The French Revolution serves as the backdrop for this television adaptation of Charles Dickens´novel. Sidney Carton is an apathetic indifferent lawyer, who suddenly the meaninig of sacrifice and responsibility when he comes to the aid of those injured during the war. But Carton´s life is further complicated by a lookalike, who is smitted with the same woman Carton loves.
 

           This novel  has received  a lot of  critical works as a reply to its contents. In the next lines I will try to show some of the most importants essays reffering to this important play and its consequences on the readers and writers.
      

      Throughout the novel, Charles Dickens’ judgment and portrayal of France, the Revolution, and the people themselves undergoes some very basic changes. Dickens is always in control of the reader by successfully reaching his goal of leading the reader by the hand through a series of emotions and ideas emanating from the plot and its characters. During the first few chapters of “Book the First,” Dickens has the reader sympathize with the plight of the French commoners. However, when the revolution begins, he does an about-face. Through narrative, scenes, and dialogue, the reader starts to consider both the aristocrats and the downtrodden as one and the same in moral and political culpability.

      Charles Dickens strongly believes that the French Revolution was inevitable because the aristocracy had exploited and plundered the poor until they were driven to extreme measures. Nowhere is that more evident than in Dickens’ portrayal of the Marquis St. Evremonde. This nobleman is the poster-child of selfish privilege. He is uncaring and has no respect for life. This is especially apparent when he cold-heartedly runs down an innocent child with his carriage. “But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage would probably not have stopped; carriages were often known to drive on, and leave their wounded behind, and why not?” In payment for the inconvenience, Monseigneur throws a single coin to the child’s parent. How well this personifies exactly how cold and unsympathetic too many of the aristocracy had become. Dickens has nothing but scorn for the high-handed behavior of the nobility, with their lack of faith, their selfishness, and their distance from reality. But Dickens’ all-seeing eye then rivets on the commoners, whom he likens to animals: “The rats had crept out of their holes to look on, and they remained looking on for hours.” But these qualities were also attributed to the Marquis who, denying the humanity of the poor, became subhuman and beastly himself.

      “A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken in the street ... . Some men kneeled down, made scoops with their two hands joined, and sipped ... Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths.” The metaphor is well taken. Their hunger, their need for vengeance and relief confirms the inevitability of revolution.

      Dickens graphically shows us the shallowness of the aristocrats and their allies by the emphasis they place on external rituals meaningless pretenses. “All the company at the grand hotel of the Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally correct.” Dickens sarcastically and masterfully demonstrates that emphasis on external show masks an internal emptiness, which is an attempt to deny the death that had begun to surround them.

      With the storming of the Bastille, the burning of the chateaux, and the murdering or imprisonment of the members of the former regime, Dickens’ earlier portrayal of the poor does an about-face. The people had been, up to then, exploited, gaunt, and submissive. Now they were a howling, breast-beating band of bloodthirsty demons. A celebrated cause became mob rule. Once an abused people, they now use their power to destroy all that is not a part of them. They discard the crosses around their necks for miniature guillotines. And the once oppressors now go to their deaths as martyrs.

      Many have grown fond of the tale involving the noble, former French aristocrat, who had virtually unmatched (except maybe in books) good fortune. First, his life was saved by the pitiful testimony of a beautiful young woman (who doesn't stand a chance at ever being a women's-lib poster girl). Anyone would gladly have married this beautiful too-good-to-be-true-woman he wedded. It is later seen, however, that this man should have married her even if she were ugly as sin. This was not the case though, and he married a beautiful woman, who had an admirer who was a dead ringer for her husband, was a loser, and would give his life to keep her from pain, all of which really comes in handy when her hubby is on his way to the guillotine. This is not the story of a man with multiple guardian angels, but rather that of a character in Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities. A skeptic could easily see this as an unbelievable, idealistic and overrated novel that is too far-fetched. An unbiased reader, however, can see that this is a story of love and hate, each making up the bare-bones of the novel so that one must look closely to see Dickens' biases, attempts at persuasion, and unbelievable plot-lines, some of which are spawned from Dickens' love and hate, and some of which love and hate are used to develop.

