A Tale of Two Cities

Transcribed from the broadcast audio and lightly cleaned; the readings are public domain.

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day. Tonight, Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book the First, called "Recalled to Life" — the first three chapters. Dickens published the novel in weekly parts in 1859, and set it back eighty-four years, in 1775.

From Dickens, Chapter the First, "The Period." It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way. In short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. 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.

It was the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.

It is likely enough that, 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 boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread.

England, Dickens goes on, had little cause for boasting. He spends a paragraph cataloguing the disorder of that year — nightly robberies in the capital, prisoners battling their jailers, the law answering it all with indiscriminate severity, the gallows busy with great crimes and small ones alike. Then the chapter closes: All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights with a high hand.

Three of that chapter's sentences are documentary. The youth condemned for failing to kneel to a procession of monks was the Chevalier de la Barre, tried at Abbeville in 1766 on charges of impiety and sacrilege; Voltaire took up his cause and pressed it for the rest of his life. The Cock-lane ghost was laid in 1762 — knockings in a lodging house near Smithfield, credited to the spirit of a dead lodger, drawing crowds by night until a committee of investigators, Samuel Johnson among them, traced the sounds to an eleven-year-old girl and a wooden board. And the magnificent potentate made to stand and deliver: the Annual Register for 1776 records the Lord Mayor of London robbed near Turnham Green that September — though the record gives three highwaymen, where Dickens, improving the story, gives one.

From Dickens, Chapter the Second, "The Mail." The Dover coach labours uphill through the fog, its passengers walking in the mire beside it, when a rider overtakes it with a message for a passenger from Tellson's Bank. There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all.

At the summit, a galloping horse comes up out of the mist behind them, and the guard challenges it. "Is that the Dover mail?" "Never you mind what it is," the guard retorted. "What are you?" "Is that the Dover mail?" "Why do you want to know?" "I want a passenger, if it is." "What passenger?" "Mr. Jarvis Lorry." Our booked passenger showed in a moment that it was his name. "Keep where you are," the guard called to the voice in the mist, "because, if I should make a mistake, it could never be set right in your lifetime. Gentleman of the name of Lorry answer straight."

The rider stooped, and, casting up his eyes at the guard, handed the passenger a small folded paper. He opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and read — first to himself and then aloud: "Wait at Dover for Mam'selle." "It's not long, you see, guard. Jerry, say that my answer was, RECALLED TO LIFE." Jerry started in his saddle. "That's a Blazing strange answer, too," said he, at his hoarsest. "Take that message back, and they will know that I received this, as well as if I wrote. Make the best of your way. Good night."

And Jerry, left alone in the mist and darkness with his spent mare, turns the message over as he walks down the hill. "Recalled to life. That's a Blazing strange message. Much of that wouldn't do for you, Jerry. I say, Jerry! You'd be in a Blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!"

From Dickens, Chapter the Third, "The Night Shadows." Here the storyteller steps out from behind the story. A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one 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. Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this.

No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end.

Mr. Lorry dozes in the coach, and one thought rides with him all night. He was on his way to dig some one out of a grave. In his dream he questions the buried man, and the exchange returns and returns. "Buried how long?" The answer was always the same: "Almost eighteen years." "You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?" "Long ago." "You know that you are recalled to life?" "They tell me so." "I hope you care to live?" "I can't say." In the dream he digs the man out — with a spade, with a great key, with his hands. And each time, got out at last, with earth hanging about his face and hair, the figure would suddenly fan away to dust, and the dreamer would start awake to the mist and the rain.

Then morning. He lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There was a ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left last night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood, in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained upon the trees. Though the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear, and the sun rose bright, placid, and beautiful. "Eighteen years!" said the passenger, looking at the sun. "Gracious Creator of day! To be buried alive for eighteen years!"

"Recalled to Life" is the book's title and its wager. A man dreams of digging another man out of a grave — with a spade, with a key, with his hands — and cannot; the figure falls to dust. Digging is not raising. The novel will spend the rest of its length on the difference.

From the Gospel according to John, the eleventh chapter, in the King James Version: Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

From Ellicott's commentary on that verse, published in 1878: The two first words of His answer, expressed in the fulness of emphasis, teach her that the resurrection is to be thought of as His person, and that it is to be thought of as actually present. I — and none beside Me — am the Resurrection: a present life, and not simply a life in the remoteness of the last day.

The man in Mr. Lorry's dream has been buried alive for eighteen years. Charles Wesley knew that dungeon. From Wesley, 1738:

And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Saviour's blood? Died He for me, who caused His pain? For me, who Him to death pursued? Amazing love! how can it be that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

'Tis mystery all: the Immortal dies! Who can explore His strange design? In vain the firstborn seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. 'Tis mercy all! let earth adore, let angel minds inquire no more.

He left His Father's throne above — so free, so infinite His grace — emptied Himself of all but love, and bled for Adam's helpless race. 'Tis mercy all, immense and free; for, O my God, it found out me!

Long my imprisoned spirit lay fast bound in sin and nature's night; Thine eye diffused a quickening ray — I woke, the dungeon flamed with light; my chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

No condemnation now I dread; Jesus, and all in Him, is mine! Alive in Him, my living Head, and clothed in righteousness divine, bold I approach the eternal throne, and claim the crown, through Christ my own.

Good night.