The Sources of a Tale of Two Cities

Author(s): J. A. Falconer
Source: Modern Language Notes, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Jan., 1921), pp. 1-10
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2914815
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MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES

VOLUME XXXVI JANUARY, 1921 NUMBER I

THE SOURCES OF A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Dickens' Tale of Two Cities really consists of two tales, which

he contrived to interweave with more than his usual art. These
are the story of Doctor Manette's living death in the Bastille and
that of Sydney Carton's self-sacrifice on the scaffold. These con-
stitute the two strong situations, the beginning and the end of the
action, from which and towards which, in the finished novel, all
intermediate action flows. It is interesting to see, as we presently
shall, that it was just these two situations which, when the novel
was in conception, first shaped themselves in Dickens' mind and
thus originated the whole plot.
We know from Dickens himself that the second, that of self-
sacrifice, came first and was his motive in writing the novel at all.
It occurred to him, he tells us in his preface, while acting in Wilkie
Collins' play The Frozen Deep. This play turned on the sufficiently
trite subject of contest between a successful and an unsuccessful
lover. In disgust and vowing vengeance, the latter, Richard
Wardour, offers himself for an expedition to the North Pole, in
which his successful rival also engages. The expedition comes to
grief. After some years the explorers determine to send a party
to try to reach civilization and bring help. Frederick having
volunteered, Richard does so too. The two get separated from the
rest of the party, which succeeds in reaching Newfoundland, and
finds there Clara, the apple of discord of the piece, come out from
England in search of news. In despair, she is now preparing to
sail for home again, when Richard appears, in the last stage of

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2 MODERN LANGIUAGE NOTES

exhfaustion, carrying Frederick, whom he lays at Clara's feet. He

confesses that he had originally meant to kill his rival but that
gradually his heart had softened; in point of fact he had cared for
him and deprived himself of food for his sake. Now worn out by
hardship, he dies while Frederick recovers.'
In the private theatricals in summer, 1857, at which Dickens
produced this fantastic play, he took the part of Richard Wardour
himself, and, in his usual way, not played it merely but lived it.
From identifying himself with the character to the desire to em-
body it in a novel was an easy step, but for some months, as Forster
indicates, the idea took no definite shape.2 In other words, he had
conceived so far merely the general situation - a man for love's
sake giving his life for his rival-without details or local setting.
Thus the matter rested till the beginning of the following year.
Little Dorrit had to be got off the stocks and it is not till the
opening months of 1858 that we have indications of the new novel
in his mind. Then it is evident that the second of the situations
has now presented itself. His mind is now dwelling not on the
end of the story but, naturally enough, on the beginning, to which
he wished to get started. We find him proposing to call the novel
One of these Days, or Buried Alive, or The Thread of Gold (in
allusion to the power of Lucie Manette to make her father forget
his past, as in the novel, Book ii, chap. 4), or The Doctor of
Beauvais.3 These titles all refer to the Doctor Manette side of
the novel and he has obviously got it clear before his mind's eye.
Further he has fixed on France (Beauvais), and what other prison
in France for burying a man alive in would he think of but the
Bastille? In short, he had now, we cannot doubt, decided on the
French Revolution as the scene of events.
This he did under the influence of Carlyle's The French Revo-
lution which, eight years before this, he declared he had read for
the five hundredth time.' Carlyle suggested the theatre of events;

1 In some insignificant details such as the names of the characters, the

original play differs from the story Collins afterwards made from it to
read during his tour in the United States, 1873-74, and which may be
found in the Tauchnitz Edition: The Frozen Deep and Other Stories.
There is an abstract of it in C. Bottger's dissertation, Charles Dickens' his-
torisoher Romen "A Tale of Two Cities," 1913.
2 Forster's Life of Dickens, Bk. ix, ch. 2.
1lb. 4lb., vi, ch. 3.

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 TIE SOIURCES OF A TALE OF TWO CITIES 3

indirectly he was responsible for the figure of Dr. Manette too.

