stituted the historian's stock in trade are now relegated to the background as

secondary causes.
The modern basis for the study of a historical period is its economic and social
conditions.
According to this depersonalized method even the Great Man theory of progress,
beloved of literary historians for its dramatic value, has been consigned to
oblivion as unscientific.
Carlyle
has been vanquished by Dry-as-dust.
When we have fairly made up our minds, how-ever, to ascept the Dismal Science
in lieu of Hero Worship, our sacrifice to intellectual honesty is more than
rewarded.
The Dismal Science is
not unlike that Loathly Ladie whom
Gawain
submitted to wed and found a princess in disguise.
The sociological and economic method proves a revealer of new values and
unguessed relationships whereby both the complexity and the significance of
human events are enormously enhanced
If histo y has been so incalculably the gainer through the adoption of this method,
the question naturally occurs whether literature may not share in the results of
this new accession of fact?
One
would fancy this suggestion a matter of course, requiring no comment or
justification, but for the fact that it is so seldom acted upon except in the most
superficial manner.
It may be objected that all this is included in the accepted historical interpretation
of literature.
That is not altogether true.
Economic changes
and the resulting social conditions do undoubtedly
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evolution+on+English+Novel&ots=7UrPMsmkgF&sig

Background of French revolution in 'A Tale of Two

Cities'
A Tale of Two Cities consists of a number of episodes and characters that are
connected by Dickens with historical side of the French Revolution. In the very
first chapter entitled "Recalled to Life", he points out that the political condition
of London is similar to that of Paris. The lives and properties of Londoners are
insecure. The condition of France is no less rotten. If any Frenchman fails to pay
respects to the oppressive people, he is liable to be tortured and the same
incredible oppressive atmosphere prevailed in France also.
The second part of the book is devoted to an analysis of social conditions in pre-
revolutionary
France.
Monseigneur, a powerful lord at the court, typified the tyranny and callousness of
the aristocrats. Four cooks were employed by him to prepare chocolate for him.
Instead of devoting himself to the promotion of public welfare, he spends his time
in theatres in the company of fascinating ladies. Government officials are
inefficient.
Military officers are without military knowledge and civil officers are equally
ignorant of civil affairs. Doctors are engaged in curing the imaginary diseases of
fashionable ladies and philosophers are busy building castles in the air.
Anstocratic ladies think it a disgrace to beget children.
In short, it is a top heavy society with its upper classes grinding out of the lower
classes
The tragic past of Dr. Manette reveals the character of Evermonde brothers who
has spoiled an innocent working world. Dr. Manette is put in the Bastille prison
for eighteen years because he earns the displeasure of a noble man. Aristocrats
can send anybody to jail at that time. The poor people suffered a lot, for instance,
they drink the wine that is accidentally spilt on the street.
Marquis, the uncle of Darnay is another representative of the heartless
Aristocracy, His coach rushes a child todeath. He throws a gold coin to the father
of the dead child. He is worried about his horses than the child.
Darnay is benevolent and wants his uncle to stop exploiting the poor. But Marquis
turns a deaf ear. He thinks only of the good old days when the aristocrats could il-
treat the poor with impurity.
"Our remote ancestors held the right of Life and death over the surrounding
vulgar.
Men like Marquis who refuses to change with the changing times saw the wind;
the whirlwind they reap is the revolution with all its attendant horrors. The
feelings of the people in France reach the boiling point and theystormed Bastille.
A Tale of Two Cities creates the impression that, before the revolution French
common people suffered from such savage oppression that eventually they rose
against their masters in a frenzy of bloodlust and revenge. The aim of the
revolution is not merely to chop of the heads of the aristocrats but to improve the
economic conditions of the poor. But this has not been achieved by the
revolution.
Poverty continues to grind out the poor. The worst face of the revolution is
reached when its own supporters start suspecting and accusing one another.
Madam Defarge is a fierce, vindictive and impassive woman. She can inflict
vengeance on her enemies and the upper classes. She knits the names of her
intended victims and exemplifies the driving force behind the revolution. She
heads the women of St. Antonie and leads them to attack the Bastille. She does
not have the soft feelings and tender sentiments that are usually associated with
the fairer sex
Throughout her life, she has been exposed to the sufferings of the poor at the
hands of the nobles. Hence, she generalizes that all aristocrats are wicked and
deserve to be put to death. There are glorious exceptions like Charles Darnay who
relinquishes his property of his own accord in favour of the poor, But, to Madam
Defarge, such stray exceptions do not invalidate the general rule.
Her implacable hatred of the anstocrats is seen when she demands the death of
Dr. Manette, Lucie and her little girl. Lucie, as a wife and mother, appeals to
Madame Defarge and requests her not to do any harm for her husband. Madame
Defarge talks only of the hundreds of poor wives and mothers whose husbands
endured untold sufferings at the hands of nobles.
We have seen our sister women suffer
Nakedness, hunger, thirst, sickness, misery.
Oppression and neglect of all kinds.

The revolution does not do much good also because most of its supporters are
like Barsard, political chame-leons. They attach themselves to save their skins.
Men like the Juryman and the mender of the road have joined the movement
because it satisfies their craving for some sensation or other. With such shallow
witted people supporting it, the revolution is bound to go avry.

