Charles Dickens, arguably Britain's greatest novelist

7^th February is a special day for the worldwide community of people who are proud to call themselves “Dickensians” (myself included) because this was the day in 1812 when Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth.

His father, John Dickens, was a naval pay clerk whose duties included taking wages to the crews of ships moored in the harbour. The Dickens family moved with the job, firstly to Chatham in Kent and then to London. Charles Dickens is therefore regarded as a “London novelist” because that is where he spent most of his life and all but one of his novels is set wholly or in part in London (the exception is Hard Times which is set in an imaginary northern industrial town).

Charles Dickens had some hard times of his own as he was growing up, mainly due to his father’s inability to manage money and support his growing family, but he discovered an ability to write amusing and incisive stories that were soon to prove immensely popular. By the end of his life (he died in 1870 at the age of 58) he was a wealthy man who was able to buy a substantial property (Gad’s Hill House) that he had admired while talking walks as a boy when living in Chatham.

Dickens is renowned for bringing the public’s attention to many of the evils of his time, particularly those associated with poverty. Although he sometimes lapsed into sentimentality, his general tone is a hard-headed one that recognises that good and evil deeds can be committed by members of all classes of society. Although many of the social problems mentioned in his novels and stories are only of historical interest today, Charles Dickens was a master at creating colourful and complex characters (not just caricatures, which is an accusation often levelled at him) whose failings and foibles are still very much with us. That is why Charles Dickens was a writer for all times and not just his own.

There are many fascinating aspects to the life of Charles Dickens, which I came to appreciate a few years ago when I was asked by the Dickens Fellowship to compile an index to 31 annual volumes of their journal “The Dickensian”. This involved me in reading and analysing some 6,000 pages of text devoted to the life and works of Dickens, so I ended up acquiring quite an encyclopaedic knowledge!

© John Welford

Charles Dickens and a murder in Boston

Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood has posed many mysteries of its own down the years, not least that of how Dickens intended to conclude the book. He died on 9^th June 1870 from a stroke, having written his final words only a few hours before, with possibly half of the intended text still unwritten.

One possibility of how the plot might have developed from that point is suggested by an ostensibly unlikely source, namely a notorious murder case that occurred in Boston Massachusetts in 1849.

The Murder of Dr Parkman by Professor Webster

Dr George Parkman had been a medical doctor, but in his later years he turned to being a landlord of residential properties in Boston and a moneylender. He also had links with the medical college of Harvard University, and one of his clients was Professor John Webster, who was Professor of Chemistry at the medical college.

On Friday 23^rd November 1849, Dr Parkman was seen entering the medical college but was never seen again alive. One week later, Professor Webster was arrested for murder. The trial took place in March 1850, with Webster being found guilty on 1^st April and hanged on 30^th August.

Webster’s motive for murder was clearly financial, in that he owed Dr Parkman more than $2,000 which he could not repay. Webster was in considerable difficulty and had even mortgaged his valuable collection of minerals twice, as collateral for loans from two different sources. Parkman knew about this fraud and was threatening to expose Webster and force him from his chair of chemistry. When Parkman went to the college that day he was attending an appointment with Webster at which Parkman expected to receive a substantial portion of the money that he was owed.

One of the fascinating aspects of the case is that Webster went to enormous trouble to dispose of Parkman’s body within the confines of the college. His activities, which included working late at night in his locked laboratory, soon excited the suspicions of the college janitor, Ephraim Littlefield, who was inspired to dig through the brickwork on the outside of the basement of Professor Webster’s laboratory. Human remains were found and Webster was arrested.

Before burning Parkman’s clothes and dismembering the body, Webster had taken his watch and thrown it into the river.

How Charles Dickens Learned About the Case

Charles Dickens made two visits to the United States. On the first of these, in 1842, he had met Professor Webster in Boston, and it is also possible that he met Dr Parkman. He was therefore interested to read an article about the case that was written by a friend of his, Sir James Tennent. Dickens accepted the article for his journal, All the Year Round, and it was published in December 1867.

On Dickens’s second American tour, in 1868, he made a point of visiting the scene of the crime. He also met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had known Webster and could testify to his strange behaviour. Dickens left Boston knowing as much about the case as he could glean.