For, having definitely chosen the French Revolution as the setting
for his plot, he applied, as he himself tells us, to Carlyle for books
on the subject and obtained in reply "two cartloads," amongf
which almost certainly was " the curious book printed at Amster-
dam," Mercier's Tableau de Paris. From it he got not only, what
he admits,5 the material for his evil Marquis, but also, a much
more important matter, the suggestion for the whole Dr. Manette
story.6
For in Mercier will be found an anecdote, told with feeling and
vivid detail, of one of the prisoners released from the Bastille by
an act of clemency on the accession of Louis XVI, "un vieillard
qui, depuis quatre-sept annees, gemissoit, detenu entre quatr(
epaisses et froides murailles." "La porte basse de son tombeau
tourne sur ses gonds effrayants, s'ouvre, non 'a demi, comme de
coutume, et une voix inconnue lui dit qu'il peut sortir. I1 croil
que c'est un reve. 11 hesite, il se leve, s'achemine d'un pas trem-
blant, et s'etonne de l'espace qu'il parcourt. . . . I1 s'arrfte comme
egare et perdu; ses yeux ont peine a supporter la clarte du grand
jour; il regarde le ciel comme un objet nouveau; son ceil est fixe
il ne peut pas pleurer. Stupefait de pouvoir changer de place, see
jambes, malgre lui, demeurent aussi immobiles que sa langue." He
is conducted to the street where he had lived; his house is gone
the whole quarter is changed, nobody knows him. His tears and
his strange clothing collect a pitying crowd around him. IUlti-
mately an old servant of the family is found, from whom he hears
that his wife had died thirty years before of grief and misery, thal
his children are dispersed in other lands, that his friends are all
gone. Overwhelmed with grief, he goes to the minister to whon
he owes his release and begs to be returned to his cell. "Separe
de la socite6, je vivois avec moi-mneme. Ici, je ne puis vivre ni
avec moi ni avec les hommes nouveaux, pour qui mon desespoii
n'est qu'un reve." The minister, touched by his unhappy case,
puts him in the care of the old servant " qui pouvoit lui parlel
encore de sa femme et de ses enfants. . . . I1 ne voulut point com-
mnuniquer avec la race nouvelle qu'il n'avoit pas vu naitre; il se fil

1f Forster, ix, chap. 2.

'W. Dibelius: Charles Dickens. Teubner, 1916, p. 333. Professor Di-
belius kindly supplied me with chapter and verse in Mercier.

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4 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES

au milieu de la ville une espece de retraite non moins solitaire que

le cachot qu'il avoit habite pres d'un demi-siecle.""
Here we have the prototype of Dickens' prisoner of the Bastille,
"recalled to life" indeed but bewildered by and incapable of it.
Manette too is released on Louis XVI's accession (the action of
the novel begins in 1775), his wife is long dead of a broken heart,
his daughter is in England, he is tended by his old servant Defarge
who provides for him " une espece de retraite "-his garret.
By what alchemy Dickens metamorphosed this slight story it is
needless to say; but its identity in all essentials with his is self-
evident.
So much for Mercier. In The French Revolution itself homrever
there are two passages which are worth attention in this connection.
Carlyle relates how, after the storming of the Bastille, a letter was
found written long years before by a wretched prisoner to some
monseigneur begging for news of his wife, " were it only her name
on a card, to show that she is alive." 8 In The Tale of Two Cities
just such a pitiful paper is sought for and found at the storming
of the Bastille and some lines in it so clearly echo the corresponding
words of Carlyle as to leave no doubt regarding cause and effect.
I place them side by side: '
CARLYLE DICKNS

If for my consolation Monseig- If it had pleased God to put it

neur would grant me, for the sake into the hard heart of either of the
of God and the Most Blessed Trin- brothers, in all these frightful years,
ity, that I could have news of my to grant me any tidings of my
d,ear wife; were it only her name on dearest wife-so much as to let me
a card, to show that she is alive! know by a word whether alive or
It were the greatest consolation I dead-I might have thought that
could receive; and I should forever He had not quite abandoned them.
bless the greatness of Monseigneur. Bk. ini, ch. 10.

The echo is audible enough in the language; there is just as much

echo in the incidents.
The other passage in Carlyle is that which tells of Loiserolles'
self-sacrifice. " The Tumbrils move on. But in this set of Tum-

"Louis S6bastien Mercier, Le Tableau de Paris, Amsterdam, 1782, chap.

283.
1 The French Revolution, Vol. I, Bk. v, chap. 7.
'As Bottger has done (p. 13) to show Carlyle's general influence, with-
out however attaching any further importance to the passage.

