Historical Fiction Notes: A Tale of Two Cities

Temple Bar in 1870, approximately a decade after Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities. (source)

The first work that I decided to read, as part of my general strategy of background research to the time period of my own work, was A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I'd actually never read this before all the way through, although I knew the overall story and part of plot from screen adaptations.

The idea came to me as "aha" inspiration one afternoon when I was vacationing with my family at the YMCA camp near Estes Park last month, and within ten minutes I had purchased a version for Kindle and had downloaded to my iPhone. I spent the the next two days pleasantly launching through it while sitting on the porch of the lodge, swiping through the pages.

It seemed a rather obvious choice, since the time frame of the story (1775 to 1793) covers nearly exactly the London years of the Harriman story. Also Dickens is well known for his detailed descriptions. I figured I would be richly inspired in how to portray details of London life at the time.

This, however, was not the case, as I soon realized. First of all, Dickens did not live in that time. He began writing novels in the 1830s, and he wrote A Tale of Two Cities in the late 1850s, as one of his last works. So he was writing about a London that was almost eight decades in the past.

In many ways this was a great gift to realize this, since that put little ol' me in the same company as the master, since we were both writing about a historical London that we didn't have direct access to. It would be interesting to see how he handled the same situation.

As it happens, he mostly didn't handle it at all. I read in a preface that critics said the book should really be called "A Tale of One and Half Cities," since Dickens didn't know Paris much at all, and his descriptions of Parisian geography are rather scant. But the same is true of his London in that story.  One will search in vain in the story for details of everyday life in London---things such as what people ate, what they wore, what their dwellings looked like, etc. He simply doesn't furnish much of that at all.

Instead, not surprisingly, his stories are character-driven to an extreme. This itself was a great realization, since it shows that one doesn't really need to furnish a great deal of minute detail, so long as the story and character are compelling enough.Even the London of that era is left to one's imagination, to create in one's mind.

In motion picture terms, however, this puts a great burden on the art director, costumer, et, c., to make things "accurate." It was always the intention of Thor and I to do as much of this work ourselves as possible. So Dickens didn't give me much to go on, but at least it confirmed that story and character are always supreme. One needn't supply too much detail unless it pertains directly to the story itself.

The one exception where Dickens truly goes into minute descriptive detail regarding a London locale is in the case of Tellson's Bank. Here Dickens elaborates in his more usual fashion regarding the old banking house where Jarvis Lorry works.

Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place, moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness, proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was no passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more convenient places of business. Tellson’s (they said) wanted no elbow-room, Tellson’s wanted no light, Tellson’s wanted no embellishment. Noakes and Co.’s might, or Snooks Brothers’ might; but Tellson’s, thank Heaven!—

I suspect Dickens himself felt constrained by the necessity of composing anachronistic description of his own city. But in the case of Tellson's bank, the idea was that it hadn't changed in many years. Constancy over generations used to be one of the hallmarks of good banking establishments, o so one could suppose that he could simply describe a bank of his own era, and it would serve pretty accurately as one from eighty years in the past.

Banks and bankers are very important in the Harriman story, as it turns out. So the descriptions he furnishes here turned out to be worth reading the story by itself.

But aside from this example,  probably the best result of reading this classic novel was simply the experience of indulging in a masterpiece of storytelling. It didn't hit me until the middle of Book the Third (the last act, so to speak), when I realized how much of the story had been prefigured and set-up through earlier actions which seemed disconnected at the time I read them. I can't overestimate the inspiration this had on me, and made me extremely satisfied and grateful that I had started my side-research with this book. There could be no better example to follow in this regard.

A tough act to follow, but a nice burden to have!