The Parkman Murder and Edwin Drood

The connections between the Parkman murder and Edwin Drood can be traced from 1869 when Dickens was making plans for a new novel. In both cases, the chief suspect is an outwardly respectable and distinguished member of an elite community, but with a dark secret and a hidden, passionate nature. In both cases, the victim disappears. In both cases, the hiding place for the body is an underground room. In both cases, the suspect tries to obtain quicklime in order to dissolve the body. In both cases, a working man is key to the finding of the body. In both cases, a watch belonging to the victim is thrown into a river. There are a number of further parallels.

In the case of Edwin Drood, not all of the above coincidences can be found in the text, but they can be deduced from the notes and letters that Dickens left behind. There is a more complicated plot to Edwin Drood than the Parkman murder, with a number of other characters being introduced – every murder mystery needs a few red herrings!

However, if the above scenario is correct, there would seem to be little doubt that Dickens intended to complete his novel with the arrest and trial of his chief suspect, John Jasper (even the first name is the same!). Webster wrote a confession in his prison cell, which was apparently what Dickens intended would happen in the case of Jasper. Although not exact parallels, there would seem be enough evidence to suggest that Dickens had the Parkman case very much in mind when he wrote The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

© John Welford

Some early London homes of Charles Dickens

Visitors to London who are lovers of the novels of Charles Dickens are doubtless familiar with the house in Doughty Street (not far from the British Museum) where Dickens lived as a young man and wrote some of his early novels, including Oliver Twist.

However, they may not be aware that several other streets in London were home to Charles Dickens at various stages in his life, although the Dickens pilgrim will, in most cases, only have a blue plaque to view as more recent developments have swept away nearly all these 19^th century buildings. The following houses were lived in by the young Charles Dickens between the ages of 10 and 12.

Bayham Street, Camden Town

The Dickens family moved from Chatham (Kent) to London in June 1822, to 16 Bayham Street. Charles would have been ten years old at the time, which was coincidentally about the same age as the small terraced house into which the growing family crowded itself. At the time Camden Town was virtually a village on the outskirts of London, with open fields between it and the city, some three miles distant.

Charles did not move in with the rest of the family at first, because he stayed put in Chatham where he lodged with his schoolmaster William Giles to continue his education. He probably joined the family in Bayham Street in September 1822, and his childhood, which had previously been a happy one, then took on a much darker hue.

The house was demolished in 1910, but a blue plaque was erected to mark the spot. One small window was rescued from the site and is now in the possession of the Dickens Museum.

Gower Street North

John Dickens, Charles’s father, was notoriously bad with money and was constantly in debt. John therefore proposed that his wife Elizabeth should open a school in a better part of town, closer to the centre, to be known as “Mrs Dickens’s Establishment”. This was to be in the family’s new home at 4 Gower Street North, itself a brand-new building, with six rooms and thus much more space than the house in Bayham Street had. 

The family moved in at Christmas 1823, but the stay was a short one. For one thing, the school idea never got off the ground, there being no evidence that even a single pupil ever enrolled with Mrs Dickens. Charles was given a job by a family friend at a shoe-blacking warehouse on the banks of the Thames, so that some extra income could help to pay for the extra expenses of their new home. Charles long regarded this period as the darkest of his young life (it was possibly around the date of his 12^th birthday, in February 1824, when he started work).

There is no trace today of the house at Gower Street, the site of which is covered in part by University College Hospital.

Little College Street, Camden Town

Disaster struck the Dickens family on 20^th February 1824 when John Dickens was arrested for debt and sent to the Marshalsea prison. Mrs Dickens and the three youngest children moved into the prison, eventually giving up the tenancy of the house in Gower Street, but Charles, still working at the blacking factory, was lodged with a Mrs Roylance at Little College Street, not far from Bayham Street. 

Charles now had a form of independence, but he had to support himself on his small earnings from the blacking factory, to which he walked five miles each way. What he did not know was that he lived with Mrs Roylance and her family rent-free, as the guest of a family friend.