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 THE SOURCES OF A TALE OF TWO CITIES 5

brils there are two other things notable: one notable person; and
one want of a notable person. The notable person is Lieutenant-
General Loiserolles, a nobleman by birth and by nature; laying
down his life here for his son. In the Prison of Saint-Lazare, the
night before last, hurrying to the Grate to hear the Death-list read,
he caught the name of his son. The son was asleep at the moment.
'I am Loiserolles,' cried the old man; at Tinville's bar, an error
in the Christian name is little; small objection was made." 10
Here is a deed which appeals impressively to the imagination and
might well recur to Dickens when the idea of self-sacrifice was
occupying his mind and he was hunting around for a striking
shape to give it. But one must not press conjectures to unde-
monstrable conclusions; there is here no necessary connection. Let
the resemblance stand for what it is worth.
What is submitted here is that Mercier and Carlyle had a more
immediate and important share in the invention of Dickens' plot
than is commonly supposed. In two if not in all three of the
passages mentioned above, they supplied the sparks (though no
more) which started Dickens' invention off along the lines it
actually took. The evolution seems to me to have been in some-
what the following order. Wilkie Collins' play supplied the germ
of Sydney Carton and his heroism; Carlyle suggested the French
Revolution as a melodramatic setting; perhaps too the great closing
scenes of the prison and guillotine; Mercier gave him the Dr.
Manette story, and into this readily fitted the letter episode from
Carlyle.
II

If this be so, it may clear up a mystery which caused consider-

able controversy at the time. While Dickens' novel was appearing
serially in All The Year Round, a play called The Dead Heart was
produced at the Adelphi bearing so startling a resemblance to A
Tale of Two Cities that the author, Watts Phillips, was charged
with plagiarism. Yet it had been written in 1856 and accepted by
the Adelphi the same year, long before ever Dickens had so much
as thought of his novel. The play, which is difficult to get, is as
follows.

10 The French Revolution, Vol. i, bk. VI, chap. 7. This resemblance too
is noted by Bottger but relegated to the insignificance of a footnote (p. 20).

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6 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES

In the Prologue, the events of which take place in Paris in 1771,

Robert Landry, a young sculptor, is affianced to Catherine Duval,
the daughter of a Paris vintner. She is forcibly abducted by the
Comte St. Valerie, who contrives to have Landry thrown into the
Bastille on a lettre de cachet.-The main action begins with the
release of Landry at the storming of the Bastille, eighteen years
later. (Thus as in Dickens an early wrong, a later consequence,
in two separate stories.) Old friends recognize him and the past
gradually comes back to his bewildered brain. He hears that Cath-
erine has married St. Valerie, but is now a widow with one son
Arthur. He determines to avenge himself on the son. He becomes
a deputy of the people, through him Arthur is arrested and
condemned to death. The morning of his execution, Catherine
gains access to Landry and pleads for her son's life. He remains
insensible to her. At the very moment however when the tumbrils
are beginning to rumble past the prison, he receives convincing
proof that Catherine had loved him all the time and even that St.
Valerie had been innocent of the worst of the wrong done to him.
He arranges for Arthur's instant flight from Paris and takes
Arthur's place in the waiting tumbril. The curtain falls on
Landry mounting the scaffold.
Here you have all the impressive paraphernalia of the Terror
just as in Dickens; an innocent man flung into the Bastille at the
will of an aristocrat; a " dead heart " brought back to life after
eighteen years; Nemesis threatening not the wrong-doer himself
but his son; the final situation duplicating Dickens in almost every
detail. No two stories could well be more similar without being
identical and it is no wonder that suspicion fell on Phillips. He
retorted by declaring that Dickens was the borrower, having heard
the play read aloud by Ben Webster, the manager of the Adelphi,
who was a friend of Dickens. The statement wants proof. Mr. Percy
Fitzgerald nevertheless goes so far as to allow that Dickens may
have been told the plot of the play.1' But the case is surely expli-
cable otherwise. Phillips admittedly owed, like Dickens, the local
colour of his play to Carlyle's book; may he too not have obtained
the suggestion for his two main situations (Bastille and guillotine)
from it and Mercier's Tableau? In other words, Dickens did not
borrow from Phillips nor was it a case of mere coincidence; it was

"Percy Fitzgerald, Life of Charles Dickens, 1905, ii, 195-196.

