Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:17:47.508Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Democracy, Terror, and Utopia in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2022

Lanya Lamouria Open the ORCID record for Lanya Lamouria [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay reads Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) as a previously unrecognized contribution to Victorian discourses around democracy. Approaching the novel through the parliamentary reform debate of the late 1850s and through Dickens's earlier writings about American democracy, I argue that this historical narrative of the French Revolution elaborates Victorian liberals’ fears that democracy will, on one hand, devalue individuality and produce a world of sameness or, on the other, overvalue individual sovereignty, giving way to isolating difference and social fragmentation. Despite his deep ambivalence about democratic reform, Dickens uses the novel to imagine alternative forms of political representation. The motif of “echoing footsteps” is one key example of the utopian democratic fantasy that the novel develops. In the “echoing footsteps” passages, Dickens appropriates the theories of Charles Babbage for political purposes, proposing that the earth's atmosphere is a medium that contains a complete democratic record of all the sounds made by every individual in existence. In this respect, the novel anticipates a concept of democracy as individual expression that today increasingly threatens democratic institutions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 2022 , pp. 295 - 324
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Ansted, Thomas David. “Recent Discoveries Concerning Light.” All the Year Round, June 15, 1861.Google Scholar
Arasse, Daniel. The Guillotine and the Terror. Translated by Miller, Christopher. London: Allen Lane / Penguin, 1989.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, 1973.Google Scholar
Babbage, Charles. The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. A Fragment. London: John Murray, 1837.Google Scholar
Baldridge, Cates. “Alternatives to Bourgeois Individualism in A Tale of Two Cities.” SEL 30, no. 4 (1990): 633–54.Google Scholar
Bowen, John. “Counting On: A Tale of Two Cities.” In Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution, edited by Jones, Colin, McDonagh, Josephine, and Mee, John, 104–25. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. Lucretia, or the Children of the Night. 1847. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1874.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. The French Revolution. 1837. New York: The Modern Library, n.d.Google Scholar
Claybaugh, Amanda. “Towards a New Transatlanticism: Dickens in the United States.” Victorian Studies 48, no. 3 (2006): 439–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clayton, Jay. Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Clayton, Jay. “The Dickens Tape: Affect and Sound Reproduction in The Chimes.” In Dickens and Modernity, edited by John, Juliet, 19–40. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012.Google Scholar
Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Crook, Malcolm. Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy, 1789–1799. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Quincey, Thomas. “The English Mail-Coach.” 1849. In The English Mail Coach and Other Essays, 1–46. London: Dent, 1970.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. American Notes. 1842. Edited by Ingham, Patricia. London: Penguin, 2000.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1852–53. Edited by Bradbury, Nicola. London: Penguin, 2003.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. The Chimes. 1844. London: Chapman and Hall, 1845.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Letters of Charles Dickens. Edited by House, Madeline et al. 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–2002.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Martin Chuzzlewit. 1842–44. Edited by Ingham, Patricia. London: Penguin, 2004.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. 1859. Edited by Maxwell, Richard. London: Penguin, 2000.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Essays on Reform. London: Macmillan, 1867.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Frances. “On Terrorism and Morals: Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.” Partial Answers 3, no. 2 (2005): 49–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hadley, Elaine. Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hadley, Elaine. “Nobody, Somebody, and Everybody.” Victorian Studies 59, no. 1 (2017): 65–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, Angus. Victorian Political Culture: “Habits of Hearts and Minds.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hensley, Nathan. “Armadale and the Logic of Liberalism.” Victorian Studies 51, no. 4 (2009): 607–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horsman, Alan. The Victorian Novel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Ingham, Patricia. Introduction to American Notes, by Dickens, Charles, xi–xxxvi. London: Penguin, 2000.Google Scholar
Innes, Joanna, and Philip, Mark. Introduction to Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750–1850, edited by Innes, Joanna and Philip, Mark, 1–10. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