Charles only stayed there for a few weeks in 1824, as he missed the company of his family and begged his father to be allowed to live closer to the Marshalsea, which was south of the river.

Little College Street was renamed College Place in 1887, but Mrs Roylance’s house was demolished in 1890.

1 Lant Street, Borough

Charles lodged here for a short period in 1824, prior to his father’s release from the Marshalsea on 28^th May. We know that his room overlooked a timber yard, but, being out at work all day and visiting his family at the Marshalsea in the evening, he doubtless did little there apart from sleep, so the “noises off” would have bothered him little. For the young Charles, having a room of his own, and his family just round the corner, this was “Paradise”, to use his own word.

  

Lant Street still exists, but the row of houses including No 1 was demolished in 1974. Visitors can see neither the house nor the Marshalsea (apart from one stretch of the outer wall), but they can walk along nearby Marshalsea St, Pickwick St, Sawyer St, Copperfield St (and others named after Dickens characters) and see the Charles Dickens Primary School on Lant St itself.

© John Welford

A potted biography of Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth on 7^th February 1812, the eldest child of a naval pay clerk. The family soon moved away, firstly to Chatham in Kent and then to London, which was to be Charles’s home for most of the rest of his life.

The family went through some bad times during his childhood, and at one stage he had to work in a shoe-blacking warehouse to help support the rest of the family.

He started writing stories and sketches while working as a parliamentary reporter, and, once he got a story into print, he simply had to write more. At first he used the name “Boz” as a non de plume, and his “Sketches by Boz” proved to be highly popular.

His first novel was the somewhat rambling “Pickwick Papers” that was really a set of farcical stories within a loose framework. However, this was so popular with the public that Dickens was set on a full-time career as a writer. In all he wrote 15 novels, including the unfinished “Mystery of Edwin Drood”, as well as shorter stories that included “A Christmas Carol”.

Among his most popular novels were “Oliver Twist”, “Nicholas Nickleby”, “David Copperfield”, “Great Expectations” and “Bleak House”.

Dickens wrote all his novels in serial form, producing weekly or monthly parts which were sometimes part of journals containing other material, both by himself and other writers.

Charles Dickens married Catherine Hogarth on 2^nd April 1836. They were to have ten children, nine of whom survived to adulthood. However, the marriage eventually broke down and the couple separated in 1858, although they were never divorced. Dickens had a secret affair with an actress, Ellen Ternan, which continued for the rest of his life.

Dickens’s popularity was so great that he was able to make a considerable income by giving readings of extracts from his books to audiences across the country. He visited the United States twice during his lifetime, the second trip, in 1867-8, being a reading tour that was highly profitable.

However the strain of constant travelling and performing began to tell on his health and he had to give up the reading tours in 1869.

He died from a stroke on 9^th June 1870, having written his last words the day before. He had asked to be buried in Rochester Cathedral but Queen Victoria insisted that only Westminster Abbey was a suitable resting place for him.

© John Welford

Why Charles Dickens avoided Chicago

Charles Dickens made two visits to the United States, but they were very different in nature. He had been 30 years old in 1842 and was keen to discover as much as he could about the country and its people (he used this material most notably in his 1843 novel “Martin Chuzzlewit”). By the time of his return visit in 1867-8 he had written a large number of novels and stories, was hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and had discovered that he could make a good living by reading his works aloud to an adoring public.

His later visit was therefore a money-making trip, and he hoped to fit in as many readings as he could, in as many cities as he could reach. However, he was not in good health at this time in his life (he died in 1870), and one of the reasons for this was exhaustion brought on his many public performances in Britain. The original itinerary had to be cut back, and one of the cities to miss out was Chicago.

Why not Chicago?

The population of Chicago was not happy about being snubbed in this way, and they found his argument that “it was better that Chicago should go into fits than he should” to be a flimsy one. However, there was more to it than that.

Dickens had a younger brother, Augustus, who had settled in Chicago in 1858 but died there the year before Charles left London to start his tour. Augustus had caused Charles a considerable amount of trouble, and Charles had no wish, especially given his state of health, to have the past raked up again, which he thought was highly likely if he visited Chicago. He must therefore have been greatly relieved when told that he could leave that city off his itinerary.

