry that
replaced both the liberal progressive thesis of Whig history and the
stadial histories of the Scottish Enlightenment with a mixed under
standing of the differential and contingent forces of historical change,
as demonstrated through comparison across historical periods and
between national cultures. The 1850s in particular marked a crossover
point for this comparative historiography, as its particular development

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within comparative mythology, linguistics, and anatomy was extended
to embrace a comparative approach to historical inquiry in general. A
reassessment of the comparative historicism in A Tale of Two Cities
does more than substitute one context for another, because compara
tive history established a mode of inquiry that was central to both
evolutionary thinking and ethnography, central even to the concept
of culture itself as something larger than self-cultivation. To put this
differently, A Tale of Two Cities serves this essay as an occasion to
document midcentury comparative history as a mode of contextual
analysis that has become so fundamental to modern social inquiry
that its nineteenth-century formulation has gone largely unnoticed.
Though comparative history enjoyed a vogue among twentieth
century historians, I have yet to find a strictly historiographie account
that explores its nineteenth-century development.12 By contrast, both
modern anthropology and sociology have recognized the impact of the
comparative method on nineteenth-century ethnographic thinking,
though the close association between fin de siècle theories of cultural
evolution and comparativism has occluded the latter's pre-evolutionary
features.13 George Stockings magnificent Victorian Anthropology
is a particularly cogent exploration of this history. Stocking spends
considerable time detailing the theorizations of comparative philology,
mythology, and anatomy in the service of describing its influence on
nineteenth-century anthropology, but this precludes extended consider
ation of comparativism perse, much less comparative history.14 Hence,
in claiming that previous examinations of A Tale of Two Cities have
overlooked comparative histoiy, I charge them with missing something
that has not really been there, a mode of historical inquiry for which
we do not yet have a coherent account. This essay is a first step in
that direction.
The first portion of this article sketches the emergence of compara
tive history in the wake of the French Revolution, an event that
destabilized Enlightenment historiography by frustrating its claims
for pattern and development (particularly after 1848). The growing
prestige of comparative analysis in natural history and philological
inquiry gave it particular weight as a mode of interpretation that could
articulate differential trajectories and trace patterns where previous
narratives proved insufficient. By the 1850s, comparativism emerged
as a generalized mode of historical investigation with various specialist
domains, and it is at this point that "comparative history" became an
explicit formation. A Tale of Two Cities serves the second portion of
this article as a test case for the possibilities of the comparatist mode

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at midcentury. Dickens's use of comparative history within A Tale of
Two Cities marks the sophistication of his grasp of the historiographie
spirit of the age, and indicates the role his novels played in applying
comparative methodology to the ethnographic and historicizing ambi
tions of nineteenth-century British fiction. At the same time, the incon
sistency of the novel's comparativism demonstrates the instability of its
differential impulses when subject to the requisite narrative closure
of a Dickensian novel: though there are two cities, in the end, there
could be only one tale.

The French Revolution of 1789 was the defining historical problem

of the nineteenth century, as it is for Dickens's novel. And as we will
see, this focal importance made revolution a central object for theories
of comparative history, from historical accounts of the revolution itself,
to the Marxist historiography of class struggle, to scientific naturalism s
engagement with a geological record that testified to catastrophic
and radical change. Revolutions demand new models. Hayden White
observes that "the Revolution and Reaction had confirmed the bank
ruptcy of any abstract approach to social reality."15 It was not the
fact of revolution itself that presented such a problem for historians;
Thomas Babbington Macauley's History of England (1848) centers on
the felix culpa of the English Civil War as the precondition for the
Glorious Revolution that followed in 1688. In Macauley's account,
even the French Revolution was fortunate for Britain's progress, as it
resolved the conflict, inaugurated by William Ill's aggressive military
policy, between Tory insularism and Whig interventionism.16 Rather,
the challenge of revolution lay in apparent indeterminacy, expressed
through the perceived instability of the succeeding French states and
in the continuing circulation of sensational accounts that exposed the
violence of the Reign of Terror.17 Augustin Thierry, a French histo
rian directly contemporary with Macauley, abandoned his own liberal
history of the formation of the Third Estate after the abdication of
Louis Philippe and the (brief) formation of the Second Republic in
1848. The English translation of the curtailed work, published in 1855
as The Formation and Progress of the Tiers Etat, or Third Estate,
in France, was widely reviewed in Britain, often with description of
Thierry's despair regarding the revolution of 1848.18 At the same time,
reviewers praised Thierry's vivid descriptions of the Reign of Terror,

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and, in particular, heroic accounts of revolutionary leaders unable to
stem the tide of violence, including Camille Desmoulins and Georges
Danton. Sensational revolutionary accounts were not unsettling as
singular events—but as a potentially limitless series of irruptions that
conditioned tragic sacrifice, they maintained a lasting and terrifying
appeal.19
Part of the appeal of revolutionary accounts lay in their lasting
relevance; as Nicholas Ranee has detailed, the new revolutions of
1848 fueled a boom in revolutionary histories, from George Henry
Lewes s The Life ofMaximilien Robespierre (1849), to Jules Michelet's
Histoire de la révolution française (1847-53).20 Historical reflection in
the 1850s regularly turned on discussions of how the events of 1789
mirrored later revolutions, and these comparisons generally were taken
as a verdict on the perennial instability of French government and
the insufficiency of a liberal progressive account of French history.
Constantine Henry Phipps's memoir of his time as British ambassador
to France in '48, A Year of Revolution (1857), reads the collapse of
the July monarchy as a quasi-comic reflection of the events of 1789
(much as Karl Marx famously argued in The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Napoleon). Phipps, then Lord Normanby, describes how the
sixteen-year-old Infanta Luisa Fernanda, a princess by marriage to
the French royal family, was abandoned to the crowds outside the
Tuileries during the royal households confused escape. Phipps echoes
Edmund Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) when
he laments that "it does appear strange that no one should have been
found to make it his duty to secure the retreat of one so young, so
gentle, so helpless, and so beautiful, who had therefore, even upon
strangers, such combined claims to protection, wherever a vestige of
chivaliy is left in the world."21 Phipps implicitly claims this chivalric
courtesy when he describes his own successful effort to secure the
princess's safe passage to England (but credits it to his duty as an arm
of British diplomatic corps—much as, in the first chapters of A Tale of
Two Cities, Lorry dismisses credit for saving Lucie in her first flight
from France as mere "business relations" [26] and Miss Pross credits
her status as an "Englishwoman" [380] for her saving offices at the
novel's close). Such generalization of individual agency foregrounds the
descriptive challenge of finding the place of the individual in revolu
tion. And they mark how recourse to chivalric courtesy allowed the
historian to tell a convenient and familiar tale about revolution that
recuperated revolutionary events as a condition of virtuous action. The
reactionary turn to an idealizing mode serves, in part, to address the

