故事發生於法國大革題命期間，英國londan律師席尼·卡頓，深深地愛上了巴黎女子露絲·曼納。但露絲．曼納卻僅僅衹是把他當作普通朋友，嫁給了法國貴族青年查爾斯·達雷。當法國政治局勢陷入一團混亂時，查爾斯·達雷遭到暴民囚禁，露絲·曼納走投無路，衹好嚮席尼·卡飾頓請求幫助。席尼·卡頓為成全所愛之的幸福，竟然以犧牲自己生命的方式來輓救情敵，在黑牢探監之際施展策劃周密的調包計將查爾斯·達雷救了出來，而他則義無反顧地步上斷頭臺。男主角的高尚情操足以令天下人同聲一哭。
雙城記-創作團隊
導演： 傑剋·康威 羅伯特·Z·倫納德
主演： 羅納德·考爾曼 唐納德·伍茲 伊麗莎白·艾蘭
編劇 Writer：查爾斯·狄更斯 Charles Dickens 塞繆爾·N·貝爾曼 S.N. Behrman W.P. Lipscomb Thomas
製作人 Produced by：大衛·O·塞爾茲尼剋 David O. Selznick
雙城記-影評
這是一個最好的時代，也是一個最壞的時代；這是明智的時代，這是愚昧的時代；這是信任的紀元，這是懷疑的紀元；這是光明的季節，這是黑暗的季節；這是希望的春日，這是失望的鼕日；我們面前應有盡有，我們面前一無所有；我們都將直上天堂，我們都將直下地獄。。。
——狄更斯 《雙城記》
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.
——Charles Dichens (A Tale of Two Cities)
為什麽叫雙城記？狄更斯的這部作品，讓我想起了卡薩布蘭卡，為了所愛的人，放棄了所愛的人。瞭解這個時代的背景是很重要的，不然前面會覺的轉的太快。總的來說，大作傢的小說還是無懈可擊的。當下的社會與狄更斯眼中書中的時代是否相似？我們的出口又在哪裏？欣賞狄更斯的這段名言。
雙城記-幕後花絮
本片改編自狄更斯的同名不朽名著《雙城記》，在大製作傢大衛．塞茨尼剋與導演傑剋．康韋的傾力攝製下，完成了這部反映法國大革命時代悲劇的傑作，也是根據本書拍攝的六個電影版本中成績最好的一部。狄更斯的小說利用各種元素描述一個動人心魄催人淚下的愛情故事，自出版以來受到無數讀者的熱心追捧，一版再版。本片並沒有完全包括小說展現出來的所有元素，但卻沒有遺漏任何最為重要的情節。當然，沒有哪一部通過優秀的小說改編的電...
雙城記-《雙城記》原著簡介：
1775年12月的一個月夜，寓居巴黎的年輕醫生梅尼特散步時，突然被厄弗裏蒙地侯爵兄弟強迫出診。在侯爵府第中，他目睹一個發狂的絶色農婦和一個身受劍傷的少年飲恨而死的慘狀，並獲悉侯爵兄弟為了片刻淫樂殺害他們全家的內情。他拒絶侯爵兄弟的重金賄賂，寫信嚮朝廷告發。不料控告信落到被告人手中，醫生被關進巴士底獄，從此與世隔絶，杳無音訊。兩年後，妻子心碎而死。幼小的孤女路茜被好友勞雷接到倫敦，在善良的女僕普洛斯撫養下長大。
18 年後，梅尼特醫生獲釋。這位精神失常的白發老人被巴黎聖安東尼區的一名酒販、他舊日的僕人得伐石收留。這時，女兒路茜已經成長，專程接他去英國居住。旅途上，他們邂逅法國青年查理·代爾納，受到他的細心照料。
原來代爾納就是侯爵的兒子。他憎恨自己傢族的罪惡，毅然放棄財産的繼承權和貴族的姓氏，移居倫敦，當了一名法語教師。在與梅尼特父女的交往中，他對路茜産生了真誠的愛情。梅尼特為了女兒的幸福，决定埋葬過去，欣然同意他們的婚事。
在法國，代爾納父母相繼去世，叔父厄弗裏蒙地侯爵繼續為所欲為。當他那狂載的馬車若無其事地軋死一個農民的孩子後，終於被孩子父親用刀殺死。一場革命的風暴正在醖釀之中，得伐石的酒店就是革命活動的聯絡點，他的妻子不停地把貴族的暴行編織成不同的花紋，記錄在圍巾上，渴望復仇。
1739年法國大革命的風暴終於襲來了。巴黎人民攻占了巴士底獄，把貴族一個個送上斷頭臺。遠在倫敦的代爾納為了營救管傢蓋白勒，冒險回國，一到巴黎就被捕入獄。梅尼特父女聞訊後星夜趕到。醫生的出庭作證使代爾納回到妻子的身邊。可是，幾小時後，代爾納又被逮捕。在法庭上，得伐石宣讀了當年醫生在獄中寫下的血書：嚮蒼天和大地控告厄弗裏蒙地傢族的最後一個人。法庭判處代爾納死刑。
就在這時，一直暗暗愛慕路茜的律師助手卡爾登來到巴黎，買通獄卒，混入監獄，頂替了昏迷中的代爾納，梅尼特父女早已準備就緒，代爾納一到，馬上出發。一行人順利地離開法國。
得伐石太太在代爾納被判决後，又到梅尼特住所搜捕路茜及其幼女，在與普洛斯的爭鬥中，因槍支走火而斃命。而斷頭臺上，卡爾登為了愛情，從容獻身。
雙城記-導讀
雙城記雙城記