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 THE SOURCES OF A TALE OF TWO CITIES 7

a case of common source. I am not the first to come to this con-

clusion. Phiz wrote at the time to one of his sons in connection
with the novel: " A rather curious thing happened with this book.
Watts Phillips, the dramatist, hit upon the very same identical
plot; they had evidently been to the same source in Paris for their
story." 12 And to Chelsea, I would add.

III

Another coincidence remains to be pointed out, this time with

a greater than Phillips. To most readers one of the most original
scenes in all Dickens (as it is certainly one of the most impressive)
is, I fancy, that in which the Doctor of Beauvais is summoned at
night to attend a dying woman in a mysterious chateau.'3 Yet
that there is nothing new under the sun is shown by the occurrence
in the fifth canto of Scott's Rokceby of an identical scene.
Edmund's ballad in that canto runs thus:

"'And whither would you lead me, then?'

Quoth the friar of orders grey;
And the ruffians twain replied again,
'By a dying woman to pray.'

"'I see,' he said, 'a lovely sight,

A sight bodes little harm,
A lady as a lily bright,
VVith an infant on her arm.'

"'Then do thine office, friar grey,

And see thou shrive her free;
Else shall the sprite that parts tonight,
Fling all its guilt on thee.'

" The shrift is done, the friar is gone,

Blindfolded as he came-
Next morning all in Littlecot Hall
Were weeping for their dame."

This ballad, Scott tells us,14 was founded on a story in Aubrey s

SF. G. Kitton, The Novels of Charles Dickens, 1897, p. 178. These par-
ticulars from Fitzgerald and Kitton I owe to Frilulein KAthe Tamsen of
Hamburg University, who kindly copied out extracts from books not ob-
tainable by me in Holland.
" A Tale of Two Cities, Bk. II, chap. 10.
14 The Poetical Works, Author's Edition, ed. by J. C;. Lockhart, 1869.
Notes to Rokeby, p. 390.

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8 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES

Correspondence to this effect. " Sir Dayrell of Littlecote,

in Corn. wilts., having gott his lady's waiting woman with child,
when her travell came, sent a servant with a horse for a midwife,
whom he was to bring hoodwinked. She was brought, and layd
the woman, but as soon as the child was born, she sawe the knight
take the child and murther it, and burn it in the fire in the
chamber. She having done her businesse was extraordinarily re-
warded for her paines, and sent blindfolded away." Having drawn
her own conclusions from what she had been permitted to see, she
immediately gives information, the deed is traced to Dayrell, and
he is brought to trial; the unexpected upshot of which, acquittal
through bribery, being the occasion of Aubrey's report.'5 In an
Edinburgh tradition (related by Scott in the same long note), the
person summoned is a clergyman, and this clergyman it is, Aubrey's
midwife not being a sufficiently romantic figure, that Scott intro-
duced, tricked out in a friar's frock, into his ballad. In the tra-
dition, as in the ballad, it is the woman, not the child, who dies.
Here then, in three different stories all antecedent to Dickens,
we have his very situation of the midnight call to a bedside, the
compromising amour, the beautiful woman on the bed, the tragic
close. Did he know any of the three? Who shall say? He knew
Scott's writings well for one thing; he was keenly interested in
criminal cases such as Aubrey relates, for another. His large
library too contained many old authors like Burton and Bacon
and Evelyn,'" so that it is less improbable than one might suppose
from Dickens' unscholarly turn of mind, that he had read Aubrey
and come across the anecdote there. At any rate Scott's poem with
the highly interesting note was accessible to him. Whether he had
read the poem or, if he had, was struck by the insignificant ballad
sufficiently to consult the note, is a wholly different matter.
And there is another point at which Dickens may have come
into contact with the story. Littlecote Hall is not hid away in a
hole and corner. The old manor house is visible to this day fronm
the Bath Road two miles from Hungerford and this story of
"Wild Darrell," as he was called, was well known in the neighbor-
hood as late at least as the eighties when Outram Tristram wrote

15 lb., Scott's note.

"For these particulars on Dickens' reading and library, cf. Dibelius,
hCharles Dickens, p. 298.