John, Juliet. “‘A body without a head’: The Idea of Mass Culture in Dickens's American Notes (1842).” Journal of Victorian Culture 12, no. 2 (2007): 172–202.Google Scholar
Johnston, Norman. “Reforming Criminals.” In Eastern State Penitentiary: Crucible of Good Intentions, edited by Johnston, Norman, Finkel, Kenneth, and Cohen, Jeffrey A., 21–29. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1994.Google Scholar
Jordan, John O. “Dickens and Soundscape: The Old Curiosity Shop.” E-rea: Révue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone 13, no. 2 (2016): n.p., doi.org/10.4000/erea.4943.Google Scholar
Joshi, Priti. “Mutiny Echoes: India, Britons, and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 62, no. 1 (2007): 48–87.Google Scholar
Kucich, John. “The Purity of Violence: A Tale of Two Cities.” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 8 (1980): 119–37.Google Scholar
Lee, Julia Sun-Joo. The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Levitsky, Steven, and Ziblatt, Daniel. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018.Google Scholar
Lewes, George Henry. The Life of Maximilien Robespierre; with Extracts from His Unpublished Correspondence. London: Chapman and Hall, 1849.Google Scholar
Linebaugh, Peter, and Rediker, Marcus. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. 1937. Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Machin, Ian. The Rise of Democracy in Britain, 1830–1918. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Mansfield, Harvey C., and Winthrop, Delba. Introduction to Democracy in America, edited by Mansfield, Harvey C. and Winthrop, Delba, xvii–lxxxvi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Tucker, Robert C., 473–99. New York: Norton, 1978.Google Scholar
Maxwell, Richard. Introduction to A Tale of Two Cities, by Dickens, Charles, ix–xxxiii. New York: Penguin, 2000.Google Scholar
McIntosh, Hugh. “Misreading and the Marketplace: Dickens and Du Maurier in a Commercial Age.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 49, no. 3 (2016): 429–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mehta, Uday Singh. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. Considerations on Representative Government. In On Liberty and Other Essays, edited by Gray, John, 203–467. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. In On Liberty and Other Essays, edited by Gray, John, 5–128. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Mitchell, W. J. T. “The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable: Word and Image in a Time of Terror.” ELH 72 (2005): 291–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, Grace. Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004.Google Scholar
Morley, John. “Young England and the Political Future.” Fortnightly Review 7 (1867): 491–96.Google Scholar
Moss, Sidney P. Charles Dickens’ Quarrel with America. Troy: Whitston, 1984.Google Scholar
Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso, 2009.Google Scholar
Mullen, Mary L. Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Picker, John. Victorian Soundscapes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poovey, Mary. “The Production of Abstract Space.” In Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864, 25–54. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.Google Scholar
“Republic.” Oxford English Dictionary online, www.oed.com (accessed January 8, 2020).Google Scholar
Robespierre, Maximilien. Virtue and Terror. Translated by Howe, John. London: Verso, 2007.Google Scholar
Saunders, Robert. Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848–1867: The Making of the Second Reform Act. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011.Google Scholar
Schmidt, James. “Cabbage Heads and Gulps of Water: Hegel on the Terror.” Political Theory 26, no. 1 (1998): 4–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siegel, Daniel. “Griffith, Dickens, and the Politics of Composure.” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 375–89.Google Scholar
“Sir G. C. Lewis, on Parliamentary Reform.” Tablet (London, England), October 9, 1858.Google Scholar
Smiles, Samuel. Self-Help, with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance. 1859. London: John Murray, 1958.Google Scholar
Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Edited and translated by Mansfield, Harvey C. and Winthrop, Delba. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Turner, Fred. The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, Fred. “Machine Politics: The Rise of the Internet and a New Age of Authoritarianism.” Harper's Magazine, January 2019, https://harpers.org/archive/2019/01/machine-politics-facebook-political-polarization.Google Scholar
Walpole, Spencer. The Life of Lord John Russell. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1891.Google Scholar
Zuboff, Shoshana. “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization.” Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zuckerberg, Mark. “A Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement.” Facebook, www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-blueprint-for-content-governance-and-enforcement/10156443129621634 (accessed November 15, 2018).Google Scholar