世界名著《雙城記》---作者狄更斯"A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) by Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870)
《雙城記》是狄更斯最重要的代表作之一。早在創作《雙城記》之前很久，狄更斯就對法國大革命極為關註，反復研讀英國歷史學家卡萊爾的《法國革命史》和其他學者的有關著作。他對法國大革命的濃厚興趣發端於對當時英國潛伏着的嚴重的社會危機的擔憂。1854年底，他說：“我相信，不滿情緒像這樣冒煙比火燒起來還要壞得多，這特別像法國在第一次革命爆發前的公衆心理，這就有危險，由於千百種原因——如收成不好、貴族階級的專橫與無能把已經緊張的局面最後一次加緊、海外戰爭的失利、國內偶發事件等等——變成那次從未見過的一場可怕的大火。”可見，《雙城記》這部歷史小說的創作動機在於藉古諷今，以法國大革命的歷史經驗為藉鑒，給英國統治階級敲響警鐘；同時，通過對革命恐怖的極端描寫，也對心懷憤懣、希圖以暴力對抗暴政的人民群衆提出警告，幻想為社會矛盾日益加深的英國現狀尋找一條出路。
從這個目的出發，小說深刻地揭露了法國大革命前深深激化了的社會矛盾，強烈地抨擊貴族階級的荒淫殘暴，並深切地同情下層人民的苦難。作品尖銳地指出，人民群衆的忍耐是有限度的，在貴族階級的殘暴統治下，人民群衆迫於生計，必然奮起反抗。這種反抗是正義的。小說還描繪了起義人民攻擊巴士底獄等壯觀場景，表現了人民群衆的偉大力量。然而，作者站在資産階級人道主義的立場上，即反對殘酷壓迫人民的暴政，也反對革命人民反抗暴政的暴力。在狄更斯筆下，整個革命被描寫成一場毀滅一切的巨大災難，它無情地懲罰罪惡的貴族階級，也盲目地殺害無辜的人們。
這部小說塑造了三類人物。一類是以厄弗裏蒙地侯爵兄弟為代表的封建貴族，他們“唯一不可動搖的哲學就是壓迫人”，是作者痛加鞭撻的對象。另一類是得伐石夫婦等革命群衆。必須指出的是，他們的形象是被扭麯的。例如得伐石的妻子狄安娜，她出生於被侮辱、被迫害的農傢，對封建貴族懷着深仇大恨，作者深切地同情她的悲慘遭遇，革命爆發前後很贊賞她堅強的性格、卓越的才智和非凡的組織領導能力；但當革命進一步深入時，就筆鋒一轉，把她貶斥為一個冷酷、兇狠、狹隘的復仇者。尤其是當她到醫生住所搜捕路茜和小路茜時，更被表現為嗜血成性的狂人。最後，作者讓她死在自己的槍口之下，明確地表示了否定的態度。第三類是理想化人物，是作者心目中以人道主義解决社會矛盾、以博愛戰勝仇恨的榜樣，包括梅尼特父女、代爾納、勞雷和卡爾登等。梅尼特醫生被侯爵兄弟害得傢破人亡，對侯爵兄弟懷有深仇大恨，但是為了女兒的愛，可以摒棄宿仇舊恨；代爾納是侯爵兄弟的子侄，他大徹大悟，譴責自己傢族的罪惡，拋棄爵位和財産，决心以自己的行動來“贖罪”。這對互相輝映的人物，一個是貴族暴政的受害者，寬容為懷；一個是貴族侯爵的繼承人，主張仁愛。他們中間，更有作為女兒和妻子的路茜。在愛的紐帶的維係下，他們組成一個互相諒解、感情融洽的幸福家庭。這顯然是作者設想的一條與暴力革命截然相反的解决社會矛盾的出路，是不切實際的。
《雙城記》有其不同於一般歷史小說的地方，它的人物和主要情節都是虛構的。在法國大革命廣阔的真實背景下，作者以虛構人物梅尼特醫生的經歷為主綫索，把冤獄、愛情與復仇三個互相獨立而又互相關聯的故事交織在一起，情節錯綜，頭緒紛繁。作者采取倒敘、插敘、伏筆、鋪墊等手法，使小說結構完整嚴密，情節麯折緊張而富有戲劇性，表現了卓越的藝術技巧。《雙城記》風格肅穆、沉鬱，充滿憂憤，但缺少早期作品的幽默。
It depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same time period. It follows the lives of several protagonists through these events, most notably Charles Darnay, a French once-aristocrat who falls victim to the indiscriminate wrath of the revolution despite his virtuous nature, and Sydney Carton, a dissipated British barrister who endeavours to redeem his ill-spent life out of love for Darnay's wife, Lucie Manette.