Augustus Newnham Dickens

Augustus Dickens married Harriet Lovell, in London, in 1848. However, Harriet went blind two years later and Augustus refused to support her. When he left Britain for America he was accompanied by Bertha Phillips, the daughter of an Irish barrister. As far as the people of Chicago were concerned, there was a married couple in the city called Augustus and Bertha Dickens, they had three children, and Augustus was the brother of a famous British novelist.

The Chicago Dickenses were not well off, and Augustus had appealed to Charles for financial help, which Charles was not prepared to give, being highly critical of his brother’s conduct. When Augustus died from tuberculosis, aged 39, Bertha and the children were left in very poor circumstances.

Criticism of Charles Dickens

The Chicago Tribune got to hear about Charles Dickens’s refusal to help his relatives. They therefore ran a series of stories that accused Charles of gross hypocrisy in his “total want of consideration for the widow and children of his deceased brother”. Not only was Charles visiting America to make lots of money, but he would be doing so by reading from books that were full of instances of generosity being shown to the poor and needy by characters who were made aware of their social responsibilities. As far as they were concerned, Charles Dickens was the lowest of the low.

The Truth about Augustus and Bertha

However, what Charles Dickens knew, but the people of Chicago did not, was that Bertha was not the widow of Augustus at all. Indeed, Charles had been more than generous to Augustus’s real widow, Harriet, who was still living in England. Charles had no obligations to Bertha. He may have had a great deal of sympathy with her plight, but if he was seen to support her there was every chance that her status as an adulteress would be revealed. The kindest thing, therefore, was to stay well out of it.

As it happened, the truth did emerge, but not through any action by Charles Dickens. He had left America by the time that the Chicago Tribune ran its apology, and the consequence of that was exactly what Charles had feared, namely the exposure of Bertha.

The story had the worst possible ending because, with her past revealed for all to read, Bertha’s mental health collapsed. Her death in December 1868 appears to have been from a deliberate overdose of morphine.

So did Charles Dickens do the right thing?

At the root of the affair was a family in desperate need which could have been helped by a wealthy relative who chose not to, and he even took the opportunity to avoid seeing them when he could quite easily have done so. Charles could have insisted on not dropping Chicago from his list of venues, and he could even have used the income from his Chicago performance to help Bertha and her children. So was he being cowardly by staying away?

That could be argued, but, then again, the argument for not exposing Bertha was a strong one, as later events made tragically clear.

There was another reason for Charles’s decision, which was that it would have been an insult to Harriet, Augustus’s true widow, for Charles to support the woman who had been the cause of her distress in the first place by robbing her of her husband at a time when she had been in great need by virtue of going blind.

One can also sympathise with Charles who was just about the only member of his family who ever made any money. Charles was constantly being badgered by his siblings and his children for support, just as he had been in earlier life by his father. It is understandable that he had little desire to add another name to the list of people who were content to rely on him for hand-outs.

That said, there is evidence that Charles Dickens did actually do something to help Bertha, in the form of a secret annuity, but by the time this came into operation she was in such a poor state of health that it made little difference.

All in all, this was a difficulty that Charles Dickens could well have done without. The mess had been caused entirely by his feckless brother Augustus, who had abandoned his blind wife and fled to America. In the same circumstances, there can surely be few people who would not have followed the same line that Charles did, and been similarly reluctant to visit Chicago.

© John Welford

Charles Dickens and the Cleveland St workhouse

Charles Dickens’s second novel, “Oliver Twist”, is well known for the scenes in which young Oliver is born and brought up in a workhouse. Anyone who has seen the stage or screen version of Lionel Bart’s “Oliver” will recall the moment when Oliver is ejected after he is goaded by the other boys to “ask for more”. We see the boys spending hours “picking oakum” under the oversight of Mr Bumble, the pompous and corrupt beadle, and the cruel and degrading treatment meted out to children whose only crime was to have been born poor.

