To2C Book the First, Chapters 2-3: Buried Alive, Recalled to Life

That’s Personal Service: A Banker Experiences Gothic Nightmares on the Muddiest Road in 1770s England

Book the First, Chapter II: “The Mail”

This is when the story itself begins. Dickens seamlessly transitions from the road that lay before Adam and Eve after their original sin and…the Dover road in Kent, southeastern England. Dover is the closest port to the Continent, where, on a clear day, you can see France. Even today, Dover is perhaps the UK’s most important port–after Brexit, the Port of Dover proposed reclaiming land from the sea to ease traffic jams at the EU hard border.

In the late 1700s, mail coaches carried passengers from London to Paris along the Dover Road, and on this particular night, Jarvis Lorry from Tellson’s Bank is headed to Dover for important business.

To better understand why Dickens starts us on this road, I talked with Adam McCulloch, journalist and musician whose work appears in The Guardian–more importantly for us, he’s the author of the “Kent Walks Near London” website, which charts dozens of awe-inspriring walks through the countryside in Kent, southeast of London.

In the first paragraph, Dickens locates the mail carriage on Shooter’s Hill, which today is in Greenwich, suburban London. McCulloch told me that Shooter’s Hill is the “only notable higher ground heading east of London south of the Thames,” within the ancient Oxleas Woods. Many of these roads still follow ancient Roman paths, so over thousands of years, they have gradually sunk below the trees into the land, creating “holloways.” On a misty, cold late November evening, the “steaming mist in all the hollows” would be rising from these ancient paths, trod literally since the time of Christ, just as Dickens describes.

To McCulloch–who has spent lots of time in this countryside–Dickens’ descriptions seem spot-on:

“This is where Dickens really comes to life - the churchyard at the village Cooling is the graveyard where Pip encounters Magwitch, for example. A misty area of drainage ditches and marsh - very atmospheric and not at all pretty.”

We talked about navigating these sunken roads, and Dickens’ descriptions, again, seem spot-on. The picture below is near one of these ancient Roman routes, so you can see how this would be nearly impassable in the winter: According to McCulloch, “I mean Julius Caesar marched through what is now suburbia before deciding it was all a bit too much hassle and turning back!”

Dickens Imagines Something Like the Horses of the Apocalypse Struggling to Deliver the Mail Along A Road Like This in Southeastern England (Picture by Adam McCulloch)

What Dickens does here is remarkable. This is a classic Gothic set-up: Spooky atmosphere, mysterious circumstances, the whole thing. Any reader can enjoy it quite a bit. As is often said about Dickens, he wrote cinematically before cinema.

But he’s also operating on another level. The mysterious message says, “Recalled to Life.” A man thought dead is alive, and Lorry is on some sort of mission. But also, A Tale of Two Cities is Dickens’ most explicitly Christian story, where he interprets the Revelation through the French Revolution. Secrets and sins are buried, but in the same way that God Knows All, secrets and sins never stay buried. So, Dickens begins this story with secrets being carried in the mail, and by a passenger in the carriage, literally stuck in the ruts of ancient roads that have been dug since the time of Christ, carried by four black horses like the Four Horsemen that symbolized famine, which is what sets the French Revolution in motion.

For me, this is why Dickens’ reputation gets short-changed: During his life and long after, he was often disparaged for being an “entertaining” writer, today we might call him a “Genre Writer”--a popular writer, not of literature with a capital L. It’s where they put Stephen King, or in the movies, Steven Spielberg before “Schindler’s List.” But like those greats, Dickens operates on all those levels, and I’ve always thought of him as a Spielberg-level entertainer and artist. Dickens certainly aspired to it: He’s always name-checking Shakespeare and Milton and all the rest, and it really did hurt him personally to be dismissed as a mere entertainer.

Back to the story, the mail coach has only made it to Shooter’s Hill, then just outside London. Jerry Cruncher, the porter from Tellson’s Bank at Temple Bar in central London, would have been able to catch up to the coach to deliver the message. Towards the end of the first paragraph, Dickens tells us that the horses were being whipped, of course, which was looked down on because “some brute animals are endued with “Reason.”

