To2C Book the First, Chapter I: All Roads Lay Before Us
Kings George III and Louis XVI Have Really Made a Mess of Things and Will Never See It Coming
In my opening Cities article, I talked about “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” paragraph: The thesis comes after the dash–-that every time has its “noisy authorities” ginning up every bit of news into evidence that things are the best or worst they’ve ever been. Our side is wise; theirs is foolish. Believe us; don’t believe them. We are of the Light; theirs is of the Dark. We offer hope; they offer despair. Dickens continues with the “noisy authorities” in paragraph three, describing two old proto-tabloid non-troversies from The Year of Our Lord 1775 that distracted from the real news of the time: British subjects in America sent something called “The Declaration of Independence” to King George III, which turned out to be a major turning point in world history. So, Dickens tells us, if you believe you live in extraordinary times, perhaps you do, but times were extraordinary back then as they are today, and will be in the future.
Because this is an historical fiction, it’s important to further sort out Dickens’ narrator. The narrator is Charles Dickens himself: Charles Dickens wrote in something like “First Person Omniscient,” much like it says on the masthead of the literary magazine in which Cities was first published: “Conducted by Charles Dickens.”
He Really Wanted You To Know Who Was In Charge of the Proceedings
As I wrote in that first article, Dickens made form meet function meet marketing: Dickens The Narrator is Dickens The Author, who, by the time he wrote A Tale of Two Cities in 1859, was a global sensation: Dickens The Brand. All three of these “Dickens” are embodied in the story: Dickens is telling a story in 1859 about what happened in 1775, knowing it will be read here in 2025. This echoes A Christmas Carol’s Past, Present, Yet To Come structure, something like a Holy Trinity unifying time into one narrative:
Dickens The Narrator = 1775
Dickens The Author = 1859
Dickens The Brand = 2025
All three of these Dickens take a God’s Eye View of events, like how the gods on Olympus looked down and saw not only all of the Earth, but all of time as well. This is not an accident: This is Dickens’ most explicitly Christian book, so Dickens’ narrator models how he sees God: Omniscient of even our innermost thoughts, and because we are all Creatures of God, human nature has Made Us Like This.
This is why the first three chapters are primarily occupied by secrets, buried in the mud and bank vaults. Like our souls on Judgment Day, we will be resurrected from the mud only after all those dirty secrets have been exposed into the light, and judged accordingly. But we’ll get to all that.
The Author’s Picture of the Desk and Chair In Which All Three Dickens Wrote A Tale of Two Cities, Housed in the Charles Dickens Museum, London (2022).
The rest of Book the First, Chapter 1 tells us what things were like in England and France in the years before the Revolution. In the second paragraph, Dickens tells us of the large-jawed kings of England and France. The “plain face” Queen of England is Queen Charlotte–yes, that Queen Charlotte from Bridgerton. This Vox article explains how Shondaland spun out the “England’s First Black Queen” mythology, which certainly isn’t true, and seems to come from racist-insults about her appearance, that she was “very brown,” had “Moor blood,” was diagnosed by her doctor as “small and crooked, with a true mulatto face.”
Portrait of Queen Charlotte In Her Youth, Looking Like She Might Not Be Fully…You Know
The real Queen Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz was a princess from a small northern German duchy, who ended up being one of the most consequential Queen Consorts in British history. She navigated the madness of her husband King George III into the Regency period, though her son wielded royal power. Most notable for us, she was a close friend of the Queen with a Fair Face, Marie Antoinette, exchanging letters with her during the Revolutionary period. Charlotte was prepared to offer refuge to the French royal family if they chose to flee. French nationals finding refuge in Britain is an under-discussed aspect of the Revolution, but is a key piece of Dickens’ personal understanding of Revolution in his time of the Victorian Era.
In his fiction, Dickens rarely wrote about monarchs, but here, he points directly to them as causing the Revolution:
“In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.
“Clearer than crystal” alludes to Revelation 21:11, describing the light that will shine from Heaven during the Revelation. This is not an accident: Dickens envisions the French Revolution as a rapture, central to his understanding of God’s Plan. We will return to this beginning at the end of the book, which is also part of Dickens’ design: He sees God’s Plan as humans playing out the story of Christ’s execution and resurrection over and over throughout history. Here, the monarchs, whose rule decides who gets loaves and fishes, believe that God had settled on their Divine Right to rule.