      The more lifeless of the characters we are supposed to like--the Manettes, Darnay, Lorry-- play their parts in the idyllic fashion Dickens and like-minded readers want, a fashion made inflexible by circumstances and purposes. "Circumstances and purposes" refers in large part to Dickens' state of mind and objective. Dickens' intrusive, unusually editorial point of view, with references to "I" and deviations from narration for monologue, reveals the novel's slavery to the teachings of his morals--or perhaps his own slavery to the morals of his time and Protestantism. Therefore, can Lucie be any different from the supportive, wholly feminine wife and mother she is? Not if Dickens' is to stick to his obligation, or perhaps obstinate purpose, of moral teachings.

      With that aside, what is to be said of Dickens' teaching, his presentation of love and hate? They both have one thing in common: the characters representing each are unmistakable at a mile away. The moment Lucie Manette is put before the reader's eyes, her tumbling blond locks, her bright blue eyes, her seventeen-year-old, slight, pretty (but not sexy!) figure and all, he knows that, not only will she not be a villainous, unlikable character, but she will be the epitome of the good, beautiful woman (and later housewife), the one Dickens thought every women should be. At this young woman's introduction with Mr. Lorry, she curtseys to him, and Dickens wastes no time in pointing out that "young ladies made curtseys in those days". The introductory scene climaxes at fair Lucie's fainting, one that, to some, puts her unflawed position into question, although to Dickens, it reinforces it.

      At the other side of this moral lecture are the Defarges. Call Dickens a master for embodying qualities, but here are another flawless pair--flawlessly evil, and sentenced to evil from the moment we see Madame Defarge's "watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of manner", a stark contrast to the slight, fainting figure of Mada-- or rather, Miss Manette. To further turn us against good old Madame Defarge, Dickens has her using a toothpick publicly in her opening scene, an activity dainty Miss Manette wouldn't dream of. Finally, we mustn't forget the setting. Lucie may have been born in France, but she defected to England, and traveled from London to meet Mr. Lorry. Madame Defarge was a Frenchwoman, born and living amongst peasants who drank wine scooped off of mud. She probably was not taught Dickens' (and his primary English audience's) Protestant morals in her Catholic nation, and certainly did not manifest them.
 
      In arguably the book's first touching scene (some say it's the one where Carton is on his way to the guillotine), Lucie goes through much trouble to coax her father from his insanity, laying her head on his shoulder, and trusting a man she had never met. When Madame Defarge sought vengeance for the cruel injustice committed against her kin, she looked to destroy not only the innocent descendent of the culprit, but his family-- an old man, a young woman, and a little girl. These two characters' love and hate are unconditional and total. Did this have to be so? Could not Madame Defarge have showed one bit of femininity, of human kindness? Could Lucie not have stolen a contemptuous glance at her persecutors? Not with Dickens at the helm. Lucie and Defarge are created with a conviction, and once Dickens' plot was laid, the blinders he put on his characters allowed only one route. Perhaps it was a primitive style, but modern characters are painted more realistically, with human weaknesses and more variability. Did it have to be so? Could Dickens have captured more readers, especially in the long run, if he had pursued more varying actions in his characters, as well as more humanness and believability? Does this point to Dickens as a flawed writer, with little imagination and ability?

      Another factor that must be considered is our inability to criticize an English--or English-living--character, or to find a modicum of respectability in a French one, with two exceptions. One is the young woman who is beheaded just before Sydney Carton. She is the enemy of an enemy, she is going to be killed, and she allows Dickens to teach another moral using Sydney Carton. Why not have her happy to die for the benefit of her countrymen, while not trembling as she ascends to her death, thereby depriving the common enemy of a small victory? With the modern trend of political correctness and anti-racism, a Tale of Two Cities written today would never leave the word processor. Jerry Cruncher is about the most sinful of the English (aside from a spy but, remember, he defected to France), and he repents by the end, which counts for another moral from Dickens. In Dickens' time, racism was not regarded as it is today, and so if he wanted to use the French Revolution to send a message to the population, it was his right, but he may have taken this too far for some.