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disillusion of revolutions aftermath. Michael Goldberg describes how
initial enthusiasm for the French launch of the Revolution of 1848 soon
descended into dismay for writers like Carlyle and Dickens—much as
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge revised their opinion
of its predecessor after 1789.22 In February of 1848, Dickens could
still joke with his confidant John Forster (in French, and with French
tongue in cheek): "I love the Republic so much, that I must renounce
my tongue and write only in the language of the French Republic,"
signing the note "Citoyen Charles Dickens."23 But this enthusiasm
is clearly tempered by 1851: when reporter G. A. Sala forwarded an
article about the newly formed Republic for Household Words with
the suggested title "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," Dickens added the
words "and Musketry."24
Challenged by events, writers of revolutionary history called upon
various representational formulae, and these mixed strategies were
further stressed by the temporal and social complexity introduced
by attempts to read distinct revolutions together. The revolutionary
forces of 1848 (as well as the ongoing social disruptions of the 1850s,
including the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 and the agitated push, in 1858,
for a Second Reform Bill), were regularly read through the lens of
previous revolutionary events, particularly 1789. The most famous
comparative analyst of the events of 1789 and 1848 was Marx. His
celebrated Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), with its
famous meditation on the reflections of history, explicitly marks a debt
to the recapitulatory features of Hegelian universal histoiy. But it also
discloses Marx's foundational commitment to historical comparison.
From 1848 on, Marx and Friedrich Engels focused considerable
effort in the pages of their Neue Rheinische Zeitung on an attempt
to understand the (apparently) differential development of England
and France, and to analyze the distinct outcomes of the revolutions
of 1648 and 1789. At least in part, this marked a response to the
variegation of the revolutions of 1848, as they spread through various
European states. Gareth Stedman Jones has already emphasized the
importance of Anglo-French comparison for Engels's thinking. Their
new comparative emphasis is evident, for instance, in a response to
François Guizot's 1850 pamphlet, Pourqoi la révolution d'Angleterre
a-t-elle réussi? (Why was the English Revolution Successful?), which
attributed the success of the English revolution to religious conser
vatism and the constructive bent of their brand of constitutional
monarchy. The review stakes its case against Guizot on the claim that
he fails to account for the "completely different historical conditions,

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the completely different states of the classes of society under the
French monarchy in 1830 and under the English in 1688."25 In order
to understand differences in past events, the historian must produce a
careful comparative analysis of the distinct contexts of those events (the
comparatist roots of Frederic Jamesons dictum "always historicize").26
The incisive focus on difference and complexity contrasts sharply with
their earlier claim, expressed only two years before, that "[t]he revolu
tions of 1648 and 1789 were not English and French revolutions, they
were revolutions of a European type."27 The turn from the confident
generalizations of 1848 to the focused comparativism of 1850 outlines a
strategic response to the collapse of '48, a response parallel to, though
radically distinct from, the idealizing gestures of Burke and Phipps.
And the comparatist germ took root: seventeen years later, in Capital
(1867), Marx's descriptions of common features are heavily qualified,
if not almost abandoned, in favor of careful comparative evaluation
that attends to distinctions as well as continuities. Marx's discussion of
English and French working day regulations is instructive:

France limps slowly behind England. The February revolution was

necessary to bring into the world the 12 hours' law, which is much
more deficient than its English original. For all that, the French
revolutionary method has its special advantages. It once for all
commands the same limit to the working day in all shops and factories
without distinction, whilst English legislation reluctantly yields to the
pressure of circumstances, now on this point, now on that[.]28

The passage modulates from the universal modern path along which
France trails England to more complex interpretation of their differ
ential courses.
Such moments turn away from of a brand of historical theorizing
(alternatively described as "stadial," "conjectural," or "universal"
history) that has dominated our historiographie understanding of the
Enlightenment and early nineteenth century.29 Described by Karen
O'Brien as "a natural process of development in which societies
undergo change through successive stages based on different modes
of subsistence," stadial history was extensively developed in the eigh
teenth century by the historians of the Scottish Enlightenment.30 In
Adam Fergusons Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Adam
Smith s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776), and Alexander Tytler's Plan and Outline of a Course of Lectures
on Universal History (1782), the histories of different epochs and
societies were reduced to common plans of maturation organized by

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universal features of agricultural, political, and individual development.
By contrast, post-1848 revolutionary histories struggled to reconcile
the ongoing instability of European states with any sense of a general
plan. This turn from stadial thinking is evident in Marx's evolving
perspective, which adopts the insistently comparatist and differential
understanding that was a pronounced feature of midcentury historical
thinking. The profuse divisions, tables of figures, diagrams, and foot
notes that took shape in Marx's unfinished work on the multivolume
Capital emphasize the insistently digressive and empiricist bent that
such comparative inquiry called for. By the close of the nineteenth
century, this empirical turn contributed to a resurgent positivism
evident in the empiricist, factual history of E. A. Freeman and others.31
Like comparative history, stadial as well as liberal progressive histories
were often couched in comparisons between, for instance, classical
Rome and contemporary Europe, Asian society and British culture.
But such comparisons reinforced a common plan, a universal develop
ment. Comparative history, on the other hand, put at least as much
emphasis upon difference and divergence. The forceful universalist
précis of the Communist Manifesto (1848) is a progressive as well as
stadial history; Capital strikes at something new.
The authority of comparative history to displace earlier historical
models grew through the comparatist commitments of allied disci
plines. Particular applications in the history of language, religion, and
biological form shaped comparative history in its earlier stages. In order
to sketch these influences, I will take each in turn.32 The signal achieve
ment of comparative philology in the early nineteenth century was the
discovery and description of the Indo-European language family. In
1786, Sir William Jones lectured to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal
about the common features and implicit common histories shared
by classical Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.33 The term "Indo-European"
was later adopted by Thomas Young in a review of Johann Christoff
Adelungs Mithridates, oder Allegemeine Sprachenkunde (1812).
Young identifies that work as part of a "universal and philosophical
history of languages," framing the new field of comparative philology
in terms of universal history.34 But he also remarks upon its departure:
"In fact, whenever the human mind pursues any process of nature, it
must be subjected to the inconvenience of breaking off occasionally
some one train of connexion, in order to pursue another."35 By the
late 1840s, the authority of the new, so-called comparative grammars
was indisputable. An analysis of comparative linguistics in the British
Quarterly Review of the 1847 report of the British Association for the

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Advancement of Science asserts confidently that, "[n]ot only may the
character of a nation be thus read, but its history also; for every nation
unwittingly writes its own history on its language. . . . Comparison of
languages, then, is our method of investigating the external and early
history of a nation."36 Such historical claims for comparative philology
bore fruit in the development of other applications for comparative
history. Max Müller was a forceful proponent of new uses of compara
tive historiography in both his 1850s Oxford lectures on comparative
philology and his 1856 essay on "Comparative Mythology." As Müller
put it, "the science of comparative mythology will soon rise to the same
importance as comparative philology. . . . Mythology is only a dialect,
an ancient form of language."37
Müller, like other comparative philologists, rests the authority
of his method, at least in part, on the authority of "science," and
in particular, the widespread comparative analysis of organic form
that underpinned contemporary developments in anatomy, geology,
and taxonomy. In an otherwise positive review of Müllers essay, an
anonymous critic dismisses the materialist "geology of language" that
comparative mythology relies upon, but analogies to the life sciences,
particularly comparative anatomy, were far-reaching and endemic to
comparative historicism.38 The first major work of modern comparative
anatomy was Edward Tyson's Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: or,
the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape,
and a Man (1699), but the science gained enormous prestige in the
early nineteenth century through the efforts of Jean Baptiste Lamarck,
Georges Cuvier, and Johannes Peter Müller. English translations of
Lamarck's Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (1815-22)
were available from the 1820s, and as Susan Shatto points out, trans
lations of the "Discours préliminaire" to Cuvier's Ossemans fossils
(1812) appeared almost immediately and went quickly into several
editions.39 Among British naturalists, the foremost proponent of this
comparative science was Richard Owen, whose spectacular Hunterian
lectures, launched in 1837 with a series on the "History of Comparative
Anatomy and Physiology," drew large crowds to the Royal College of
Surgeons for almost two decades.40 Lewes, in an 1856 review of those
lectures, described Owen as the "greatest comparative anatomist of
the age" and advanced his comparative approach as of both "necessary
importance [and] exhaustive interest."41 Contemporaries drew attention
to the manner in which comparative anatomy, while providing access
to the larger system or relationships that united the diversity of life,
also exposed differentiation and divergence. An 1853 review of one

