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Democracy, Terror, and Utopia in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2022

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Abstract

This essay reads Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) as a previously unrecognized contribution to Victorian discourses around democracy. Approaching the novel through the parliamentary reform debate of the late 1850s and through Dickens's earlier writings about American democracy, I argue that this historical narrative of the French Revolution elaborates Victorian liberals’ fears that democracy will, on one hand, devalue individuality and produce a world of sameness or, on the other, overvalue individual sovereignty, giving way to isolating difference and social fragmentation. Despite his deep ambivalence about democratic reform, Dickens uses the novel to imagine alternative forms of political representation. The motif of “echoing footsteps” is one key example of the utopian democratic fantasy that the novel develops. In the “echoing footsteps” passages, Dickens appropriates the theories of Charles Babbage for political purposes, proposing that the earth's atmosphere is a medium that contains a complete democratic record of all the sounds made by every individual in existence. In this respect, the novel anticipates a concept of democracy as individual expression that today increasingly threatens democratic institutions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 2022 , pp. 295 - 324
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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