      Today, Lucie Manette would by no means be taken seriously as a believable, even likable character. She persists in fainting at particularly stressful moments, but when her husband is before a heartless, bloodthirsty jury, she looks brave and strong just for him. In context, this was a screaming contradiction, but one that Dickens required to portray his Eve. It is much easier to believe Madame Defarge's hate than her opposition's love. Defarge's sister was raped and murdered mercilessly and her brother was killed by a pair heartless "noblemen". It is much easier to understand Defarge's taste for blood than the condition of Manette, who, after practicing as a competent doctor and acting normally for years, experiences a recurrence of his mental condition simply because his wonderful daughter has left for two weeks, although he has two dear friends nearby.

      Charles Dickens has built an enduring story enjoyed by millions, which is loved by experts and critics today although it would be immediately butchered if written by a modern author. It is a love story loved by its creator, but wholly unbelievable. It is actually doomed by its own idealism and unrealistic characters. As a hate story, it is much more competent, although also using this for its own purposes. One can draw one's own conclusions and ideas from such a book, but facts are facts.

      A victimized person in greater distress sooner or later focuses on seeking revenge rather than thinking about moral duty. Madame Defarge, in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, was such a person. Because her family suffered at the hands of a noble family, without ever recourse to justice, Defarge wants revenge, not merely on the family that perpetrated the evil but on the entire class from which it came.

      In seeking vengeance, Madame Defarge has acquired the very traits of those who wronged her. She sees no focused blame and is willing to exploit an entire class to satisfy her need. Her vengeance emerges through her knitting, which represents both her cold patience and her impassioned urge to retaliate, as she steadfastly knits the names of her intended victims into the shrouds.

      Madame Defarge’s vendetta totally disobeys the idea of moral duty. There can be no morality in the closure she seeks. Moral duty is the product of reason; revenge is an emotion too often too sweet to those whose hearts are filled with hatred and hurt.

      In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens’ choice of sentimental expression had an excellent effect on the readers’ responses to the characters. The use of exaggerated sentimentality helped create a clear picture of the story’s issues in the readers’ minds; it gave a feel for the spirit of the times, and made it easier to understand the characters’ points of view. It was this very sentimentality that Dickens strived to achieve.

      What comes to mind first when dealing with the lively imagination of Dickens is the creative and detailed picture he gives. In describing Dr. Manette, for instance, Dickens exaggerates his characterization by saying Manette’s voice was like “the last feeble echo of a sound made long, long ago.” From this alone you can hear the faintness of his voice and feel the suppressed dreadfulness of his past. In this way, the sentimentality of it all gets the reader involved emotionally and makes the character come alive.

      Also, the sentimentality, although at times difficult to endure, produced a deeper understanding and emphasis of the harsh conditions that the people of France dealt with. For example, when Dickens describes France as having “its one poor street, with its poor brewery, poor tannery, poor tavern, poor stableyard ...” and says. “It had its poor people, too,” you can relate these horrid conditions to the world in which we now live. For this reason, Dickens use of emotive words aids you in grasping the circumstances that influenced the characters’ actions and thoughts.

      Lastly and most importantly would be Lucie’s elaborate expression of sentimentality in her constant fainting at the least sign of distress. However unbearable it might have seemed, the reader could not fully appreciate the significance of her character and why she was loved by so many equally sentimental; characters in the novel. When Lucie early on testifies at Darnay’s trial in the English court, she says, “He was kind, and good, and useful to my father. I hope,” and here she bursts into tears, “ I may not repay him by doing him harm here today.” Her deep sensitivity and generous nature shines through. And remember, when Lucie stands forlornly and devotedly at a place near the Paris prison in order for her husband, Darnay, to glimpse her and their child, it is clear that Dickens wanted to portray her as a loving, faithful, and sympathetic person.

      As you see, there are many scenes where much tenderness, faithfulness, and loyalty are done with much feeling and some exaggeration. All this is necessary and a part of Dickens’ plan. From narrative description to flowery dialogue and noble monologue, from hateful vengeance to heroic bravura, sentimentality is used effectively.

      In Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, serialization is an important and effective tool that divides the literary work into episodes, creating a suspenseful plot. In addition, serialization also creates a “soap opera” effect on the novel’s readers, leaving them with a cliff-hanger scenario at the end of each episode.

