ABSTRACT
Gillian Beer focuses on the fleeting mention of the mallard to argue that the return of the native often involved, in Victorian narrative, 'the return of repressed forms of behaviour under the durance of extreme conditions'. His analysis might be extended to include another bird of passage, a migrant of the human sort, in the novel inspired in part by the melodrama that Dickens and Collins cowrote. This chapter refers to Charles Darnay, the French emigre in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, who, unlike Sir John Franklin, is rescued after his perilous passage from England into revolutionary France. Migration to and from England is featured in many of his novels and the international passages depicted in the consecutive sequence of novels that includes Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, is particularly worth studying. Dickens's cross-Channel narrative about French emigres has clear affinities, primarily about British migrants to Britain's colonies overseas, of the nineteenth century.