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C9CA86946103#:~:text=Dickens%20depicts%20this%20process%20most,symbols
%20of%20the%20French%20Revolution.
Dickens and the French revolution
Dickens is non-committed in his attitude towards the revolution. He condemns
the evil aristocracies. At the same time, he condemns the evil revolutionists also
who have no less blood thirsty than the aristocrats of old. He hates oppression
wherever it is found. When the rich are oppressed by the poor inspite of their
innocence, he pities the rich. When the poor are oppressed by the rich he pities
the poor. As Chesterton says, "Dickens did sympathize with every sort of victim of
every sort oftyrant. He did truly pray for all who are desolate and oppressed". To
Dickens, evil and tyranny can beget only evil and tyranny. The only way to avoid
the revolution and all its blood bath is to practice Christian charity, as Darnay and
Sydney Carton do. Darnay voluntarily
relinquishes his property in favour of the poor and does not mind his own life in
order to save the poor citizen, Gabelle. Sydney Carton gladly lays down his life for
the sake of his love. Jarvis Lorry and Jerry Cruncher are loyal to the core and are
bent on protecting the interests of their customers. Without minding the grave
dangers, Lorry and Cruncher go to Paris when the revolution is at its height, just
to save their belongings of their French customers. Miss.Pross, the servant maid
of Lucie, does not betray Lucie. When Pross is threatened by Madam Defarge with
imminent death, Pross violently wrestles with the tigrish woman and does not
think of divulging the secret of Lucie's departure in order to save her own skin.
Those people- Carton, Darnay, Dr. Manette, Lorry, Cruncher and Miss Pross with
their capacity for voluntary abdication and self-sacrifice are far nobler than the
aristocrats of the old order and the revolutionists of the new order. The only
revolution that Dickens recommends is the Christian revolution of self-sacrifice
and self-abnegation and not the French revolution of plundering and pillaging.

It is not solely on the private virtues that this growing insignificance of the individual in the mass is
productive of mischief J. S. Mill There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as
masses Raymond Williams Until recently, Dickens criticism has often operated with an idea of his writing
privileging inter-personal relations, especially focused on the family, as a safe haven against the
vicissitudes of historical change and the prison-house of society (Bowen and Patten 2006, 7). Such
judgements may seem to have a particular purchase in relation to his historical novels, both of which
narrate eruptions of mass political action; the Gordon Riots of 1780 in Barnaby Rudge (1841) and the
French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities (1859). In his classic study of the historical novel, Georg Lukàcs
argued that these texts take on ‘the character of modern privateness in regard to history’ (1969,
292).The plots of both novels do focus on the survival of a family group despite the turbulence of events
around them: in Barnaby Rudge, the family of the locksmith Gabriel Vardon provides a refuge for those
who survive; A Tale of Two Cities, of course, famously ends with Sidney Carton’s vision of an afterlife in
‘a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence’ (Dickens 2000,
390).1 Plenty of people who have never read A Tale of Two Cities know the famous lines from its
denouement: ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I
go to, than I have ever known’ (390). 172 K. Mitchell et al. (eds.), Reading Historical Fiction © Palgrave
Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2013 Jon Mee 173 They are mostly read as self-
sacrifice, as the initially craven Carton places ‘affective’ family values above even his own fate. According
to Lukàcs, ‘Dickens, by giving pre-eminence to the purely moral aspects of causes and effects, weakens
the connexion between the problems of the characters’ lives and the events of the French Revolution’
(1969, 292). This essay argues, on the contrary, that Dickens’s narrative technique, especially his use of
‘cinematic’ effects like close-ups and dissolves, undercuts the separation of the private and the political,
complicates the relationship between causes and effects, and in the process creates a sense of the
continuous and continuing pressure of the past on the present that refuses the autonomy of the
‘human-moral’ (292) qualities that Lukàcs identifies with bourgeois ideology. Neither the Manettes in A
Tale of Two Cities nor the family that survives the turmoil of Barnaby Rudge are represented in any
obvious sense as part of a ‘natural’ order; both are made up of survivors cast out from other failed
families. In neither case is ‘family’ a unit that transcends history, nor in either case does any simple
opposition to the masses define it. In both novels, there are crucial moments when the masses are
shown to be constituted from and even motivated by family values of sorts. These aspects of the novels
are not simply thematic, nor are they limited to the working out of the plot. They are also intrinsic to the
narrative techniques that Dickens exploits in looking at the past. ‘Ways of seeing’, to use John Berger’s
phrase (1986), are crucial to any estimation of Dickens’s representation of the past, well beyond the
critical commonplace that acknowledges the distinctive visuality of his imagination (Bowen and Patten
2006, 4). The variability of perspective in the novels complicates their sense of history, opening out
causative relations, and questioning the relationship between ‘people’ and ‘masses’. In this regard,
Dickens seems to anticipate Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s view that writers should: Exert a double vision;
should have eyes To see near things as comprehensively As if afar they took their point of sight, And
distant things as intimately deep As if they touched them. (1994, 451) In Dickens the relationship
between perspectives on the past and present is more complex than Barrett Browning’s binary allows,
for, as

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