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of Owen's published lectures by naturalist William Broderip describes
the perspective afforded as

the great Law of Progression from the General to the Particular. The
law of the closer adherence to the archetype, in other words, of a more
generalized structure, in the embryos of existing species, is distinctly
appreciated in his previous works, with a plain indication at the same
time of that higher and still more interesting generalization of the
corresponding closer conformity to type in the primeval quadrupeds,
as contrasted with the modern ones—which manifest more modified
or specialized structures,42

Through comparative analysis, generalized historical pattern coordi

nates modern divergence.
The interplay between comparative anatomy and comparative
philology at the beginning of the nineteenth century was complex,
with practitioners of each citing the other field for authority and
explanatory analogies. It was on this basis that Cuvier, in the "Discours
préleminaire," cast his work as a new kind of historicism: "As a new
species of antiquarian, I have had to learn to decipher and restore these
monuments, and to recognize and reassemble in their original order
the scattered and mutilated fragments of which they are composed; to
reconstruct the ancient beings to which these fragments belonged."43
Comparative analysis afforded Cuvier, as it later would Dickens and
Marx, a method to analyze a history punctuated by "revolution."44 Only
through comparative analysis, Cuvier argued, could larger patterns
emerge behind revolution, patterns independent of the narratives that
revolutionary events upset.
The embrace between natural scientific and sociohistorical compara
tivism sketched out the framework for a new comparative history at
the same time that post-revolutionary historians were shopping for
new perspectives. Positivism was one, grounded by Auguste Comte
on an "analogy" between the historical formations of the different
natural and human sciences, and on that basis, committed to the social
application of scientific method, particularly observation, experiment,
and "comparison."45 But positivism is only a highly visible example of a
general empirical historiographie revolution that sought to adapt scien
tific perspectives to social history. As early as 1804, reviewers of Jules
M. Degerandos Histoire Comparée noted that "[i]n the vast combina
tion of effects and causes presented by the revolutions of the Arts and
Sciences, some general law may perhaps be observed and detached;
which, connecting itself with the principle of these revolutions, may

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place itself in the rank of the essential elements of the system."46
It was not until midcentury that such comparative historicism, as a
generalized method of historiography, took root, as we have already
seen in the case of Marx. At the close of the 1850s, in reflecting on
the republication of Thierry's Third Estate as part of Bohn s Standard
Library, an anonymous reviewer observes that Thierry's work

has touched upon a topic of the greatest interest to students of what

may be called "Comparative History." Nothing to thinkers of this class
is, or can be, more curious than the past and present differences of
political government among nations originally of the same stock and
early subjected to much the same influences. . . . Nevertheless, the
contrast between the political history of France and that of England,
reaching, with vicissitudes, to the present day, remains indubitable.47

In writing for the urban London audience of the Critic, the review
sets out "Comparative History" as a fresh neologism, but is confident
that the groundwork for such broad historical comparison has already
been laid and that the vicissitudes of historical differentiation demand
comparative history.48

Within A Tale of Two Cities, the narrator advances this positive

claim for the power of comparativism to project social movements:
"Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers,
... it will twist itself into the same tortured forms" (385). The radical
disruptions of revolutionary events only gain coherence when placed
in a comparative framework that interprets their similarity to other
cases of radical change. Comparativism is a particularly pronounced
feature of the analyses of revolutionary history that emerged in the
1850s. But the novelization of comparative history in A Tale of Two
Cities brings it into intimate contact with other formal influences,
particularly melodrama. Earlier, I noted how recourse to romantic
codes of chivalric behavior served accounts of revolutionary violence
as a strategy for imagining the radical event as a condition for virtuous
action. And in A Tale of Two Cities, virtue finds one of Dickens's most
forceful expressions through Sydney Carton s closing sacrifice. As Sally
Ledger has pointed out, melodrama has long been recognized as a
key feature of A Tale of Two Cities, helping to motivate the multiple
courtroom scenes, which precipitate sentimental crises in the romance

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plot.49 Such sentimental features, notes Joss Marsh, made it ripe for
adaptation to the Victorian stage, where it immediately found a range
of productions (with mixed success) until the long fin de siècle run of
The Only Way (1899-1939).50 If these adaptations help register how
the novel was read, it's evident that the melodramatic features of the
novel, particularly Cartons final sacrifice, were central to contempo
rary readings.
At the same time, the firm typologies of melodrama seem to militate
against the differential and particularizing leverage of comparative
history. The purposes of this portion of my essay, then, are twofold.
Centrally, I will examine how A Tale of Two Cities adapts compara
tive inquiry as a point of entry for the problem of telling a history
of the French Revolution. Browne's illustrations for the part issues
provide an illuminating visual description of this comparatist impulse
and shaped reception. This comparatist investment also foregrounds
a tension between comparative analysis and the universalizing social
model advanced by melodrama. Dickens's motivations for describing
the French Revolution were complex, both in his analyses of the
radical foment of the latter 1850s and in his own private desire for
what Kucich has described as the novel's "pressing, fundamental need
for liberating change of the most extreme kind," and I will analyze
how that complexity is reflected in the interplay between comparatist
and melodramatic centers of gravity.51
It is a critical truism, but one that bears revisiting, that Dickens's
novel consecrates personal and professional revolutions for the author
himself. Over the course of the year before A Tale appeared, he had
formalized his separation from his wife, Catherine, weathered the
ensuing public scandal, and established his lover, Ellen Ternan, in
her own home. This radical personal reversal was followed closely by
Dickens's decision to end his relationship with Household Words, as
well as with his publishers, Bradbury and Evans, ostensibly in response
to Bradbury's handling of the Ternan affair. In order to effect this
separation and draw his audience to his new periodical, All the Year
Round, Dickens formulated an elaborate stratagem for the auction of
Household Words. He sent two doubles: Frederick Chapman played
his official bidder, while the theater manager Arthur Smith served
as a kind of secret agent. Smith pretended indifference during the
bidding, and when Chapman—Dickens's ostensible bidder—bowed
out at an artificially low price, so did Bradbury and Evans, with the
knowledge that Household Words without Dickens and his writers
was nearly worthless. This allowed Smith to snap up the property for

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Dickens at a fraction of its estimated worth.32 Dickens's evident glee
in the performance shines through his personal correspondence, and
it's hard to miss the sense that Carton's theatrical stand-in as Darnay's
double in the first number of A Tale of Two Cities (within a chapter
titled "A Disappointment") served as an inspiration for the elaborate
nose-tweaking Bradbury and Evans received at the auction a few weeks
later.53 Dickens was in a revolutionary mood—and dramatic staging
served him both personally and professionally as a model for how to
turn revolution to account.
Yet this account captures only the most sanguine side of Dickens's
visions of revolution; he had spent the latter part of the decade
imagining the threats as well as opportunities of radical change. An
1855 letter to liberal parliamentarian Austen Henry Layard indicates
Dickens's intuition that the supposed collapse of Chartism in 1848
masked broad civil unrest and the appetite for revolution:

There is nothing in the present time at once so galling and so alarming

to me as the alienation of the people from their public affairs. ... I
believe the discontent to be so much the worse for smouldering instead
of blazing openly, that it is extremely like the general mind of France
before the breaking out of the first Revolution, and is in danger of
being turned by any one of a thousand accidents . . . into such a Devil
of a conflagration as has never been beheld since.54

In worrying about Britain in 1855, Dickens turns to ante-revolutionary

France, the period upon which A Tale opens. The events of the latter
half of the decade could have done nothing to assuage this anxiety.
The Hyde Park Riot of 1855 was followed, in 1856, by the pardon of
political prisoners and the return of John Frost, a key Chartist leader
of the Newport Rising of 1839. Fox embarked on a series of public
speeches for Chartism and against penitential transportation that
raised the specter of the mass Chartist demonstrations of 1848; at his
first speech, the Leader reported, "an absolute fight took place; some
children were nearly trodden to death; women fainted, and it was with
the greatest difficulty that a ring was formed round Mr. Frost and his
friends."55 In late 1857, Wilkie Collins described Russia's "Remarkable"
Palace Revolution of 1741 for Household Words, noting that "[i]t was
not the less effectual because it lasted but a few hours, and had been
accomplished without the sacrifice of a single life."36 This emphasis
upon bloodless revolution responds to the events of the Sepoy Rebellion
earlier that year; as Priti Joshi has recently noted, various references in
A Tale suggest how sensational representations of the rebellion in the

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British press exacerbated Dickens's fears of domestic unrest.57 In 1858,
sensational accounts of the Siege of Lucknow were replaced by equally
breathless descriptions of the attempted assassination of Napoleon III,
and the arrest, imprisonment, and execution of his would-be assassin,
Felice Orsini. The discovery that the plot and its munitions were
forged on English soil only heightened general interest.38 And a few
months later, radical associations across the nation again stirred over
the advancement of a new Reform Bill in Parliament.59 A critique of
this reform push in the pages of the New Quarterly Review analyzed
popular excitement in light of the first Reform Bill of 1832:

[A]s human nature is always the same, though its outward manifestations
may differ under different circumstances, so we may be sure that they
are as much in favour of Electoral Reform now as then, and that it
only wants such a stubborn resistance as the old Tories made in 1832,
to bring out the same passion and violence in 1858.60

In framing an argument against the popularization of the vote, the

reviewer turns to comparative analysis. Such comparison analyzes
human nature as it is expressed under distinct conditions and different
"outward manifestations":

We may expect that the reform movement into which we are about
to enter will follow the course it did before; and therefore, if we can
trace the former contest through its several stages, and show the result
of the victory then attained, not only shall we correctly appreciate the
starting-point of the present movement, but we may also be able to
estimate its ultimate effects on society.61

Comparison yields insight into the differential possibilities of history;

what has happened once need not happen again. This foregrounds the
educational function of historical comparison (as well as its service to
polemics)—a function already close to the pedagogical justification of
nineteenth century fiction, particularly for the novel. To the degree that
comparison serves to provide self-reflection and moral instruction, it
approaches the moralizing function of melodrama, which reads events
into typologies of good versus evil, virtue versus vice. By contrast, when
comparison serves to disentangle the relationships between distinct
social formations, it (at least provisionally) turns away from such moral
izing and towards a genuine concern with alternative possibilities.
The interconnection of comparison s moralizing and discriminating
functions is most evident in the illustrations Browne prepared for A
Tale of Two Cities, particularly as they revamp traditional modes of

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visual allegory and transform then into indeterminate opportunities
for reflection and distinction. The part number engravings serve as
the most focused and explicit articulation of the novels' comparatist
vocabulary. Ledger is one of the most recent critics to note the extensive
reflections between French and English environs that are established
between the various illustrations of these numbers.62 This juxtaposi
tion is most evident in the elaborate framework sketched out in the
illustrated green wrapper for the monthly parts. A complex lattice of
framed scenes and reflections that borrows from medieval iconography,
the woodcut is a primer for comparative reading, as the individual
components of the frames map in bilateral and vertical symmetry
onto counterparts.63 To note only the most explicit comparisons, the
image reflects, horizontally: Lucie Manette and Madame Defarge; a
London grave and Dr. Manettes cell; a sans-culotte and a tricoteuse;
the English court of Old Bailey and Tellsons bank; while vertically, it
expresses the conceit of A Tale's "Two Cities" by mapping an image of
St. Paul onto Notre Dame. These reflections express the mobilization
of older modes of visual allegory and juxtaposition—classically realized
in William Hogarth's Harlot's and Rake's Progress (1831 and 1835)—as
strategies for comparative interpretation. The determinate narra
tive and allegorical flow of Hogarth's sequential paintings and prints
contrast with the simultaneity of Browne's composite woodcut, which,
by framing images within an extended field of comparison, permits
of a wider variety of interpretive tracks. The wrapper also avoids the
typological determinacy of medieval iconography, favoring comparative
compositions that produce the novel as a system of correspondences
liberated from their emplotment. Much as the golden strands of Lucie's
hair cinch the precarious framework of the wrapper's illustration, the
narrative thread that ties the parts of Dickens's Tale together is an
accessory to the prolific structure of correspondences elaborately devel
oped in the alternative interactions of its parts. Differential movements
between the panes multiply the possible paths. In sum, the effect of
the homogenized comparative space is, in part, to flatten the moral
hierarchy and to expand the allegorical narrative into a plane of less
determinate interpretive play.
Phiz's illustrations suggest how a composite interpretive perspective
can respond to the needs of serial publication in coordinate parts. A
Tale of Two Cities, the first of Dickens's novels to be offered in both
weekly and monthly parts before being collected for volume publica
tion, circulated in a variety of serial formats, and we can imagine the
reader piecing together incidents and issues in a process of assimilation

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and comparison that Browne's wrapper inaugurates.64 In this manner,
the illustrations provide evidence for the comparative reading prac
tices of its time. There is considerable critical discussion of whether
the end of Dickens's more than twenty-year collaboration with Phiz
after A Tale of Two Cities marked a critical evaluation of Browne's
style, already outmoded in the face of a new photographic realism
and Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics.65 But to my eye, Phiz's illustrations
for A Tale retain their vitality and display a firm understanding of
the novel's comparatist engagements.66 Browne was certainly agitated
about the impact of newer and cheaper printing techniques on his
plates; in an apparent response to Dickens's displeasure with some of
his prints (in an undated letter that makes it uncertain which novel
they belonged to), he complained that the poorly executed lithographs
which replaced intaglio printing for part issues were tantamount to a
"monthly stoning" that would soon be his "death."67 Besides a keen
reflection on the lithographic process, Browne's complaint that he was
being publically stoned (and that it was "very fine sport" for Bradbury
and Evans), displays the deft way he read himself into collective social
violence in the spirit of A Tale of Two Cities, and from our perspective,
pleads his status as a victim of the author's coup d'état.
Browne's personalization of the impact of revolutionary printing
technology models the melodramatic shift central to the novel. Criticism
has long emphasized how revolutionary social division frays the relation
ship between individual and collective agency.68 In light of the function
that melodramatic form played in presenting revolution, it seems this
tension is reproduced in A Tale as a conflict between comparative
history and the universalizing romantic typologies encoded by melo
drama. The incompatibility of these two perspectives on revolution is
the central point of György Lukâcs's criticism of the novel for using
revolutionary France as a mere "romantic background" for a bourgeois
love story.69 Lukâcs does not credit Dickens's insistent comparative
inquiry into revolutionary history, but he puts his finger on how the
novel radically displaces its comparative analysis in closing, as strategies
of comparison are exchanged for a series of melodramatic gestures,
formal moves that consistently replace opportunities for particularizing
comparisons with generalizing substitutions.70
The final confrontation between Miss Pross and Madame Defarge
explains the point here. When Madame Defarge makes her way to the
Manette/Darnay household, she expects to find Lucie Manette (now
Lucie Darnay), not Miss Pross. After all, it is Lucie who has served as
her counterpart and point of comparison throughout the novel—even