Dickens was not yet 25 when he started to write Oliver Twist in 1837. He already had a reputation, as “Boz”, for writing sketches of London life, many of them with a satirical or amusing slant, and for his rambling comic novel “The Pickwick Papers”. However, the first parts of Oliver Twist to hit the news-stands (like all his novels, it was published as a part-work) were of a somewhat different nature. The reader was presented with dark scenes of death in childbirth, squalor, poverty and child cruelty. What could have prompted this change in the young novelist? What memories was he perhaps bringing to the fore?

British historian Dr Ruth Richardson has linked the existence of a workhouse on a London street with one of Charles Dickens’s early homes, only nine doors down the same street. It seems inconceivable that the presence of this building so close to his own home could not have had a profound influence on young Charles, especially as he lived in the same house on two separate occasions and for a total of five years.


What was a Workhouse?

The reader might not be aware of the nature of a workhouse. These were institutions that go back several centuries, the original ones being built at least as early as the 17th century. They were a means of providing support to the very poorest members of society, so that parish funds for relief of the poor would be compensated by the provision of something tangible in the form of products made by recipients of the relief.

The workhouse provided somewhere to sleep at night and food to eat, but it was also a “house of correction”, in that extreme poverty was regarded as being, to a greater or lesser extent, the fault of the impoverished person. Workhouses were run with the deliberate intention of not being pleasant places, so that people would do everything they could to avoid being sent to one.

In 1834 the Poor Law Amendment Act changed things by preventing parishes from giving relief except via the workhouse. If you fell on hard times you either went to the workhouse or you starved, whereas under the previous system there was the option for some of “outdoor relief”. The Act ended a number of abuses and cruelties, but it reinforced others and introduced some new ones.

It was these abuses that Dickens sought to expose in the “workhouse” chapters of Oliver Twist. It is however of interest that some of the practices castigated by Dickens, writing after the 1834 Act came into force, belonged to the period before the Act, which was when he was living only a stone’s throw from a very prominent workhouse.

The existence of the Strand Union Workhouse in Cleveland Street has long been known about. It was originally built in 1778 as the workhouse for the parish of St Paul, Covent Garden, and took on the function of a union workhouse (i.e. to serve several neighbouring parishes) in 1836. In later years the building was used as the Outpatients’ Department of the Middlesex Hospital, but is now empty.


Charles Dickens and Cleveland Street

It has also long been known that Charles Dickens spent two periods of his early life at a house in Cleveland Street, firstly as a young child when his family first moved to London from Portsmouth, and later when he was aged between 18 and 20 and was starting his career as a Parliamentary reporter. In all, he spent some five years living in the street. The house is 22 Cleveland Street, although the address in Dickens’s time was 10 Norfolk Street. Cleveland Street runs nearly parallel to, and to the west of, Tottenham Court Road, emerging on to Euston Road close to Regent’s Park.

As is often the case with historical discoveries, it is a matter of putting two and two together. The two facts were known, but not set alongside each other until Dr Richardson did so and appreciated their significance.

The nature of Dickens’s awareness of what went on inside the workhouse is a matter of surmise, but it would be incredible to imagine that he was oblivious to the presence of such a prominent institution so close to his home, or that he did not know what it was for. His own family lived very close to the breadline, and indeed his father was at one time consigned to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison when the family fortunes reached a particularly low ebb. The threat of the workhouse must surely have been at the back of his parents’ minds.

It does not therefore call for too great a leap of imagination to see Dickens’s interest in workhouse life as stemming from his early experience of living so close to a striking example of one. Although the workhouse in Oliver Twist is clearly not in London, the conditions in any one workhouse could be assumed to be similar to those in any other. A workhouse was a fairly generic institution.

© John Welford

Martin Chuzzlewit, by Charles Dickens: a summary of the plot

The Chuzzlewit family is introduced at a gathering at the home of Seth Pecksniff, an architect, in a village near Salisbury in Wiltshire.

The head of the family is “Old Martin”, believed by all the other family members to be incredibly rich and whose fortune most of them are scheming to acquire as large a chunk of as possible. Old Martin, a widower, has taken as his companion a penniless orphan girl, Mary Graham, on the understanding that she will be well looked after as long as he lives, but turned out in the street when he dies, thus guaranteeing his own well-being, especially as he suspects that most of the people around him would prefer him to die as soon as possible.