      A major effect of serialization is the change it renders in character development. Sydney Carton would be a prime example. In the novel’s beginning, he is portrayed as a drunk, a loser with no purpose to his life. However, as the readers go on, they find that Carton is, indeed, not what he seems to be. Ultimately, our reprobate saves Charles Darnay’s life from certain death and is instrumental in having him escape to England with his beloved Lucie, their daughter, and his father-in-law, Dr. Manette.

      Charles Dickens uses an unusual method of serialization that resembles that used by daytime soaps. After covering several plot developments of several characters, usually primary ones, he switches to a series of subplots involving other characters, usually secondary ones. For example, after Dickens covers the adventure of the Marquis St. Evremonde, he jumps back to Darnay. The effect is a narrative hook that encourages the readers to go on. This leads to suspense and, of course, a successful tale.

      A final, and obvious, effect of serialization is the steady advancement of plot development. As the novel is divided into thematic parts, it gives the readers a definite feeling for the plot and causes them to think about possible outcomes. This , in turn, will allow the readers to make their own judgments about characters and meaning, making the readers very involved and anxious. Again, this causes suspense and that “soap opera” effect and, above all, an enjoyable novel.

                                 The Novelists' Purpose

                                

      Dickens and his contemporaries did not, then, as one over-subtle critic has suggested, deliberately set out "to domesticate death ... and take it in by the fireside" as a ploy for coping with its prevalence in the harsh, urbanizing world outside (Welsh 212). Death was already a familiar presence at the family hearth. What many of them did was just the opposite. Like Josephine Butler, whose daughter's death sent her out to help fallen women, they took their personal grief and channelled it productively into their dealings with the world outside. Mrs Gaskell saw this as the very "secret of comfort": "the sufferer wrestling with God's messenger until a blessing is left behind, not for one alone but for generations" (Mary Barton 366). One way for the writer to invest early death with a positive meaning was by emphasizing the spiritual strength of the dying child, and encouraging others to learn from it.

      Concern with this subject is not new in the novel. In the previous century it featured most spectacularly in Clarissa. Clarissa is described as a 'young lady' in the subtitle of Richardson's most famous work, [....]; but in her own and others' estimation, she is often a child. She dies while still in her teens, having refused to accommodate herself to the greed of this world. There is much lingering over her death-bed, both before and after she dies, but everything confirms not her weakness, but her strength. In her last letter to her brother, she insists that her suffering has been productive and that she is happy. (This is in vivid contrast to the almost equally prolonged but wretched struggle put up by the monstrous old bawd, Mrs Sinclair). Clarissa's courageous departure is an instance of the saintly early death syndrome already rampant in religious tracts; but her superiority to those around her is far better demonstrated, through the accumulation of detail in one long letter after another, and through the greater complexity of characterization.

      Following the tradition of those early tracts, Mrs Sherwood had exploited younger children's deaths [in The History of the Fairchild Family] to one main end: to direct her child readers' attention to their own spiritual health. A good child like Charley Trueman dies serenely (like Clarissa) to provide a lesson about the rewards of virtue, while a bad child like Augusta Noble dies in agonies (like Mrs Sinclair). Both reassurances and warnings are also given to older readers: parents should realize from such episodes their own responsibility to guide their children well; they should take from them some lessons for their own lives, too. Mrs Sherwood's The Infant's Grave is the story of one bereaved mother who fails to learn. Having been comforted by being told that God planned her child's salvation and that he is now in heaven, the woman goes her way, resuming her life and eventually "the deceitful pleasures of the world" (74). In the midst of these, she dies "an early and sudden death" which "fixed her destiny forever" (75). The ending may--is intended to--shock, but the message is actually positive. There is no reason for parents to dwell morbidly on their losses, but they should not forget them, either; these experiences are valuable, and should aid them in working towards their own salvation. [....]

