A Tale of Two Cities
On
our Charles Dickens London walks we take you to several sites associated with and featured in A Tale of Two Cities.
As with most of his other works it appeared in weekly installments, the first installment appearing in his magazine All The Year Round on 30th April 1859 and the last appearing on November 25th of the same year.
He wrote it against a backcloth of great turmoil in his private life and we go in to a great deal of detail about this period on our London walks that take in Whitehall and St. James’s; the Soho London walk; whilst, our Dickens London walks that take in the Inns of Court and Fleet Street, we visit several of the locations featured in the novel.
We also feature the novel, and Dickens tumultuous private life, on a London walking tour that goes from Blackfriars (well to be precise the Blackfriar Pub) to the Haymarket Theatre.
Richard Jones’s Dickens London walk has been applauded many times, most recently by the Association of Professional Tour Guides for whom he conducted a Dickens West end walk in February 2009.
In the course of the walking tour participants learnt how by 1859 Charles Dickens had separated from his wife Catherine Dickens having met with the 18 year old actress Ellen Lawless Ternan.
Dickens was besotted by Ellen Ternan, who was known to her family as Nelly. She was pretty, blond-haired and, despite the fact that her acting career had made her much worldlier than many eighteen year old girls of the age, she possessed an air of innocence that much appealed to Dickens.
They had first met in 1857, when Ellen performed alongside Dickens in Wilkie Collins’s play The Frozen Deep. Indeed the play itself provided the inspiration for part of the storyline of A Tale of Two Cities, a fact which Dickens acknowledged in the preface to the first edition, published once the serialisation was complete.
When I was acting, with my children and friends, in MR. WILKIE COLLINS’S drama of The Frozen Deep, I first conceived the main idea for this story [A Tale of Two Cities]. A strong desire was upon me then, to embody it in my own person; and I traced out in my fancy, the state of mind of which it would necessitate the presentation to an observant spectator, with particular care and interest.
As the idea became familiar to me, it gradually shaped itself into its present form. Throughout its execution, it has had complete possession of me; I have so far verified what is done and suffered in these pages, as that I have certainly done and suffered it all myself.
Some believe that several psychological characteristics of Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay are drawn from Dickens own perception of himself. It has been remarked upon that Dickens may have hinted at them being an amalgam of himself by making the initials of their surnames his own initials.
Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities is generally beleived to have been based on Ellen Ternan. Lucy Crayford was the part she played by Nelly in the Frozen Deep and it has been remarked upon how the physical description Dickens gives of Lucy Manette bears an uncanny resemblance to Ellen Ternan.
Thus, during the writing of A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens personal life was going through a period of great upheaval. But he had met with the woman who would remain his companion for the rest of his life. She would remain his companion till the day he died, there is a possibility they had a child that died, and their relationship was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Victorian age as the Dickens formidable PR machine went in to overdrive to ensure that the secret life of Charles Dickens, a man who was the very embodiment of family love and harmony, did not become public knowledge.