Old Martin’s grandson is Young Martin, the “hero” of the novel, whose interest in the fortune is outweighed by his attraction to Mary.

Far more interested in the fortune is Jonas Chuzzlewit, the son of Old Martin’s brother Anthony. Jonas also has his eyes on his father’s fortune. We gather early on that Jonas will stop at nothing to advance himself.

The other co-villain of the novel is Pecksniff, the architect, who is also a Chuzzlewit relation. Pecksniff is one of Dickens’s greatest creations, whose name has become a byword for platitudinous humbug and hypocrisy. Although his house bears a large brass plate announcing his profession, Pecksniff has never designed or built anything in his life. Instead, he takes in pupils at high tuition rates, teaches them virtually nothing, and steals their work to claim it as his own.

Pecksniff, another widower, has two daughters, Mercy and Charity (or Merry and Cherry). They share their father’s character traits and are also vain and unfeeling to boot. Also in his household is a meek and much put-upon assistant, Tom Pinch, who had originally been a pupil of Pecksniff but who now acts as his drudge, the money to pay for his tuition having long run out. Despite his situation, Tom will not hear a bad word said about Pecksniff, whom he still admires.

Pecksniff agrees to take Young Martin on as a pupil, with the idea that ingratiating himself with Old Martin might get him included in the latter’s will. However, when the two Martins quarrel, over Young Martin’s paying court to Mary Graham, Old Martin demands that Pecksniff ejects Young Martin from his practice, which Pecksniff promptly does.

(As is often the case with Dickens’s novels, various actions take place in parallel, so their timing in “reality” does not necessarily follow the order of their presentation in the novel. It is therefore easier to describe them in their logical sequence, as follows, than as they may be given in the book’s pages.)

Having been dismissed, Martin departs, accompanied by cheerful Mark Tapley of the Blue Dragon Inn in the village where Pecksniff lives, for America to seek his fortune there. Dickens had himself returned from a visit to the United States not long before beginning to write “Martin Chuzzlewit” (in 1842). Much of what he saw there disgusted and alarmed him, and provided plenty of material for satire, particularly in terms of American customs, manners and practices. The “American” pages of Chuzzlewit caused him considerable unpopularity in the States, which not only led to difficulties when he went back for a reading tour in 1867-8, but are echoed even in the present day.

In the novel, Martin is appalled by the brashness and vulgarity of the people he meets, and is swindled out of his (actually, mainly Mark’s) money when the land he invests in turns out to be a malarial swamp. Martin nearly dies of malaria but is nursed back to health by the ever-optimistic and selfless Mark. When he is well enough, the two return to England.

Although the American episode is sometimes regarded as an unnecessary interlude in the novel, and these scenes are sometimes omitted from abridged versions, Martin’s experience is life-changing and fundamental to his character development. Whereas previously he had been happy to exploit the goodwill and generosity of others (such as Mark Tapley) to suit his own ends, he now resolves to be less proud and to seek to reconcile himself with anyone he has wronged.

During his absence in America, Old Martin has fallen under the influence of Pecksniff and is now living in the latter’s home. Young Martin’s attempts to make things right with his grandfather are therefore rejected, with the firm backing of Pecksniff. Pecksniff, in the meantime, has set his eye on Mary Graham and now makes unwanted advances to her. Mary turns to Tom Pinch for protection, thus finally persuading Tom that Pecksniff is not the paragon of virtue he had imagined. Pecksniff overhears the conversation and turns Tom out.

Jonas Chuzzlewit has also appeared in the Pecksniff household. He pays court to Charity Pecksniff, which causes a breach between the sisters. This becomes even worse, later in the novel, when he ditches Charity and marries Mercy instead. The marriage is far from happy, with Jonas constantly abusing Mercy in revenge for the taunts that she had aimed at Jonas during his courtship of Charity.

Anthony Chuzzlewit dies suddenly in somewhat mysterious circumstances. Jonas has become involved in the business schemes of a petty criminal called Montague Tigg, and Tigg becomes suspicious of Jonas’s actions regarding Anthony’s death.

