ABSTRACT
In the third chapter of A Tale of Two Cities, the ‘Night Shadows’ of the title which surround the travellers on the Dover Mail are both external and internal, as Mr Lorry, slipping in and out of uneasy sleep, is beset by nightmarish dreams of digging a man out of a grave. The confused images in Lorry’s anxious mind ‘serve the novelist’s purposes’, as Barbara Hardy aptly puts it, ‘in tense anticipation and preparation, a foreboding prospective movement which is to become habitual in the story and a sounding of its resurrection theme.’1 But what immediately follows is not a fulfilment of the foreboding but an escape from it, and a change of mood and narrative pace as disturbed dreams give way to the light of the rising sun; and Mr Lorry lowers the window of the coach to look out onto a restorative scene of rural tranquillity:
The scene marks a pause in the urgent onward thrust of Dickens’s dramatic tale; it is one of those moments of suspension which punctuate his narrative and create one of its rhythms — not the rhythm created by repetition that Barbara Hardy writes about,3 but one generated by a sudden shift from what Garret Stewart terms Dickens’s ‘fever style’ to ‘a quiet, lucid prose that increases greatly the potential for that alternating momentum which is the very life of Dickens’s story.’4 It is such moments that I wish to examine here, not only for their contribution to the ‘alternating momentum’ of Dickens’s narratives, but as strongly visual scenes whose pictorial qualities are of interest in their own right as one of the distinctive, if often undervalued, strengths of his writing. As John Sutherland has pointed out, Dickens often thought of himself as a maker of pictures and criticism may do him a disservice by taking a devisualized approach to his works: Dickens ‘hangs the pictures: should not the reader deign to look at them?’5 And to look closely at such scenes as this is to gain some insight into the peculiar power of Dickens’s writing, its ability not only to change momentum but to charge commonplace details with strange suggestiveness and to create visual images that reveal the familiar world in a bright new light.