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on the wrappers cover. But the promised threat of the unavoidable
violence which will destroy Lucie—"Tell the Wind and the Fire where
to stop; not me!" (354)—is short-circuited when Pross takes her place.
The scene pivots away from the particularizing impulses of comparison
by means of Pross and Defarge s ability to escape the particularity
of language itself, as they manage to communicate without knowing
either s tongue. The specificity of language offered some of the earliest
purchase on the capacity of comparative analysis to analyze social
difference. The mutual intelligibility of Pross and Defarge, by contrast,
indicates the engagement of a universalizing perspective. Though
framed as comparison, comparison serves as a pretext for the acces
sion of a higher order understanding that renders cultural specificity
moot. In a letter to Edward Bulwer Lytton that analyzes the Pross/
Defarge confrontation and implies the elder author s skepticism of the
historical accuracy of the encounter, Dickens clarifies the stakes of this
translation: "I have the positive intention of making that half comic
intervention a part of the desperate woman's failure; and of opposing
that mean death ... to the dignity of Carton's."71 To intervene, Dickens
turns from comparison to opposition, and deploys the ethical solvent
of melodrama to dissolve the moral ambiguity of social history. In
wrenching Defarge from a "desperate [death] in the streets"—which
she not only "wouldn't have minded" but justifiably expects—Dickens
codes her death as a site of moral judgment. Explicity assuming the
status of "an Englishwoman" in the text, Pross transforms herself into
an equally "determined woman in her different way"; she is at once
Defarge's equal, and (it is here that her "different way" makes all the
difference) her superior in the moral allegory that they stage (380). Yet
the accidental (and awkward, and hackneyed) gun struggle that kills
Madame Defarge indicates how the scene itself struggles to illustrate
the "vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate"—a
statement that has uncertain application to the revolutionary France
Dickens has described (382).
While love overcomes hate in this scene, Pross's deafness indicates
that it does not do so completely.72 Elsewhere in the novel, the minis
trations of love are temporary. The chief example is Lucie Manettes
first interview with her father. By falling at his feet and staging her
own tableau, Lucie substitutes for her mother, recalls her father to
modern life, and appears to demonstrate the superiority of love to
the tyranny of history. But by the close of the novel, the resurrec
tion of Manettes old note precipitates a final breakdown and secures
Darnay's (later Carton's) execution. This reversal emphasizes how the

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logic of substitution that Dickens deploys to resolve his novel finds its
complement in the terrible potential of history to displace the present.
The language of resurrection, which Dickens apparently borrows
from Michelet (whom he had met in Paris in 1844), articulates fear
of a history that can read itself into the present through aggressive
historians like Madame Defarge.73 Carolyn Steedman has speculated
that there is a similar anxiety in Michelet s own language of "résurrec
tion," suggesting, as she freely translates it, that "it was not life that he
breathed into 'the souls who had suffered so long ago . . . ' but death,
that he took into himself, with each lungful of dust."74 The humorous
features of Crunchers earlier profession as resurrectionist (munching
away on the rusted iron that guards the dead), with the "half-comic"
character Dickens ascribes to Pross's confrontation with Madame
Defarge, serve equally to defuse the most unsettling implications of
history's legacy and recast them in a comfortable comic mode.
Dickens's ultimate decision to name his novel A Tale of Two Cities
rather than Buried Alive foregrounds comparative history as a strategy
to address history without reviving it, but implies that the burden of
history cannot be shaken off so easily as Cruncher sheds his night
shift.75 At best, it seems that "love" can only accommodate "hate":
once the problem of a violent revolutionary history has been opened,
it cannot be closed, only adjusted. This is most evident in Carton's
self sacrifice for Darnay. His love for Lucie Manette is incapable of
saving his life and Charles's—but it is capable of staging a reversal
that rewires revolutionary violence to serve his own ends. It's not
clear he would have it any other way. Carton serves as a crucial pivot
point for the resolution because, as the critical literature testifies, he
is key to the novel's programmatic strategies of comparison, both as
an object and theorist of what comparison might entail. Simon Petch
has placed Carton at the center of the novel's extended comparisons
"between French and English cultures of professionalism"—particu
larly legal professionalism—and define the novel's comparativism as
a mode of institutional analysis.76 When Carton and Darnay are first
"brought into comparison" by Stryver (77), their likeness secures
justice through coincidence, rather than probative evidence. At this
early point in the novel, and insofar as Carton is a passive object of
comparative evaluation, comparison serves an epistemological func
tion—destabilizing confident notions and narratives, opening the
possibility of other culprits and alternative histories. This is the effect
the comparison serves for Carton himself, as he weighs its implica
tion: "[H]e shows you what you have fallen away from and what you

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might have been! . . . Come on, and have it out in plain words! You
hate the fellow!" (89). Here Carton the comparatist is closest to the
comparative historian: able to analyze differential courses without the
capacity to change them, advancing a mode of description rather than
meliorism. Only at the close of the novel does Carton discover how to
tie together (without combining) the distinct trajectories implied by
comparison. By taking Darnays place on the scaffold, he putatively
secures his longevity through the lasting "sanctuary" he finds in the
hearts of the Darnay family and in the son they name for him (390). By
the close of the novel, Cartons continued status as a potential object
of comparative investigation—the possibility that he will be discovered
as an imposter—seems to be the only check that remains to stall the
complete collapse of the comparative network he once established.
Hillary Schor emphasizes the adulterous features of Carton's
effective insertion into the Darnay household, and it is important to
emphasize the incomplete consummation of this resolution—both
for his personal narrative and for the novel at large.77 His eminent
prolepsis ("It is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever
known") is only endorsed by the narrator in the subjunctive (as what
his sentiments "would have" been), and as such, critics have noted
its deeply speculative and uncertain framing (390). Only from this
multiply qualified position (as what a deceased and fictional character
might bave predicted) can putative descendants narrate the novel
retrospectively as a single coherent event. As the Tale is actually
plotted, Carton's execution happens in a moment of simultaneity—as
the carriage containing Lucie and Charles speeds away, and as Madame
Defarge meets her death in their Paris home. This synchronous
time projects a mode of temporal comparativism and indicates the
insufficiency of a single narrative to capture a complex revolutionary
event.78 In emphasizing, in his letter to Bulwer-Lytton, that Madame
Defarge's death provides an opportunity for contrast, Dickens both
points toward this plotted complexity as an opportunity for comparison
and highlights the insufficiency of a strictly melodramatic account.
Perhaps more accurately, the ideological pressure brought to bear
through melodrama crystallizes the discordant ideological grounds of
revolution, as Priya Joshi has argued for readers of the English novel
in India.79 Carton's profoundly melodramatic sacrifice only offers the
potential for an effective melodramatic resolution because it does
not address the motivation for revolution itself. In setting the task of
discovering the differential conditions that produced a modern French
(rather than a modern English) revolution, the novel commits to

