If the scenes from above reflect an engagement with a broad sweep of history, then the close street-level scenes take us back into bourgeois realism and the family unit (more common in depictions of London and typical of incipits like that of Great Expectations). These are mixed of course with more intimate scenes at street level of particular groups and individuals. In A Tale, the city, particularly Paris, is shown to us in particular ways involving “super” visions or “supervisions,” that is, panoptic visions, which imply a desire to supervise and even control.
Only Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and Barnaby Rudge (1841) offer broader vistas. Dickens’s other novels mostly favour the domestic interior and the confined view of the London street or court. Our first focus will be on the technique of seeing or showing from above, that is, seeing panoramically or in terms of a scene performed publicly which the eye can encompass. Cutting across official routes and reinstating marginal and forgotten areas was a daily experience and indeed practice for Dickens in his walking, performing this depth and doubleness as he traversed London which became a palimpsest of times and ideas like Freud’s vision of Rome (Freud).ĢThis article will be looking at how space is seen, constructed and made meaningful in A Tale of Two Cities and how this brings out some key questions about Dickens, the two cities he loved and his political position as a writer. We are in the realm of what Guy Debord has called a “psychogeography,” the latter, according to Merlin Coverley, being a “tale of two cities,” an urban experience linked to political opposition which challenges the “official representation of the city” (Coverley 12). France afforded Dickens a view of another reality and a means of negotiating his own mental tensions and divisions. His mind seems to have been moving between the two cities, as it was between two societies, two women, two political and aesthetic regimes. He chose France as the place he would live with her away from the constraints of British society.
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His attachment to France is perhaps further shown by his decision to install his beloved mistress, Ellen Ternan, at Boulogne and Paris. Dickens crossed the channel 68 times between 18 alone (Tomalin). He even lived there for short periods, was received at the home of Victor Hugo in 1847 in the place des Vosges (then Place Royale) and met many of the great writers of the day including Théophile Gauthier and Alexandre Dumas. 1Dickens was a regular visitor to France and a declared Francophile.