In paragraph four, Dickens sets the political scene. In France, they were “making paper money and spending it.” The French monarchy was going broke: Dating back to the “Sun King” Louis XIV, the Bourbon Dynasty consolidated various lands into the French Kingdom by, mostly, cutting deals that exempted aristocratic landowners from taxation. By the time of Louis XVI, nearly all of France’s wealth wasn’t taxed, so the state went bankrupt on the weight of expenses like, say, bankrolling the American Revolution. They tried to print their way out of it, but as “Revolutions” podcaster Mike Duncan asserts, the French Revolution really begins not at the Fall of the Bastille, but with the monarchy declaring bankruptcy and calling the Estates-General.
Thus, the violence spread across the country, which Dickens alludes to, using descriptions of violence committed by “Christian pastors” documented by Voltaire. Dickens roots the Revolution in the betrayal of Christianity by the authorities of Christendom: divine right monarchs and high ranking church officials. For Dickens, these human institutions are rooted in corruption because humankind is corrupt–which is why he says:
“Rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into the boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it,”
That “movable framework,” of course, is the guillotine, and also the tumbrils–the wooden farm carts that were used to transport the condemned. For Dickens, this original sin is rooted in the soil like the eternal trees in the forest.
Back in England, armed men robbed carriages on the highways surrounding the capital London, which sets the scene for Book the First, Chapter II. As he does throughout the Cities, Dickens pulled the story of the “mail waylaid by seven robbers,” from an historical source, here, the Annual Register. And, as he sometimes did, Dickens gets some dates wrong and sets this scene before the advent of mail coaches, but Dickens' point still stands: 1770s England was a violent place, the prisons were full, and the hangman were busy.
Dickens namechecks Newgate Prison, a particular horror for him: One of his first Sketches by Boz came from his visit to Newgate in 1836, in which Dickens imagines the dream of a condemned man that night before he’s executed. Outside Newgate, executions were conducted in the street, and Dickens would attend, then use his publications to campaign against the death penalty.
Fagin From Oliver Twist Sitting in His Newgate Cell for the Condemned, Illustration by “Phiz” From the Original Publication of Cities In All The Year Round (1859).
One final note from Book the First, Chapter I: Dickens namechecks St. Giles Church, and in the chapter’s final line writes, “the creatures of this chronicle among the rest–along the roads that lay before them.” This alludes to the end of Paradise Lost, where an angel leads Adam and Eve away from the Gates of Paradise, leaving the Garden of Eden and passing into the new, unknown world full of sin.
William Blake’s Illustration of the Final Moment of Paradise Lost
Dickens makes clear that this story–again, his most explicitly Christian story–is about Original Sin, the fall of Mankind, and the Revelation. He sees the Revolution as the Revelation here on Earth, invoking England’s great Christian poet John Milton for the purpose. The Woodman and the Farmer who will carry out the Revolution “worked unheeded” while “those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the fair faces…carried their divine rights with a high hand.” Like Satan and his minions in Paradise Lost, they’ve got it coming, and what they leave behind is a cursed inheritance on Earth.
Dickens sees all this happening in this story of the “musketeers” robbing St. Giles-without-Cripplegate, which just so happens to be John Milton’s church. I will write an entire article about this church that sits in the middle of the brutalist architecture of the Barbican—somehow spared during the Blitz while the surrounding parish of Cripplegate was almost entirely leveled. Dickens could not have known what would happen to London in 1940, but he would not be surprised. Revolutions just keep turning because, well, we’ve always been like this.
In the Back Right Corner, St. Giles-without-Cripplegate Still Standing After the Blitz Destroyed Most of the Parish. Today, The Barbican Center Surrounds This Area, With St. Giles Emerging From the Middle of a Criss-Cross of Concrete and Brick Walkways.
The Author Inside St. Giles-without-Cripplegate Church, In Front of the Stature of Its Most Famous Parishioner, John Milton.