      In the Victorian novel, children generally decline gracefully into death like the dying Clarissa, and readers of all ages are expected to find comfort and spiritual lessons in the manner of their going. Suffused with an angelic light, indicative of their special status, sick children's demeanours become less childlike, more saintly: even Thackeray's spirited Bryan, Barry Lyndon's nine-year-old son, acquires a different kind of spirit on his death-bed. A halo of bright curls, sunlight or lamplight is apt to grace the sick-bed pillow, confirming the child's holy condition and destination. Instead of protesting that he wants to stay in this world, like Tommy Anderson in Fielding's Tom Jones, Lucie Darnay's son in A Tale of Two Cities obediently and bravely prepares to leave his parents and sister: "I am called, and I must go!" Appearance and behaviour like this both help to soften a mother's grief, so that "those were not all tears of agony" that ran down Lucie's cheeks as "the spirit departed from her embrace that had been entrusted to it" (240).

      Novelists who describe the experience of a child's death in more detail emphasize the value of the young life less superficially. Not unexpectedly, in view of Mrs Gaskell's own recent loss [of her infant son William], a more profoundly moving episode occurs in Mary Barton itself. Here, attention is drawn to the preciousness of Mrs Wilson's little boy by the intensity of the struggle to give him up. At last the desperate mother hands her dying son, whose twin brother already lies dead from the "ghoul-like fever," to her sister-in-law:

May happen yo'd better take him, Alice; I believe my heart's wishing him a' this while, for I cannot, no, I cannot bring myself to let my two chiler go in one day; I cannot help longing to keep him, and yet he sha'nt suffer longer for me. (270)

      That acceptance was the common, if difficult, goal is amply attested to in Augustus Hare's collection of Epitaphs for Country Churchyards, published in 1856. Anonymous verses such as this could be read on many a country tombstone:

Weep not, dear mother, weep not, I am blest,
And I must leave heaven did I return to thee;
For I am where the weary are at rest,
The wicked cease from troubling. Come to me.

You might have seen on that bed a few days after a pretty white coffin, with silver nails and figures of winged angels, and the name of Bertha on it; and inside, under that beautiful lid, lay a lovely, lovely figure, strewed over with sweet-smelling violets. (188)

      However, elsewhere there is restraint in the use of the conventional formulae, a freshness of approach, and a reassurance that does not preclude a full acknowledgement of the realities involved. Dickens's most notorious child's death-bed scene, Little Nell's in The Old Curiosity Shop, may seem a poor example to give here. But the physical details of Kit's and his companions' journey--their slow, hushed progress through the white wintry landscape, the snow on their eyelashes, and the numbing of their limbs--prepare us with delicacy not only for the presence of death, but also for its emotional toll. The scattering of winter berries and green leaves on Nell's couch is not simply (as Barbara Hardy suggests [66]) part of the blurred pathos of the scene: it reminds us of this journey, and works on a symbolic level to hint more subtly at the new life which the narrator promises for her. [....] Having overcome his own reluctance to let Nell go, which lingered even after Forster jogged his arm about her, Dickens finally comes to the point himself with repeated assertions of her death (652-54). Some self-pity may inform his threnody for dead innocence; but the rhapsodic commentary which punctuates these assertions, in the narrator's and schoolmaster's voices, attempts to address rather than obscure the issue of a beloved child's mortality, and, as usual, draw lessons from it. Nell has long been seen as her grandfather's guide; but now she is very clearly the old man's spiritual guide. Dickens goes on to demonstrate that nothing can ever fill the "weary void" Nell leaves in this life (660); but there is, of course, the hope of reunion in the next. The "wrestling" and the "blessing" which Mrs Gaskell talks about are both felt in this episode.

      A more strained assent than that found here, or in many of Augustus Hare's epitaphs, informs the brief reference to The Lord's Prayer on Milly Barton's tombstone in George Eliot's "Amos Barton": "Thy will be done" ([....] 114). Milly herself is an adult, of course, but she has been buried with her new baby in her arms, leaving a husband and six surviving children behind. The nineteenth-century tomb of the Walton family at All Saints Parish Church, Kingston-upon-Thames, records, amongst other deaths, those of a young wife and her five-week-old infant, and expresses the further implication of this reference: "Thy will be done O Lord not mine." Another of Hare's epitaphs expands the frequently appended exhortation to the living in a slightly unusual way for such an inscription:

Can aught be more than this?
Yes, Christian, yes!
It is much more to live,
And a long life to the 'good fight' to give.... (62)

      Death was no respecter of class: Prince Albert died of typhoid in 1861, and was nearly followed by the Prince of Wales in 1872; his sister, Princess Alice, along with a small daughter, died from diphtheria in 1878. But, inevitably, it dealt most savagely with the under-nourished, badly-housed and over-worked. Chadwick had pointed out in 1842 that the age of death could vary considerably between adjoining drained, partly drained and undrained streets even in the same locality, and therefore between the different classes of people inhabiting them. Nor was age always a factor: large families of children were orphaned as epidemics swept rapidly through the overcrowded and insanitary areas of the industrial cities, killing young adults in their prime. Nevertheless, a disproportionate number of very young children perished. As well as the dreaded typhoid and cholera, the childhood diseases of scarlet fever, measles and whooping cough are all cited in Registrars' notes in the Quarterly Returns as causes of alarming increases in the death rates in urban areas. In the Spring Quarter of 1846, for example, 118 people died in Sheffield South, 41 of them under the age of one. The whole figure was found to be "very considerably above average ... which must be attributed principally to the fact that measles has scarcely ever been known so prevalent and fatal as during the last 3 or 4 months" (Registrar General's Quarterly Tables 1842-48).

      Again, much was achieved simply by showing the child character's own positive attitude to death. It reminded people that the children of the poor had more chance of misery in adult life. The novelists showed young people like Mrs Gaskell's Bessy Higgins in North and South, or Dickens's Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend, actually wishing themselves well out of it: "Have pity on me. Take me up and make me light!" cries the latter to the angels she sees during her "chilled, anxious, ragged" and suffering childhood (290). Even reformers like Annie Macpherson, the revivalist and social worker who helped Dr Barnardo from the sixties onwards, sometimes felt that early death could be a special mercy for them, considering the imminent temptations of alcohol and other vices. Another epitaph from Hare's collection illustrates this attitude well:

Here innocence and beauty lies, whose breath
Was snatch'd by early, not untimely death;
Hence was she snatch'd, just as she did begin
Sorrow to know,--before she knew to sin.
Death, that can sin and sorrow thus prevent,
Is the next blessing to a life well spent. (15)

Then the mother wrung her hands, fell on her
knees, and prayed to our Lord: "Oh hear me not
when I pray against Thy will, which is the best!
hear me not! hear me not!Ó (47)

      Andersen was particularly pleased with the tale, recording his satisfaction that this and another story of resignation had "given many grief-stricken mothers consolation and courage" (The Complete Fairy Tales 1084). But not everyone approved of robbing death of its sting in this way; should not society be improved instead? Charles Kingsley thought so. On behalf of the Ladies' Sanitary Association, he spoke furiously against such a point of view: "I would rather have the living child, and let it take its chance, than let it return to God--wasted. O! it is a distressing thing to see children die." (Sanitary and Social Essays 262-63). The child must be preserved for the struggles of life, he says: guarded against evil, yes, but not by sending the soul back precipitately. Dickens, who sees to it that Jenny Wren is cured of morbid tendencies, was foremost among those who begged "men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts" (Bleak House 705) to look unnecessary death in the face. He wanted them to see it for what it was: the Evangelical politician, Henry Drummond, talking specifically of working children's premature deaths, uncompromisingly and emphatically termed it "WHOLESALE MURDER!" (24).

      Deaths of this kind are therefore presented with unbridled indignation by the Victorian novelists. Pathos comes in, of course, in fact it is sharpened by the sufferer's victim status, and played upon in order to manipulate the reader's response. The dying child is still seen as brave and strong, and there is still a hope of better things to come. The aim, however, is not "Comfort in Sorrow" (the heading for the chapter following Bessy's death in North and South). The author wants to criticise rather than console, to rub the public's averted nose in the stink of the back-alleys. Prevention is the "blessing" aimed at here. Such is preeminently the case with Jo, the poor crossing-sweeper in Bleak House, who has no family to weep for him anyway, and whose case is treated as representative of all those from the squalid tenements of Tom-all-Alone's. These are the destitute, who live like bewildered, driven animals while the Chadbands and their likes are squabbling among themselves, and self-righteously blaming others for their condition. As Dickens pointed out much earlier, Jo's "whole material and immaterial life is wonderfully strange; his death, the strangest thing of all" (274). The strangeness that readers are asked to note here is the inhumanity of society, of course; it is pointed up vividly by Jo's attitude when he is at his last gasp: he is not afraid to die, just very anxious to be "laid along" with that one kind gentleman who "wos very good" to him (704). This detail is far more telling than his well-known repetition of the beginning of The Lord's Prayer.