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sympathetic engagement with those conditions as they are brought to
bear on specific French characters, particularly Madame and Monsieur
Defarge. While the implacable vengeance of the former ejects her
from readerly sympathy at the dénouement, the first half of the novel
irrevocably commits to the observation that, "under similar hammers,
[humanity, French or English] will twist itself into the same tortured
forms" (385). Not only does this frame the French revolutionaries as
objects of empirical study and sympathy, it validates their provisional
perspective upon history, even that of Madame Defarge herself. This
is doubly the case for Monsieur Defarge; his almost compassionate
understanding of the need for radical change seems to exonerate him
at the close of the novel (a point emphasized by Phiz's choice to depict
him consoling Gaspard for the loss of his child in "The Stoppage at
the Fountain"). The attempt to disclose (without strictly validating)
an authentic revolutionary perspective that is alien to domesticated
English space demonstrates the power of comparative historicism to
advance alterity.
To frame this differently, the pyrotechnics of Carton's final sacrifice,
with its soaring oratory and reverberating Christian typologies, is an
intensely worked accommodation of the comparative history that the
novel has opened—rather than a solution to what it makes visible.80
At the opening of the novel, and before the revolution, codes of
melodramatic engagement appear ready to hand and universally effec
tive—as is proven my Lucie Manette s early effect on both her father
and Monsieur Defarge. But in the wake of an analysis of revolutionary
history, it takes a great deal more to activate those formulas. In a post
revolutionary world, who knows how long a new domestic settlement
will last? The strategy of attenuation is brought into high relief by the
abridged theology that Carton communicates to the young seamstress
who dies at his side. His claim regarding the afterlife, that "there is
no Time there, and no trouble there," seems equally a meditation on
the insufficiency of his final vision as a history of what has occurred
(403). On this view, the dogmatic turn of the novel's resolution belies its
careful coordination with an attenuated and comparative understanding
of the function of religious belief for a society under the profound
cross-pressures of global commerce and international contact with
widely divergent definitions of human value. In allowing Carton to live
on through the Darnay's descendants, the novel is careful to provide
a version of afterlife compatible with a thoroughgoing agnosticism.81
In this fashion, A Tale of Two Cities practices the adjustment Tanya
Agothocleous has described as "urban cosmopolitanism," through which

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novelists, by engaging religion, "sought not merely to universalize the
moral meanings of their texts but to globalize them, locating them
within a historicized vision of the contemporary world."82 The global
vision offered by national and transnational comparatism makes the
possibility of a singular tale of these two cities extraordinarily tenuous.
In this fashion, comparative history, as an interpretive strategy,
establishes the conditions for recognizing the multiple modernities
of recent critical concern. The novel is an unusual place to find the
cultural multiplicity more recently raised as a model for the modernism
of non-Western and non-secular societies. Yet in S. N. Eisenstadt s foun
dational statement of the case, the French Revolution and Jacobitism
served as touchstones for thinking about how the emergence of such
multiplicity becomes visible.83 Dickens's commitment to comparative
historiography in A Tale of Tiuo Cities, as an opportunity to combine
authorial perspective with alterity, observation with participation,
contributes to what James Buzard has identified as the ethnographic
ambitions of the Victorian novel. As Buzard puts it, with reference to
Stocking, the discipline of ethnography "took up the novel's challenge
of confronting the implications of the boundedness and plurality of
culture by understanding itself to be, not the science of 'society' or
culture, but the 'science of cultures.'"84 Peter Logan reminds us that,
for early theorists of culture like E. B. Tylor, "culture was a singular
term that did not admit of the plurality."85 But the commitment to
comparative analysis, as both the impulse and legacy of compara
tive history, indicates the degree to which such pluralism was always
inherent in the culture concept as a historicist mode of social analysis.
The lasting currency of the title of Dickens's novel testifies to the
continued influence of comparative thinking across the full range of
Western intellectual production in all its popular and professional,
general and particular, dispensations. In a modernity variously char
acterized in terms of multiplicity, it is obvious in retrospect that our
thinking on a range of topics tends to get organized through dualistic
formulations. A Tale of Two Cities remains an open, eternally révis
able question: can there really be a singular tale that captures any two
towns (or even two terriers)? Perhaps it is not the possibility of such
coherence that keeps us reading, but its impossibility, as ground for
the endless resurrection of discovery.

University of Southern California

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 NOTES

1 As of April 2013, a search of the MLA database for titles including the phrase "A
Tale of Two" and excluding the word "Dickens" yielded more than two hundred ind
pendent results. The same search in Google Books returned more than one million
titles (without excluding duplicates); Google Scholar, 10,400.
2 See Catherine Gallagher, "The Duplicity of Doubling in A Tale of Two Cities,
Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 12 (1983): 124-45.
3 Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Richard Maxwell (New York: Penguin
2003), 5. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
4 John Kucich, "The Purity of Violence," Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian
Fiction 8 (1980): 121.
5 Discussions of the various forms of doubling have long been central to criticism
of A Tale of Two Cities. See John Gross, "A Tale of Two Cities," in Dickens and th
Twentieth Century, ed. Gross and Gabriel Peterson (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press
1962), 187-97, esp. 189.
6 Kamilla Elliott provides an enlightening analysis of the figurative strategies of facia
recognition in the novel in terms of metaphor, metonymy, and simile but displace
historiographie considerations for an analysis rooted in the concerns of representation
in general; see "Face Value in A Tale of Two Cities," in Charles Dickens, A Tale of Tw
Cities, and the French Revolution, ed. Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh, and John
Mee (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 87-103.
7 The most extensive example is Gareth Stedman Jones's "The Redemptive Power o
Violence? Carlyle, Marx, and Dickens," History Workshop Journal 65 (Spring 2008
1-22. But this renewed interest in Dickens's historiography is a central concern of
the recent collection of essays published in Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities,
and the French Revolution, cited above. In addition to recollecting Jones's article, th
anthology includes Mark Philip's "The New Philosophy: The Substance and Shado
in A Tale of Two Cities," which construes the novel as immersed in radical politica
theories of the late eighteenth century; see Dickens . . . and the French Revolution
24-40. William J. Palmer, by contrast, and in a manner closer to my reading here, find
A Tale anticipating the social turn; see Dickens and New Historicism (New York: St
Martin's Press, 1997), esp. 91-93, 168.
8 One of the most extended considerations of Thomas Carlyle's influence is David
Marcus's "The Carlylean Vision of A Tale of Two Cities," Studies in the Novel 8
(1976): 56-86.
9 Dickens to John Forster, [Summer 1851], in The Letters of Charles Dickens, gen
ed. Graham Storey, 12 vol. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 196.5-2002), 6:452.
10 Jones, McDonagh, and Mee summarize contemporary events, in their introdu
tion to Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, and the French Revolution; see 1-23.
11 See Maxwell, "Appendix III: Dickens and his Sources," in A Tale of Two Cities,
399-443.

