[25] Dickens did not accept the whole Carlyle creed.  He retained a sort of belief in the collective wisdom of the people, which Carlyle certainly did not share.

CHAPTER XII.

Dickens’ career as a reader reading for money commenced on the 29th of April, 1858, while the trouble about his wife was at the thickest; and, after reading in London on sixteen nights, he made a reading tour in the provinces, and in Scotland and Ireland.  In the following year he read likewise.  But meanwhile, which is more important to us than his readings, he was writing another book.  On the 30th of April, 1859, in the first number of All the Year Round,[26] was begun “The Tale of Two Cities,” a simultaneous publication in monthly parts being also commenced.

“The Tale of Two Cities” is a tale of the great French Revolution of 1793, and the two cities in question are London and Paris,—­London as it lay comparatively at peace in the days when George III. was king, and Paris running blood and writhing in the fierce fire of anarchy and mob rule.  A powerful book, unquestionably.  No doubt there is in its heat and glare a reflection from Carlyle’s “French Revolution,” a book for which Dickens had the greatest admiration.  But that need not be regarded as a demerit.  Dickens is no pale copyist, and adds fervour to what he borrows.  His pictures of Paris in revolution are as fine as the London scenes in “Barnaby Rudge;” and the interweaving of the story with public events is even better managed in the later book than in the earlier story of the Gordon riots.  And the story, what does it tell?  It tells of a certain Dr. Manette, who, after long years of imprisonment in the Bastille, is restored to his daughter in London; and of a young French noble, who has assumed the name of Darnay, and left France in horror of the doings of his order, and who marries Dr. Manette’s daughter; and of a young English barrister, able enough in his profession, but careless of personal success, and much addicted to port wine, and bearing a striking personal resemblance to the young French noble.  These persons, and others, being drawn to Paris by various strong inducements, Darnay is condemned to death as a ci-devant noble, and the ne’er-do-well barrister, out of the great pure love he bears to Darnay’s wife, succeeds in dying for him.  That is the tale’s bare outline; and if any one says of the book that it is in parts melodramatic, one may fitly answer that never was any portion of the world’s history such a thorough piece of melodrama as the French Revolution.