This small detail actually tees up an important point that Dickens will come back to when the Revolution gets started: Dickens alludes to the working class men like Jerry as animals because the aristocratic classes treated them like animals–dehumanizing them in a way that creates violence. Many aristocrats actually believed the working class were no better than animals–literally, they believed them to have less ability to Reason than the trained animals on their grand estates. In response, some Enlightenment figures argued that, beyond this dehumanizing idea, some animals actually had the ability to Reason, and Dickens draws on this clash of ideas later when the Revolutionaries take to the streets.

To create even more atmosphere, Dickens employs the Gothic tropes of the time: The steaming mist rises “like an evil spirit,” the passenger (Lorry) “was disturbed in the mind,” all three of the passengers had to walk alongside the carriage, “wrapped to the cheek-bones and over the ears” so that nobody could recognize anyone else. This was especially problematic because anybody could be in league with robbers–the road was dotted by ale-houses that could produce somebody “in the Captain’s pay,” meaning that they were highwaymen, and the coachmen carried eight loaded pistols.

They reach the top of the Hill, where the coachmen hear another horse cantering up Shooter’s Hill. Everybody is in a kind-of prisoner’s dilemma: They have to stay together because being alone will get you robbed, but what if one of the others is a robber? Jerry announces that he is looking for Jarvis Lorry, who identifies Jerry and takes the message without anybody getting shot. “Recalled to Life” is the mysterious message–which seems, in the last paragraph, to shake Jerry, as if “recalling to life” might have something to do with him as well.

The Illustration For This Chapter in the Original Publication of All The Year Round by Phiz (Hablot Browne), 1859.

Book the First, Chapter III: “The Night Shadows”

The opening of Book the First, Chapter III is one of my favorite in all Dickens. It’s an example of his first-person omniscient narration, but also the way his mind worked like a movie camera. Dickens would “perform” his books in the mirror by his desk while he wrote, which is likely why his writing is so visual and kinetic.

Dickens tells us that “every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” Then he shifts into first person:

“...when I enter a great city by night, that everyone of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it.”

Why does Dickens put himself, the narrator, in the first person?

He is bringing himself right into your house, next to you in your sitting room, telling you…not a secret, but reminding you that you, and your beloved sitting with you, have secrets. This isn’t just a literary technique: Dickens often used himself as a narrator to create this intimacy with the audience.

So, if we imagine Dickens cinematically, he starts with him, Charles Dickens, entering the city, with all the lights in the distance, gradually becoming closer. Those lights come from individual houses–like yours, dear reader!. Deeper still, those lights come from a room that’s enclosed like your heart within your body. If you follow that light further, well, now Dickens has put himself right there with you, shining a light on you and whoever might be there with you, enclosed in your sitting room where you…are probably reading the first edition of All The Year Round, Conducted by Charles Dickens, who has graced you with the first serial of A Tale of Two Cities right there on the cover.

And what else does this man know? Charles knows that you have a secret you’re keeping from that person next to you, and they are keeping something from you as well. This is true for all of us, the hundreds of thousands, even the nearest to us. It’s human nature.

This is a helluva thing to write, especially when we know today that Charles Dickens was having an affair with an 18 year old girl, humiliated his wife Catherine in a very public separation–and, as recent letters reveal, was trying to get her placed in an asylum. For years, this “rumor” was of some controversy, but his first major female biographer Claire Tomalin pieced the story together–and showed the receipts–in her extraordinary biography of Dickens and her landmark book The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan, which became a 2013 film starring Ralph Fiennes as Dickens and Felicity Jones as Ternan.

The Author With Dickens Biographer and Legendary British Academic Claire Tomalin, Who Deserves a Full Season All Her Own. She Was Kind Enough To Come Meet My Study Abroad Class at Waterloo Station in 2019.