12 In advance of the institutionalization of history as a distinct discipline at the close

of the nineteenth century, theorization of historicism in itself was largely ad hoc. Marc
Blochs "Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés europénes" (1928) is generally seen
as a founding document for twentieth-century thinking about comparative history;
see, for example, William H. Sewell, Jr. "Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative
History," History and Theory 6:2 (1967): 208-18. A special issue of History and
Theory from 1999 puts a fine point on this by advancing comparative history as a
general mode inherent in various modern practices—but without any consideration

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of its formation or function in the nineteenth century; see Chris Lorenz's introduction
to the issue, "Comparative Historiography: Problems and Perspectives," History and
Theory 38.1 (1999): 25-39. Finally, the nineteenth century is largely absent from the
comprehensive historical review provided by the recent special issue of New Literary
History 40.3 (2009) devoted to the topic of "Comparison" and guest-edited by Rita
Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman.
13 Sociology and anthropology have been engaged with a fraught réévaluation of
comparison s methodological place since the 1950s, at the same time that they locate its
emergence later than I do here. This is because the tendentious features of compara
tivism became most apparent during the widespread application of an evolutionary
analogy to ethnography and anthropology. For an extensive consideration of the
case of anthropology, see Alison Wylie, "The Reaction against Analogy," Advances in
Archaeological Method and Theory 8 (1985): 63-111. For the case of sociology, see the
special issue on comparative history in Comparative Studies in Society and History, in
particular, Theda Skocpol and Margaret Sommers, "The Uses of Comparative History in
Macrosocial Inquiry" Comparative Studies in Society and History 22.2 (1980): 174-97.
14 See George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Macmillan,
1987), 14-16.
15 Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973), 167.
White's epochal study of the figurai strategies that underpin specific historical schools
is one place we would expect to find a consideration of comparative history, given
its reliance upon strategies of analogy. But White describes comparative method as
a theoretical application of what he terms the "Metaphorical Mode," suggesting that
it projects a formal model which is then substituted for the historical object (84—85).
l6Thomas Babbington Macauley, The History of Englatidfrom the Accession of James
the Second, 5 vol. (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler, 1861), l:133n.
17 Jones s essay "The Redemptive Power of Violence? Carlyle, Marx, and Dickens," is
particularly eloquent on the problem presented by revolutionary violence for historical
thinkers.
18 See "The Formation and Progress of the Tiers Etat, or Third Estate in France,"
Athenaeum 1436 (5 May 1855): 514-15; also in New Quarterly Review 4.14 (1855):
156-59. See also "History and Biography," Westminster Review, 71.140 (1859): 605-24.
19 For an evaluation of A Tale of Two Cities and the implications of terrorism for
the interface between individual action and collective politics, see Frances Ferguson,
"On Terrorism and Morals: Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities," Partial Answers: Journal
of Literature and the History of Ideas 3.2 (June 2005): 49-74.
20 See Nicholas Ranee, "Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities (1859)," repr. in
Critical Essays on Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Michael Cottsell (New
York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 74-88.
21 The Marquis of Normanby [Constantine Henry Phipps], A Year of Revolution, from
a Journal Kept in Paris in 1848, 2 vol. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans,
and Roberts, 1857), 1:107-8.
22 See Michael Goldberg, "Carlyle, Dickens, and the revolution of 1848," Dickens
Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 12 (1983): 223-32.
23 Dickens to Forster, 29 February 1848, in Letters, 5:256. My translation. The original
reads: "MON AMI, je trouve que j'aime tant la République, qu'il faut renoncer ma
langue et écrire seulement la langue de la République de France."
24 George Augustine Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala (London:
Cassell, 1898), 251.

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 25 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, review of Pourqoi la révolution d'Angleterre a-t
elle réussi? by Guizot, repr. in Marx and Engels, Gesamtausgaube (MEGA), 32 vol.
(Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1972-), 10:205. My translation.
26 Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 2002), ix.
27 Marx and Engels, "The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution," repr. and trans,
in Collected Works, 50 vol. (New York: International Publishers, 1975-), 8:161.
28 Marx, Capital, vol. 1., in Collected Works, 35:304.
291 do not mean to suggest that stadial history doesn't persist, particularly within
progressive accounts of modernity, as Nathanial Wolloch has recently argued; see
"The Civilizing Process, Nature, and Stadial Theory," Eighteenth-Century Studies
44.2 (2011): 245-59.
30 Karen O'Brien, "Between Enlightenment and Stadial History: William Robertson
on the History of Europ e," Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 16.1 (1993): 53.
31 This was a surprisingly lively Gradgrindian shift, as described recently by Ian
Hesketh, "Diagnosing Froude's Disease: Boundary Work and the Discipline of History
in Late-Victorian Britain," History and Theory 47.3 (2008): 373-95.
321 am saving an expanded discussion of the history and shape of comparative history
per se for a later study.
33 See Armin Burkhardt, Hugo Steger, and Herbert Ernst Wiegand, eds., vol. 2 of
The History of the Language Sciences: An International Handbook on the Evolution
of the Study of Language from the Beginnings to the Present, 3 vol. (Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter, 2001), 109.
34 Thomas Young, "Mithridates, oder Allegemeine Sprachenkunde. Mithridates, or
a General History of Languages," Quarterly Review 10.19: 250.
35 Young, 252.
36 "Ethnology—The Unity of Mankind," British Quarterly Review 10 (1849): 431.
37 Max Müller, "Comparative Mythology," in vol. 2 of Oxford Essays (London: J.
Parker, 1856), 86-87.
38 Review of "Comparative Mythology," Saturday Review 2.30 (1856): 85-87.
39 See Susan Shatto, "Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and the Monstrous Efts," Yearbook
of English Studies 6 (1976): 144-55. The fifth edition of the "Discours préliminaire"
included a preface by Robert Jameson expounding on the similarities between biblical
accounts and Georges Cuvier's catastrophism. For more on the biblical interpretation
of Cuvier in England, see Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in
the History of Paleontology (London: Macdonald, 1972), 135G36.
40 See Nicolaas A. Rupke, Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 2009), 18-22.
41 George Henry Lewes, "Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy and Physiology,"
Fraser's Magazine 53.313 (1856): 80.
42 [William Broderip], "Lectures on the Anatomy and Physiology of the Invertebrate
Animals," Quarterly Review 93.185 (1853): 48. This source was identified through
the digital edition of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (Routledge, 1999).
43 Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), 183.
44 Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, 191.
45 Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy (1854), repr. in Auguste Comte: The
Foundation of Sociology, ed. Kenneth Thompson (New York: Wiley, 1975), 105-6.
46 R. W, "M. Degerando's Comparative History of the Systems of Philosophy, rela
tive to the Principles of Human Knowledge," Monthly Review 46 (April 1804): 521.