Dickens introduces one of his greatest comic creations in the person of Mrs Sarah (Sairey) Gamp, a nurse who arrives to lay out Anthony’s body. She is constantly drunk and talks non-stop, particularly about her imaginary friend, Mrs Harris, who never fails to shower Sarah with compliments. Mrs Gamp is never without her umbrella, and, so popular did her character become among Victorian readers, that the word “gamp” entered the language as a slang term for “umbrella”.

Montague Tigg, having changed his name to Tigg Montague, has devised a fraudulent investment scheme that would be recognised today as a “Ponzi” fraud. Investors would only get returns if later investors could be persuaded to part with their money, which would be encouraged by seeing the large profits that others were apparently making. Such a scheme must eventually collapse, although the perpetrators would hope to have fled with the cash before this happens.

In Tigg’s case, he is in a position to blackmail Jonas, because of what he knows or guesses about the death of Anthony, and Jonas is forced to seek a new investor in Pecksniff (thus causing his eventual financial ruin). However, this is not enough to save the business, and Jonas’s way out of the situation is to murder Tigg.

In the denouement, Jonas is tracked down as the murderer of Tigg, but commits suicide before he can be arrested. Old Martin reveals himself as having only pretended to fall under Pecksniff’s control, his aim being to reveal the latter for what he had always known him to be. It also turns out that he had always intended Young Martin to marry Mary Graham, and his anger had been because Young Martin had jumped the gun.

It is also revealed that Anthony had died of a broken heart at the realisation that his son wanted him dead. However, Jonas had indeed been planning to poison his father and clearly believed that he had succeeded, hence his response to Tigg’s blackmail.

At the end of the book, evil is punished, hypocrisy is undone and virtue rewarded. Nearly everyone gets their just desserts, although Tom Pinch is left alone on the last page, playing the organ to himself.

© John Welford

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens: a summary of the plot

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” is one of the most famous opening lines in English Literature. The particular time is 1775, and Jarvis Lorry, of Tellson’s Bank, travels from London to Paris to take Lucie Manette, who has lived nearly all her life in England, to find her father, a French doctor who has just been released after eighteen years imprisonment in the infamous Bastille, because an enemy wanted him out of the way.

They find him being looked after by Defarge, his old servant, in a very sorry state and almost out of his mind, absorbed in the shoemaking that he had taught himself whilst in the Bastille. They take him back to London where he makes a slow recovery.

Five years later, Lucie and the doctor are called as witnesses at the trial of a Frenchman, Charles Darnay, who has been falsely accused of spying. At the trial, the defence lawyer, Stryver, is advised by his assistant, Sydney Carton, that there is strong resemblance between Carton and Darnay. This makes any evidence based on identification suspect, and Darnay is acquitted as a result.

Both Darnay and Carton are attracted to Lucie. When Darnay eventually marries Lucie, Carton remains devoted to her.

Darnay is in fact the nephew of a French nobleman, the Marquis St Evrémonde, who holds his tenants in contempt and shows no sympathy when his carriage runs over and kills a young child (illustrated above). Darnay visits the Marquis and declares his opposition to the oppressive monarchist government. The Marquis is murdered. It is later revealed that the “lettre de cachet” that had placed Dr Manette in the Bastille had been issued by the Marquis.

A year later, Lucie urges Carton to abandon his dissolute ways. Jerry Cruncher, who supplements his income as a messenger for Tellson’s Bank by grave robbing, digs up the coffin of Roger Cly, a former servant of Darnay who had testified against him at his treason trial. In Paris, John Barsad, the other chief witness against Darnay, visits Defarge and his wife. Dr Manette suffers a relapse and resumes his shoemaking.

The Revolution begins in Paris with the storming of the Bastille, in which the Defarges play leading roles. M Defarge finds the former cell of Dr Manette.

Gabelle, who had formerly worked for the Marquis and acted as agent for Darnay, is imprisoned by the revolutionaries, so Darnay goes to Paris to try to help him, accompanied by Lorry and Cruncher.

However, Darnay is himself arrested and imprisoned. Lucie, plus her child, father, and servant (Miss Pross) go to Paris. Darnay is released but then re-arrested, with the Defarges producing evidence that would seem to seal his fate. Barsad is revealed, by Cruncher, as being Miss Pross’s long-lost brother Solomon.