               Moreover , child death is used in this play as in many other works of him, and I make you know it in the following lines :

Child Death and Literature at the End of the Victorian Era

      Child mortality was decreasing by the end of the century, as a result of improved working and living conditions, public health measures such as vaccination, and better medical treatment. For instance, the mean annual death rate (per million living) for male children between the ages of one and four had roughly halved, declining from over 36,000 in the period 1848-72, to about just under 19,000 between 1901 and 1910; for older children, the change was still more dramatic (see W.D. Logan, Tables 4A and 5A). A Punch cartoon published soon after the end of the first period (in the issue of 22 February 1973) could already afford to take the subject of childhood influenza lightly [....]. Concern with children's premature decease began to seem morbid.

      Two trends of thinking supported this view, the one Christian, the other post-Darwinian. Kingsley and the writers associated with his muscular brand of Christianity celebrated the fighting spirit. Hughes's frail Arthur must be toughened up by Tom Brown, so that he becomes strong enough to survive the fever, to do the good work on this side of the river, alongside his great headmaster, Tom himself, and many of their fellows. For others, however, Christianity had lost its power either to inspire or to console. The traditional formulae for dealing with bereavement were being lost. What Trollope's hard-hearted Sir Hugh says to his poor wife in The Claverings, when she murmurs her pious submission to God's will and hopes for their only son's reception into heaven, must have looked more like common sense than callousness to some readers: "That's all very well in its way," said he, "but what's the special use of it now? I hate twaddle" (209). This was in the late '60s. Nearly three decades later, when Jude's son 'Old Father Time' takes the lives of Sue and Jude's babies in Jude the Obscure, and then commits suicide himself, the doctor, "an advanced man," can offer "no consolation" to the shattered parent (287). If this was the new way of treating child death, perhaps (as the reception of the novel also suggested), it was better not to deal with it at all. "Commonly," wrote W.D. Howells in Harper's Weekly, "a boy like the son of Jude ... hardens himself against his misery, fights for the standing denied him, and achieves it" (255). Nothing could be more indicative of what was now generally expected from a child character in fiction.

      In fact, children do still die in novels occasionally: in 1894, Mrs Ward has a bronchitic little boy expire in front of the philanthropic heroine in Marcella, very much in the style of the early Dickens; but such cases are now rare. Indeed, Ward's best-known child character is Sandy in David Grieve, whose impish doings were modelled on those of her nephew, Julian Huxley. The child death-bed scene, like photographs and paintings of sleeping, dying or dead children, no longer seemed relevant. But the novelists had not written in vain. For example, the cruelty which brings Tom to the water's edge in The Water-Babies pricked the general conscience so painfully that the Chimney Sweepers' Regulation Act, which prohibited the employment of children for this purpose, went through within the year (though three Chimney Sweeps' Bills introduced into Parliament in the previous decade had all been defeated, despite the presentation of irrefutable evidence of the barbarism involved). Moreover, at a time of large-scale loss, the novelists had consoled the inconsolable with the companionship of shared tears. As George Eliot says at the end of "Amos Barton," "No outward solace could counteract the bitterness of this inward woe. But outward solace came" ([....] 111). Sick children themselves apparently did draw encouragement from such sources, and were capable of valiant efforts of faith. The Earl of Shaftesbury was deeply impressed by the serene acceptance achieved by one of his sons who died of pleurisy at Harrow, at the age of sixteen (see Battiscombe 208). As for the modern reader, the novelistic skills with which some Victorians explored the last critical days and even moments of a child character's life still invite admiration.

                                                        Tornar a l´índex.