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 THE SOIURCES OF A TALE OF TWO CITIES 9

his Coaching Days and Coaching Ways. There is no reason why

Dickens on one of his numerous journeyings should not have heard
the story on the spot. Marlborough Downs close by were evi-
dently known to him, judging by "The Bagman's Story" in
The Pickwick.'7 He probably passed along the Great Bath
Road westward or eastward bound more than once in his restless
life and can scarcely have failed to notice the quaint Tudor gables
of Littlecote or ask their history. The "haunted room" is still
shown at Littlecote, and the country folk still point out the stile
where Darrell, having saved his neck from the rope, broke it at
length by a fall while riding, his horse having shied violently at a
flaming babe in the path! Darrell, it seems, was what we call
" a thoroughly bad lot," and notorious for more than the midwife
affair. He was " at feud with all his neighbours, accused of one
murder, suspected of another, his name a byword for profligacy
and something worse "; 17' he ran away with Lady Hungerford, his
neighbour's wife, and, what brings us nearer to our story, was
reported to have had several children by the sister of one of his
servants and to have murdered one of them.'8 Quite a marquis-
like figure this! Apart altogether from tradition, there exist, as
the letter just quoted shows, authentic documents about the inter-
esting owner of Littlecote, Darrell papers at the Record Office, and
the deposition made on her deathbed by Mrs. Barnes the midwife.
Littlecote Hall figures in history just a hundred years after
Darrell's time. It was there that William of Orange lay the night
after his meeting with King James' commissioners at Hungerford
in December, 1688. The fact is thus noted by Macaulay. "He
retired to Littlecote Hall, a manor house situated about two miles
off, and renowned down to our own times, not more on account of
its venerable architecture and furniture than on account of a hor-
rible and mysterious crime which was perpetrated there in. the days
of the Tudors." 19 Now MIacaulay may have learned this story
from Scott's note to Rokeby which he mentions in a footnote-for
the word " renowned " is only Macaulayan hyperbole. In which
case Dickens may have learned it there too, perhaps attracted to it

17 Prof. Dibelius points this out to me.

17a Outram Tristram, Coaching Days and Coaching Ways, p. 46.
"'Letter from Sir H. Knyvelt of Charlton, quoted by Tristram, p. 47
"History of England, chap. ix. The italics are mine.

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 10 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES

by this very passage in Macaulay which is sufficiently striking.

Or the story may really have been known to a considerable circle
in the world at large, to Scott for example, and why then not to
Dickens?
All which goes to show that the sinister scene enacted that wild
night in the room at Littlecote was not by any means too obscure
for Dickens to stumble across somewhere or somehow in his quest
of the sensational. Whether he did or not, the analogy is too curi-
ously close not to be worth noticing.
J. A. FALCONER.
The University of G-roningen.

LES SOIURCES IYUN POEME DE LECONTE DE LISLE

Dans son 6tude sur les Sources de Leconte de Lisle, Montpeilier,

1907, M. Joseph Vianey indique comme source probable du Calu-
met du Sachem (Poemes tragiques, xxxii), le Voyage pittoresque
dans les Grands Deserts du Nouveau Monde de l'abbe Em. Dome-
nech (Paris, Morizot, s. d.). La preface est datee de 1860, dit
M. Vianey. L'edition que j'ai sous les yeux, et qui semble etre en
tout la m8me, est datee de 1862.
Les rapprochements indiques par M. Vianey, Voyage pittoresqute,
ch. xiii, p. 124; ch. xvii, p. 586; ch. xiv, p. 459, sont de valeur
inegale. Le premier passage cite renferme des indications assez
generales sur le dolce far niente cher aux Peaux-Rouges et leur
gout pour les reveries que leur procurent leurs "pipes de steatite
rouge." Le second est une tres breve description des idees qu'ont
les Indiens sur l'autre vie et pourrait en effet avoir inspire au
moins une strophe du poeme, l'avant-derniere. Le troisieme, qui
contient.un tableau tres colore des forets du Nouveau Monde,
merite d'etre 6tudie dans le detail et nous y reviendrons plus loin.
Disons sans plus attendre, qu'il faut savoir gre a M. Vianey
d'avoir le premier signale l'ouvrage de l'abbe Domenech que Le-
conte de Lisle a certainement utilise, dans une plus large mesure
meme que M. Vianey ne l'a indique. Domenech n'est cependant
point la seule source du Calumet du Sachem. Leconte de Lisle a
puise non pas a une source unique, mais au moins a deux et presque
certainement "a trois, comme une analyse detaillee du po'eme nous
permettra de le demontrer.

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