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 47 "The Formation and Progress of the Tiers État, or Third Estate, in France"
[unsigned review], Critic 18.455 (1859): 298-99.
48 "Comparative history" doesn't lose this sense of tentativeness until the twentieth
century, most significantly through the work of Bloch and the revival of his thinking
in the sixties and seventies; see commentary by Sewell, Jr.
49 See Sally Ledger, "From the Old Bailey to Revolutionary France: The Trails of
Charles Darnay," in Charles Dickens... and the French Revolution, 75-86, esp. 75-77.
50 See Joss Marsh, "Mimi and the Matinée Idol: Martin-Harvey, Sydney Carton
and the Staging of A Tale of Two Cities, 1860-1939," in Charles Dickens . . . and the
French Revolution, 126-45.
51 Kucich, 120.
52 See Frank Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1998), 401.
53 Dickens to Georgiana Hogarth, 16 May 1859, in Letters, 9:65.
54 Dickens to Austen Henry Layard, 10 February 1855, in Letters, 7:587.
55 "The Chartist Gathering," Leader 7.339 (1856): 892-93.
56 "A Remarkable Revolution," Household Words 16.384 (1857): 100.
57 See Priti Joshi, "Mutiny Echoes: India, Britons, and Charles Dickens's A Tale of
Two Cities," in Nineteenth-Century Literature 62.1 (2007): 48-87. Jones, McDonagh,
and Mee have recently reminded us that Dickens's anxiety about the Indian revolution
was driven in part by his son Walter's service at Lucknow; see their introduction to
Charles Dickens . . . and the French Revolution, 8-9.
58 On discovering that many of Orsini's accomplices were alien residents of England
during their preparations—including the design and testing of the contact explosives
used in the attack—the French government threatened to sever diplomatic relations.
See H. Hearder, "Napoleon Ill's Threat to Break off Diplomatic Relations with England
during the Crisis over the Orsirti Attempt in 1858, " The English Historical Review 72.284
(1957): 474—81. Palmerston's response, in introducing an Alien Bill to provide specific
punishments for plots against foreign citizens, was widely understood to be a bow to
French pressure. See "French Reform of English Law," Examiner 2611 (1858): 97-98.
59 The remnants of the National Chartist Association refused to endorse it, on the
grounds that the proposal of a five-pound suffrage fell far short of the original six
points of the People's Charter. "Opposition to the Government Reform Bill" Examiner
2668 (1859): 185-86.
60 "The New Reform Bill," New Quarterly Review 7.26 (1858): 175.
61 "The New Reform Bill," 176.
62 See Ledger, 77-79. The tragic assembly around the carriage of "Stoppage at the
Fountain" in part 3 contrasts with the jubilant masses surrounding the coach of "The
Spy's Funeral" for part 4, while Carton's shadowed reflection in "Congratulations" of
part 6 prefigures his looming presence over Damay's shoulder in the frontispiece to
the bound edition. The remapping of temporal relationships between part illustration
and bound volume indicates the departure of the illustrations from the frenetic linear
sequence of the plot. The jubilation of "The Spy's Funeral" sharply contrasts with the
violent Jacobin crowd of "The Sea Rises," not merely in the substitution of swords
and clubs for hats and fiddles, but more particularly, in the contrast drawn between
the diffusive movements of the London crowd—leaping, flying, even sitting—and the
turbulent flow of the Parisian mob across the page. In France, it seems there is such
a (threatening) thing as collective social agency.

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 63 A facsimile of the cover for the June monthly is also included in the Penguin
edition of A Tale of Two Cities, 393.
"Which is to emphasize Philip V. Allingham's point that the wrapper was "an aide
mémoire intended to facilitate the monthly reader's keeping track of a discontinuous
narrative" ("Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities [1859] Illustrated: A Critical
Reassessment of Hablot Knight Browne's Accompanying Plates" Dickens Studies
Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 33 [2003]: 109).
65 See Valerie Browne Lester, Phiz, The Man Who Drew Dickens (London: Chatto and
Windus, 2004), 162-64. An examination of the relation between Browne's illustrations
and contemporary photography appears in Susan Cook's "Season of Light and Darkness:
A Tale of Two Cities and the Daguerrean Imagination" Dickens Studies Annual: Essays
on Victorian Fiction 42 (2011): 237-60. A good summary of the debate is given by
Allingham on The Victorian Web, http:/[Link]/art/illustration/phiz/bio.
html See also Jane R. Cohen, Charles Dickens and his Original Illustrators (Columbus:
Ohio State Univ. Press, 1980), 118-21.
66 The explanation for the divorce is probably simple economics; Browne, beholden
to his longstanding business relationship with Bradbury and Evans and the lucra
tive launch of their new illustrated weekly Once Upon a Time (All the Year Round's
direct competitor), was unable to throw himself in with Dickens's revolt against those
publishers.
67 Hablot K. Browne to Dickens, undated; reproduced in Lester, 154. See also the
discussion between Lester, Allingham, and David Parker at [Link]
org/art/illustration/phiz/[Link]
68 Cates Baldridge has argued that the abstraction from individual to collective is
allied with a threatening revolutionary collectivism in A Tale; see "Alternatives to
Bourgeois Individualism in A Tale of Two Cities," SEL:Studies in English Literature,
1500-1900 30.4 (1990): 633-54.
69György Lukâcs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 243.
70 Elliott has described this as a strategy of "inter-semiotic identification" (101).
71 Dickens to Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, 5 June 1860, in Letters, 9:259-60.
72 Although it is unclear what need Pross will have for hearing after she has proved
that listening is incidental to the moral stakes of her universe.
73 See Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens, His Tragedy and Triumph (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1952), 537. For a brief description of the encounter, see Una Pope
Hennessy, Charles Dickens, 1812-1870 (Edinburgh: A. R. Clark. 1947), 233.
74Carolyn Steedman, Dust (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2002), 28.
75 See Andrew Lang, introduction to A Tale of Two Cities, vol. 11 of The Works of
Charles Dickens, 32 vol. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1906-8), viii.
76 Simon Petch, "The Business of the Barrister in A Tale of Two Cities" Criticism
44.1 (2002): 36.
77 Hilary Schor, Dickens and the Daughter of the House (New York: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1999), 92.
781 am influenced in my reading here by Jonathan H. Grossman, who discussed the
simultaneity offered by technologies of travel at the close of A Tale of Two Cities in a
spectacular paper titled "Passengers of History," delivered at the annual conference
of the Modern Language Association in December 2005.
79Priya Joshi, In Another Country (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002), 85-86.

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 80 Ledger is particularly sensitive in reading the insufficiency of the prolepsis as a
complete resolution to what has been diagnosed: "Notwithstanding these idealized
visions of a reformed legal order in the future, it is the violent, brutal disorder and
arbitrary justice of the novel's narrative of the past that tells us more, and more power
fully, about the present in which it was written and read" (84).
81 As Janet Larson puts it, typological figures in Dickens's novels "represent only
religious and moral ideals severed from the fuller implications of the typologist's sacred
text" (Dickens and the Broken Scripture [Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985], 12).
This stands in direct contrast, for instance, to the close of Bulwer Lytton's Zanoni (1842),
which similarly closes with the sacrifice of Zanoni and his lover at the revolutionary
guillotine, at which point the clouds literally part to reveal the choir invisible in which
they rejoin. In this fashion, the novel anticipates the accommodating metaphysical
ambiguity exploited, for instance, in Jack Conway's 1935 film adaptation of the novel,
in which the closing shots pans up to the sunlit clouds above the Place de la Révolution
for Carton's closing monologue.
82 Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the
Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011), xvi.
83 See Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, "Multiple Modernities," Daedalus 129.1 (2000): 1-29.
84 James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth
Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005), 302.
^Peter Melville Logan, Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives (New York:
State Univ. of New York Press, 2009), 93.

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