The Sun.
London, England, 1859-08-11 00:00:00

CHARLES DICKENS'S NEW WORK.

A Tale of Two Cities. By Charles Dickens.
Nos. 1., 11., and 111. Chapman and Halt
A cordial welcome is at all times certain to be
accorded to any work from the hand of Mr. Dickens,
._
It is his due. He has earned a right to this wel
cnoemtheinbgyleyeeoluthmaens
benefactions
nfaevtoielunme
tees
histh generation
volumes volumes that are-more truly Household Words than
the nineteen volumes of his lately discontinued
periodical. But a peculiarly cordial welcome is
the
due, we cannot but think, of the new romance, of
which these three numbers before us form the ex-
quisite commencement. Although only. three in
number, these instalments constitute in reality
more, considerably more, than what by ordinary
acceptatidn might be regarded as a commencement.
They complete, indeed, more than one third of the
entire production. According to the adv.q.;
tised announcement the story will end it'
eight monthly parti—less than half the ens-
tertiary dimensions of the serial novels by
So that in estimating the value of the WerlL
now, we cannot be regarded as in any way
pronouncing an opinion upon its merits prema-
turely. As far as it has yet gone, it giVes everyA.
promise of taking high rank among the happiest
masterpieces from the pen of our great novel's"
It is not unworthy of him as incomparably the,
greatest of all our great English humourists. 1„.1
illustrates anew, and in a remarkable manner, h 1.9
extraordinary command over our emotions as a
pathetic narrator. It yields additional and
startling evidence of his rare and comparatively
speaking but recently developed genius as a
master of Terror. The Tale of Two Cities—mean"
ing Paris and London—opens at a period already
brought vividly to light by the luminous track
the same radiant imagination. " The Epoch" her',
depicted, in Chapter One, by a series of rapid bill,
masterly touches, is, as nearly as possible, the epoel!
of " Barnaby Rudge"—the time of the powderedperuke, the gold laced coat, the long-flapped and
embroidered waistcoat, the shoe buckle, and the!
" old cocked hat like a three-cornered spittoon." It
is familiar ground both to Mr. Dickens and to his
readers—and they enter upon it together with an
instant and agreeable sense of its familiarity. But
the historic turmoil attracting them again in that
direction is no longer the din and hubbub of the
famous Gordon Riots of 1780—it is a sound far
wilder, and more solemn in its nature—the storm
and clangour of that grand and awful French Re-
volution. The first of the Three Books, into which
the narrative is subdivided, begins, it is true, five
years earlier than the date at which Lord George
raised that fanatical cry of "No Popery," which
led, in London, to so much bloodshed and to 05'
many disastrous conflagrations. But this first book
—impressively and, at the outset, enigmatically
entitled, " Recalled to Life "—is very brief in
itself, is comprised, indeed, entire, in the first
monthly instalment ; it is the merest introduction,
but a very essential introduction. It is a pictil-
resque reminder that history is little better than
a series of repetitions—that our vaunted progress,
somehow, is but very little progress, indeed, after
all. Then (saith the very first page of the marra;
tire) in that year of our Lord, 1775—"Spirituil;
revelations were conceded to England at aril
favoured period, as at this." Apart from MI
Southeote, for example, then but recently arrived
at her "five and twentieth blessed birthday"—"Even
the Cock-lane Ghost had been laid only
round dozen of years, after rapping out its nics;
gages, as the spirits of this very year last Pas'
(supernaturally dejicient in originality)" observes
Mr. Dickens in one of his delightful little pare"-
thesis, "rapped out theirs:" England—then ruled by
" a king with a large jaw, and a queen witha plain
face"—(as France was simultaneously ruled by "
king with a large jaw, and a queen with a fair,
face")—was receiving from the opposite shores °.`,
the Atlantic " messages in the earthly order et
events" which, says the writer humorously'
" strange to relate, have proved more important to
the human race than any communications yet re'
ceived through any of the chickens of the Coelc
Lane brood." As to the " situation" on the other
side of the channel we would gladly here—but for
its length—give Mr. Dickens's vivid, grizzly, ur
some De Balzab portraiture ! With the Wood-
man, Fate then marking probably trees some-
where in the woods of France and Nor-
way, trees that were "to come down and
be sawn into boards, to make a certain move-