With Darnay sentenced to death, Carton, still devoted to Lucie, goes to his cell and drugs the man that he so closely resembles, sending him back to London with Lucie and Mr Lorry. Mme Defarge is killed by Miss Pross after the former had threatened Lucie and her child.

Carton goes to the guillotine in Darnay’s place, declaring “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done”.

This summary © John Welford

Darkness and light in A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” is a story about contrasts, as is evident from the very title. We are shown the two cities, namely London and Paris, in very different lights, with Paris being the city of revolution and danger and London as the place of peace and sanctuary. Along with this contrast are the themes of night and day, darkness and light, running through the book.

The tale begins at night, with Mr Lorry making his journey to Dover to catch the ferry to France, where he is to rescue Dr Manette. It ends in daylight, with the death by guillotine of the hero, Sydney Carton. However, to equate darkness with evil and light with good is to make too facile a judgment, and Dickens is far too clever a writer to make so obvious a distinction. In the examples given above, a good deed is performed at night and an evil one in daylight.

That said, Dickens is happy to make use of the conventional approach when it suits him. At the end of Chapter 16, darkness falls in Paris just before the Revolution starts. He writes:

“Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church bells and the distant beating of the military drums in the Palace Courtyard, as the women sat knitting, knitting. Darkness encompassed them. Another darkness was closing in as surely, when the church bells, then ringing pleasantly in many an airy steeple over France, should be melted into thunder cannon …”

The chapter that follows is entitled “One Night”, but it describes a peaceful moonlit evening in London, with Lucy Manette receiving reassurance from her father on the eve of her wedding day. Here, darkness and light are intermingled, as the full moon reminds Dr Manette of the sad times spent looking out of his former prison cell and thinking of the wife and daughter he believed he had lost forever.

The cover of darkness is used to perform deeds that are secret, sometimes they are evil, sometimes not. Jerry Cruncher robs graves at night, but Jerry is on the “good” side in the story, and his activities lead to the unravelling of one of the mysteries.

Sydney Carton is dissolute by day but works hard at night, producing brilliant legal defences that make the reputation of his employer, including the acquittal of the man who will become Lucy’s husband and for whom Sydney will sacrifice his life.

Charles Darney’s evil uncle, the Marquis St Evremonde, is murdered at night. However, the destruction of a cynical aristocrat who cares nothing for the peasants is a deed that we regard as good, although it also has evil consequences.

The focus of much of the action in Paris is the Bastille prison, which is a place of darkness at all times. When it is stormed by the revolutionaries, Dickens gives us the following:

“Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone, past hideous doors of dark dens and cages …”

The mob is described as a “sea of black and threatening waters”, and light is only supplied by the fires of burning chateaux and other property seized from the aristocrats.

The metaphor of darkness and light also appears in the creation of shadows, which are of course the result of light that is prevented from shining by obstacles placed in its way. The dark figures of the mob, particularly Madame Defarge, are often described in terms of shadow, and as being the creators of shadow. Lucy remarks at one point that “that dreadful woman seems to throw a shadow on me and on all my hopes”.

As the story approaches its close, the reason for Dr Manette’s imprisonment is recounted in a chapter entitled “The Substance of the Shadow”, with the next two chapters entitled “Dusk” and “Darkness”. In the second of these, the darkness of Madame Defarge’s cruelty is contrasted with the light of Carton’s resolve to save his rival in love, Charles Darnay, and thus, through self-sacrifice, to end his life in service to Lucy Manette.

The interplay of darkness, light and shadow are therefore constant, and Dickens’s choice of chapter titles shows that this is no accident. However, the chaos of revolution is reflected in the uncertainties introduced by Dickens as good and evil deeds are associated sometimes with light and sometimes with darkness.

A Tale of Two Cities is not regarded by most critics as being one of Dickens’s greatest novels, but we know that he was very pleased with it. Perhaps later readers have misjudged it by not being aware of many of the subtleties that the author introduced, with darkness and light being one of the mechanisms used to great effect.

© John Welford