In the Mail, It's Dickens With a Twist

It's a mark of good writing, of course, that its observations about the human condition can transcend a particular time and place. As I read on, I couldn't help thinking that if Dickens were writing today, the "two cities" of the title might easily have included Washington. In Paris, Dickens observes, the towers of Notre-Dame are roughly equidistant from the city's extremes of luxury and squalor. In the District of Columbia, scenes of debilitating poverty are routinely described as occurring in the shadow of the Capitol dome.

But the Washington echo that made me really sit up and take notice showed up in the person of Mr. Stryver (no first name given), the upwardly mobile lawyer who employs poor Sydney Carton and depends on Carton's brilliance for his success.

Dickens nails his description of Stryver with the single verb "to shoulder." In his thirties "but looking 20 years older than he was," Stryver "had a pushing way of shouldering himself (morally and physically) into companies and conversations that augured well for his shouldering his way up in life." Reading this, I felt as if I knew the guy. I could almost feel him glancing over my own shoulder at a Washington party, scanning the crowd for someone more influential to talk to.

Week after week the chapters kept coming: in February, March and on into April. The wait between them kept me in suspense, as intended, but it also allowed competing stories to shoulder their way into my brain. Compelling though it was, "A Tale of Two Cities" could be overshadowed by the serially grim news from Iraq, the continuing saga of my parents' move into a retirement home or the ups and downs of my daughters' basketball and soccer teams. Come baseball season, the Yankees and the Red Sox offered yet another story line to distract me: "Tale of Rival Cities" blared the headline in the Boston Globe.

All this narrative competition should come as no surprise. As Stanford's Paulson points out, one reason the serial form appeals to us in literature is that "it's not unlike living a life." Slices get served up, but we never know what's coming next. No wonder we like comic strips and long-running TV dramas; no wonder we wait so eagerly for the next fat Harry Potter to hit the bookstores. And no wonder someone with Dickens's flair for serials was wildly popular in 1859.

"Dickens was a rock star," Paulson says. He was a popular entertainer whose work "crossed class, crossed sex and crossed age lines in the way some TV programs do" -- and never mind that highbrow types like her have claimed him now.

Meanwhile, despite the distractions, I kept reading.

Things quickly turn ugly in revolutionary Paris -- too quickly to be true to history, but never mind that; Dickens is particularly good at showing how "liberators" can morph into tyrants themselves. Soon the virtuous Charles Darnay, who has returned to France to try to help an old family retainer, is languishing in prison just as his father-in-law once did. His prospects are worse, though, because the guillotine has been invented in the meantime.

I knew perfectly well that Darnay wouldn't lose his head -- that would have been too much of a nihilistic downer for Dickens's readership, and besides, like most readers, I'd long ago figured out how he'd be saved. But it didn't matter: I was still gripped by the pace and intensity of the concluding chapters, and I was deeply annoyed when a computer glitch kept me from downloading the final installment.

When at last it showed up in the mail, I was surprised by a climactic confrontation between Madame Defarge and a character I'd assumed was totally peripheral. I was moved by Darnay's rescue and Carton's redemption. And I found myself looking forward to next year's serialization: Paulson says it's likely to be "Hard Times."

I'll miss Mr. Big Shoulders, though.

Stryver drops out of "A Tale of Two Cities" two-thirds of the way through, yet he remains the Dickens character I can picture most clearly. I expect to see him shouldering through the downtown streets forever, "like some great engine forcing itself through turbid water," convinced that the fate of all humanity depends on how fast he, personally, can get ahead.

When next year's Discovering Dickens serialization is announced -- probably in November or December -- you can sign up at the project's Web site (dickens.stanford.edu). To be notified when signups begin, e-mail discoveringdickens @stanford.edu.