able framework, with a sack and a knife in it
terrible in history." With the Farmer, Death
setting apart "likely enough in the rough out-
houses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent
to Paris," rude carts sheltered there from the
weather, " bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed
about by pigs, and roosted in by poultery"—setting
them apart already " to be his tumbrils of the Be-
volution." In the midst of this memorable epoch,
rwahpeidnlysoenradaninyexdreeraadblye vienntps
but
reNpveerraetiseene—retthlye,
Tale
of Two Cities opens in a dense fog surrounding the
mail coach and its team of horses as they toil uP
Shooter's Hill, on the road to Dover, upon one
Friday
night late in November. The vividness of
this introductory
description would be matter (!f
surprise to us, but that we remember who it is
we have as the narrator. And so we follow, quite
as a matter of course, the four horses as the
mash their way through the thick mud, wit
droopingl
heads and tremulous tails,floundering and
stumbling between whiles as if they were falling
to pieces at the larger joints." Occasionally (with
a touch of equine individuality even in this team
the near leader "violently shaking his head an -
everything upon it—like an unusually emphatic
horse denying that the coach could be got up the
hill." At last they do get up to the top of it never-
theless. And then while they pause there in the
darkness for the approach at a gallop of seine
horseman, who turns out to be a messenger, but
who may;for, aught they know, be a highwayman',
what a master stroke that is, realising the whole
incident to us so vividly!—" The stillness conse-
quent upon the cessation of the rumbling and
labouring of the coach, added to the stillness of the
night, made it very quiet indeed— the pant"
ing of the horses communicated a tremulous
melon to the coach, as if it were in a state
of agitation." The messenger proves to he
Jerry Cruncher—one of the genuine Boz creations.
Here is a characteristic description of a bit of hire.
Jerry has just taken his hat off to scratch his head,
which has "stiff black hair standing jaggedly all
over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad
blunt nose." " It was so Ilk. smith's work," writes
Jerry's historian, "so much more like the top of a
strongly-spiked wall than a human head of hair,
that the best of players at leap-frog might have
declined him as the most dangerous man in the
world to go over." Jerry is. one of the hangers-en
at Tellson's Bank, near Temple-bar—of which esta-
blishment we read no less whimsically than We
have done but just now in regard to its retainer
" Tellson's was the triumphant perfection of incon"
veniende. After bursting open a door of idiotic
obstinacy, with a weak rattle in its throat, rul
fell into Tellson's down two steps, and came to
yourself miserablelldiettelte sehfopmewnitmh
atwdeo little
counters, in a
where the e
cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while
they examined the signature by the dingiest of
windows, which were always under a shower bath
of mud from Fleet-street.' Not to loiter over the
minute touches' of humour which are as usual scat-
tered abundantly about him by our novelist—bring-
ing out localities and individualities with all the
distinctness of photography when viewed through
the stereoscope--let us, before we close this notice
of the three first instalments of this charming Tale;
amongd nts a ltrheea dy
principaldepicted in a
ri te,e andter ye
t hi
ne
of Two Cities, enumerate briefl a few of the hie'
t "pick"
rod uee do. of
someT 4:
incident of Book the First—intimated by its
terious title, " Recalled to Life,"—is the release of
Dr. Manette from the Bastile, where, al one of t"-
victims of the infamous lettres de cachet, he has ewe
dured, before the story opens, the awful torture °f
eighteen years solitary incarceration. " The Wine
Shop," and " The Shoemaker," the two chapters
which the unfortunate prisoner is restored tothde
world, and drawn, at last, to the recognition, ale
into the arms, of his young daughter, are among n
most exquisite things Charles Dickens has ever outwritten. Ni re read words like these through
tears—we have for them no less spontaneous a tri-
bute of appreciative admiration. Scarcely less
pathetic,
ss
pathetic, or less beautiful, in its way (though the
pathos is here in a lesser degree) is the incident de-
scribed in the third number—the number for !hi,
current month—" The Stoppage at the Fountaill•
,
Besides thege Parisian incidents. there are othe"

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