Some Dickens criticism, for no apparent reason

I love Charles Dickens. There. I said it. I especially love "A Tale of Two Cities."

Everybody remembers two things about that book: the opening phrase, and the terror. The opening phrase has been lifted so many times, it has almost become a cliche ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of time . . ."). Everyone seems to remember "the terror" because it culminates in (spoiler alert) Sidney Carton getting beheaded.

The thing about the book before the terror, though, is that is pretty slow moving. It takes a long time to get to the point where the French peasants decide they're going to start beheading the nobility. For no particular reason, I was thinking about that recently. I read (somewhere that I can't remember) a critique of the book that referenced the incomparable George Orwell writing about that book. I quote Mr. Orwell's criticism in part for you, dear reader, with a few phrases bolded for emphasis:

 Dickens sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and that many of the people who were executed deserved what they got. If, he says, you behave as the French aristocracy had behaved, vengeance will follow. He repeats this over and over again. We are constantly being reminded that while ‘my lord’ is lolling in bed, with four liveried footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving outside, somewhere in the forest a tree is growing which will presently be sawn into planks for the platform of the guillotine, etc., etc., etc. The inevitability of the Terror, given its causes, is insisted upon in the clearest terms:

It was too much the way... to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown — as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it — as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain terms recorded what they saw.

And again:

All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a spring, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.

In other words, the French aristocracy had dug their own graves. But there is no perception here of what is now called historic necessity. Dickens sees that the results are inevitable, given the causes, but he thinks that the causes might have been avoided. The Revolution is something that happens because centuries of oppression have made the French peasantry sub-human. If the wicked nobleman could somehow have turned over a new leaf, like Scrooge, there would have been no Revolution, no jacquerie, no guillotine — and so much the better. 

Quoted for no particular reason. Sleep tight.