All this deserves a separate post, but suffice to say, this is Dickens’ personal context when he penned this paragraph in 1859: We all have secrets, even from the ones nearest us, and though they may be buried now, they will be recalled to life. Perhaps Dickens is…not exactly confessing, but saying to himself, in the pages of this book, that he knows that eventually all this will come into light. Perhaps he can even see it himself, like he sees the light inside your rooms when he enters a great city under the cover of night. As he says at the end of the paragraph, after speaking of water locked under eternal frost and of his friends and neighbours who are dead:

“Is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than am I to them?”

If this is Dickens the Narrator telling us about Dickens the Author’s waking nightmare, this is how he continues his introduction to Jerry Cruncher, the messenger disturbed by the notion that a man can be recalled to life. Dickens tells us that, on his way back to London, Jerry stops at a few of the pubs that dot the road, “keeping his own counsel” while downing an ale, wrapped up in a muffler “under an old cocked-hat like a three-cornered spittoon,” telling himself that he’s an “honest tradesman.” What’s bothering him, we don’t know, but this will be a chapter title later.

It’s a haunting passage. Personally, every time I’m in the airport and walk by the faux-pubs populated by lonely souls on their way to someplace else, I think of Jerry Cruncher on his way back to Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar, to finish the day’s business with “the greater authorities within.”

Meanwhile, Jarvis Lorry is huddled inside the mail carriage lodged in the deep ruts on the road to Dover. The rest of the chapter can be confusing because Dickens writes it as Lorry’s waking nightmare as he falls in and out of sleep on the ride. I will tell you all about Tellson’s Bank later, which is the subject of a later chapter, but for now, here’s what we need to know: Lorry’s nightmare is a conversation with a man, “buried alive” for eighteen years, being literally/figuratively dug out of the ground in a dream-logic, asking to be taken to “her.” At the end of the chapter, Lorry lowers the window, sees the rising sun behind “a ridge of ploughed land”--that digging to plant the crops to nourish our bodies, but the dig–dig–dig that Lorry must do will bring a man into clear sky and fall leaves.

As we will learn, Jarvis Lorry is a “man of business”: a stoic, serious figure who has given his life entirely over to the bank. He calls himself a “machine,” always telling others that he has no emotions, no connections, that he’s simply Tellson’s clerk.

Dickens’ omniscient narrator tries to bring Lorry’s inner life to the surface, without betraying the way Lorry has to process himself in order to be this “man of business.” Dickens helps us access Lorry’s inner life in a way that intersects all this buried secrets business with Lorry’s own work.

Dickens tells us that:

“The strong-rooms underground, at Tellson’s, with such of their valuable stores and secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a little that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among them with great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last them.”

Lorry’s primary duty for Tellson’s is to act as trustee for various accounts. The idea of a “trust” goes back to the Romans, but mostly evolved out of the feudal system of land ownership in England. And, yes, the word trust takes on the double-meaning: The owner trusts the “trustee” to administer the property. That includes transparency to the owner, but also a duty of confidentiality. In other words, the trustee knows your business, but cannot reveal the details until such time that warrants disclosure, usually your death.

This is how Dickens helps us understand the weight Lorry carries with him. All those family secrets are, quite literally, underground in the vaults–-and only you and he know them. Jarvis Lorry is quite literally the keeper of the great keys, who, when you die, will take your family and your beneficiaries down there, underground, to reveal all that was buried during your life.

Eventually, they’re going to know. If you buried a secret down there–evidence of an illegitimate birth, whatever it may be–that box is going to get opened. They’re going to find out. Like the lanterns inside every room, there’s Jarvis Lorry with his feebly-burning candle, with the knowledge of your business, whatever it may be.

In this way, Dickens creates Lorry as a Saint Peter figure, standing in front of pearly, golden, wrought iron gates–literally the keeper of the keys to the kingdom in the popular image of Saint Peter that probably derived out of Matthew 16:18-19. Something happened 18 years ago that buried Lorry’s client, traumatic enough to induce this waking nightmare.

The Author’s Photo Inside the Child and Co., the Real-Life Inspiration for Tellson’s Bank. All The Secrets Are In the Vaults Behind Those Bars