November 26, 1859—As thousands of readers devoured the last serial installment of Charles Dickens’ latest novel, A Tale of Two Cities, they quickly committed to memory the dying words on the scaffold of hero Sydney Carton: “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done…”
Dickens must have felt the exact same way. An actor wannabe and, by financial necessity, a careful watcher of his income, he had spent the last two decades fulfilling audience expectations and peering over publishers’ shoulders concerning his business rights.
On the Saturday that his story of the French Revolution came out in its seventh and eighth installment in the inexpensive magazine he edited, All the Year Round, the indefatigable author could have, if he were so inclined, paused to rest and smile at the reception he was receiving. But I doubt if he did.
After all, he had to be up and making a success of his new magazine—soliciting, editing, even rewriting contributions from others, writing essays of his own, and, when the muse bid him to do so, serializing his next novel, Great Expectations, there, too. You’d do the same thing, I guess, if you owned 75% of the venture, as Dickens did.
Melodrama had been shaping Dickens’ approach both to his work and his life. He loved to act, and in his preface to A Tale of Two Cities he noted that he first conceived the idea for the novel while performing in his friend Wilkie Collins’ melodrama The Frozen Deep.
My post from yesterday on Collins’ The Woman in White touched briefly on a clandestine relationship that began while Dickens appeared in The Frozen Deep: the one with actress Ellen Ternan. But the play also got him to think about recreating his own version of the self-sacrificing hero in that melodrama.
The novel was Dickens’ 12th, but only his second set outside his own period. (His first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge, had as its backdrop the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780.) While Collins inspired Tale’s denouement, another friend, Thomas Carlyle, provided essential materials for historical background—his own work, The French Revolution, plus materials used in researching that history.
In a famous essay on his indebtedness to D.W. Griffith and Dickens, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein credited the British novelist with planting the ideas of the close-up and “parallel montage”—i.e., a "shifting of the story from one group of characters to another." It was perhaps forced by circumstance, as Dickens puzzled increasingly over how to maintain interest, from one installment to the next, while ensuring that his novels, when appearing in book form, cohered from beginning to end.
Daniel Pool’s Dickens’ Fur Coat and Charlotte’s Unanswered Letters points to the turning point in Dickens’ development as a novelist: his 1848 agreement with publisher Bradbury & Evans that he would be paid for his full 20 “numbers” or installments.
Without having to write self-contained installments, as he had been forced to do previously (lest lack of reader interest induced the publishers to pull the plug on the novel), he could now integrate his books more strongly. “Notice how patiently and expressly the thing has to be planned for presentation in fragments, and yet for afterwards fusing together as an uninterrupted whole,” he wrote aspiring novelist Jane Brookfield, specifically citing A Tale of Two Cities.
He might have been a master entertainer who knew how to make readers laugh, cry, and hunger for his next work, but Dickens didn’t provide similar happiness to those who worked with him. His dispute with Bradbury & Evans, over their refusal to publish his letter denying improprieties with Ellen Ternan, led to a parting of the ways. They had to watch as he returned to his old publisher Chapman & Hall, naming them the distributor of All the Year Round.
A Tale of Two Cities also marked Dickens’ last collaboration with longtime illustrator Hablot Knight Browne (1815-1882) — better known simply as "Phiz." (One of his illustrations from the book is in the link accompanying this post.) While monthly editions of All the Year Round continued to have illustrations by Phiz, the cheap weekly editions of the magazine made publishing this work impracticable.
There was also the matter of Dickens’ evolution as an artist to consider. Like Anton Chekhov and Woody Allen, Dickens began, in Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, as a humorous writer, before mingling in far more serious elements as time went on.
Dickens must have felt the exact same way. An actor wannabe and, by financial necessity, a careful watcher of his income, he had spent the last two decades fulfilling audience expectations and peering over publishers’ shoulders concerning his business rights.
On the Saturday that his story of the French Revolution came out in its seventh and eighth installment in the inexpensive magazine he edited, All the Year Round, the indefatigable author could have, if he were so inclined, paused to rest and smile at the reception he was receiving. But I doubt if he did.
After all, he had to be up and making a success of his new magazine—soliciting, editing, even rewriting contributions from others, writing essays of his own, and, when the muse bid him to do so, serializing his next novel, Great Expectations, there, too. You’d do the same thing, I guess, if you owned 75% of the venture, as Dickens did.
Melodrama had been shaping Dickens’ approach both to his work and his life. He loved to act, and in his preface to A Tale of Two Cities he noted that he first conceived the idea for the novel while performing in his friend Wilkie Collins’ melodrama The Frozen Deep.
My post from yesterday on Collins’ The Woman in White touched briefly on a clandestine relationship that began while Dickens appeared in The Frozen Deep: the one with actress Ellen Ternan. But the play also got him to think about recreating his own version of the self-sacrificing hero in that melodrama.
The novel was Dickens’ 12th, but only his second set outside his own period. (His first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge, had as its backdrop the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780.) While Collins inspired Tale’s denouement, another friend, Thomas Carlyle, provided essential materials for historical background—his own work, The French Revolution, plus materials used in researching that history.
In a famous essay on his indebtedness to D.W. Griffith and Dickens, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein credited the British novelist with planting the ideas of the close-up and “parallel montage”—i.e., a "shifting of the story from one group of characters to another." It was perhaps forced by circumstance, as Dickens puzzled increasingly over how to maintain interest, from one installment to the next, while ensuring that his novels, when appearing in book form, cohered from beginning to end.
Daniel Pool’s Dickens’ Fur Coat and Charlotte’s Unanswered Letters points to the turning point in Dickens’ development as a novelist: his 1848 agreement with publisher Bradbury & Evans that he would be paid for his full 20 “numbers” or installments.
Without having to write self-contained installments, as he had been forced to do previously (lest lack of reader interest induced the publishers to pull the plug on the novel), he could now integrate his books more strongly. “Notice how patiently and expressly the thing has to be planned for presentation in fragments, and yet for afterwards fusing together as an uninterrupted whole,” he wrote aspiring novelist Jane Brookfield, specifically citing A Tale of Two Cities.
He might have been a master entertainer who knew how to make readers laugh, cry, and hunger for his next work, but Dickens didn’t provide similar happiness to those who worked with him. His dispute with Bradbury & Evans, over their refusal to publish his letter denying improprieties with Ellen Ternan, led to a parting of the ways. They had to watch as he returned to his old publisher Chapman & Hall, naming them the distributor of All the Year Round.
A Tale of Two Cities also marked Dickens’ last collaboration with longtime illustrator Hablot Knight Browne (1815-1882) — better known simply as "Phiz." (One of his illustrations from the book is in the link accompanying this post.) While monthly editions of All the Year Round continued to have illustrations by Phiz, the cheap weekly editions of the magazine made publishing this work impracticable.
There was also the matter of Dickens’ evolution as an artist to consider. Like Anton Chekhov and Woody Allen, Dickens began, in Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, as a humorous writer, before mingling in far more serious elements as time went on.
Phiz’ strength—rambunctious humor—was of increasingly marginal interest to the serious Victorian audience Dickens was now courting. The novelist decided, without explanation, to end a partnership that had greatly enhanced the reception of his work. This was hardly the manner of the lovable entertainer that his public had gotten into the habit of bringing into their home every year like a friend--especially Christmas, when one of his magazine's issues had one of his contributions about the importance of kindness and thinking about other things besides money.
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