The novel was published in weekly installments (not monthly, as with most of his other novels). The first installment ran in the first issue of Dickens' literary periodical All the Year Round appearing on 30 April 1859; the thirty-first and last ran on 25 November of the same year.
Plot summary
Book the First: Recalled to Life
“ It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... ”
—Opening line of A Tale of Two Cities
It is 1775. Jarvis Lorry, an employee of Tellson's Bank, is travelling from England to France to bring Dr. Alexandre Manette to London. At Dover, before crossing to France, he meets seventeen-year-old Lucie Manette and reveals to her that her father, Dr. Manette, is not dead, as she had been told. He has been a prisoner in the Bastille for the last 18 years.
Lorry and Lucie travel to Saint Antoine, a suburb of Paris, where they meet the Defarges. Monsieur Ernest and Madame Therese Defarge own a wine shop. They also (secretly) lead a band of revolutionaries, who refer to each other by the codename "Jacques" (drawn from the name of an actual French revolutionary group, the Jacquerie).
Monsieur Defarge (who was Dr. Manette's servant before Manette's imprisonment, and now has care of him) takes them to see Dr. Manette. Manette has withdrawn from reality due to the horror of his imprisonment. He sits in a dark room all day making shoes, a trade he had learned whilst imprisoned. At first he does not know his daughter, but eventually recognizes her by her long golden hair which resembles her mother's. Dr. Manette had long kept a strand of his wife's hair which was found on his sleeve when he was imprisoned. Lucie's eyes are blue also just like his. Lorry and Lucie take him back to England.
Book the Second: The Golden Thread
"The Golden Thread" redirects here. For the legal judgement, see Golden thread (law).
It is now 1780. French emigrant Charles Darnay is being tried at the Old Bailey for treason. Two British spies, John Barsad and Roger Cly, are trying to frame the innocent Darnay for their own gain. They claim that Darnay, a Frenchman, gave information about British troops in North America to the French. Darnay is acquitted when a witness who claims he would be able to recognise Darnay anywhere cannot tell Darnay apart from a barrister present in court (not one of those defending Darnay), Sydney Carton, who just happens to look almost identical to him.
In Paris, the Marquis St. Evrémonde (Monseigneur), Darnay's uncle, runs over and kills the son of the peasant Gaspard; he throws a coin to Gaspard to compensate him for his loss. Monsieur Defarge comforts Gaspard. As the Marquis's coach drives off, Defarge throws the coin back into the coach, enraging the Marquis.
Arriving at his château, the Marquis meets with his nephew: Charles Darnay. (Darnay's real surname, therefore, is Evrémonde; out of disgust with his family, Darnay has adopted a version of his mother's maiden name, D'Aulnais.) They argue: Darnay has sympathy for the peasantry, while the Marquis is cruel and heartless:
"Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend," observed the Marquis, "will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof," looking up to it, "shuts out the sky."
That night, Gaspard (who has followed the Marquis to his château, hanging under his coach) murders the Marquis in his sleep. He leaves a note saying, "Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from JACQUES."
In London, Darnay gets Dr. Manette's permission to wed Lucie. But Carton confesses his love to Lucie as well. Knowing she will not love him in return, Carton promises to "embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you".
On the morning of the marriage, Darnay, at Dr. Manette's request, reveals who his family is, a detail which Dr. Manette had asked him to withhold until then. This unhinges Dr. Manette, who reverts to his obsessive shoemaking. His sanity is restored before Lucie returns from her honeymoon; to prevent a further relapse, Lorry destroys the shoemaking bench, which Dr. Manette had brought with him from Paris.
It is 14 July 1789. The Defarges help to lead the storming of the Bastille. Defarge enters Dr. Manette's former cell, "One Hundred and Five, North Tower". The reader does not know what Monsieur Defarge is searching for until Book 3, Chapter 9. (It is a statement in which Dr. Manette explains why he was imprisoned.)
In the summer of 1792, a letter reaches Tellson's bank. Mr. Lorry, who is planning to go to Paris to save the French branch of Tellson's, announces that the letter is addressed to Evrémonde. Nobody knows who Evrémonde is, because Darnay has kept his real name name a secret in England. Darnay acquires the letter by pretending Evrémonde is an acquaintance of his. The letter turns out to be from Gabelle, a servant of the former Marquis. Gabelle has been imprisoned, and begs the new Marquis to come to his aid. Darnay, who feels guilty, leaves for Paris to help Gabelle.
Book the Third: The Track of a Storm
"The Sea Rises", an illustration for Book 2, Chapter 21 by "Phiz"
In France, Darnay is denounced for emigrating from France, and imprisoned in La Force Prison in Paris. Dr. Manette and Lucie—along with Miss Pross, Jerry Cruncher, and "Little Lucie", the daughter of Charles and Lucie Darnay—come to Paris and meet Mr. Lorry to try to free Darnay. A year and three months pass, and Darnay is finally tried.
Dr. Manette, who is seen as a hero for his imprisonment in the hated Bastille, is able to get him released. But that same evening Darnay is again arrested, and is put on trial again the next day, under new charges brought by the Defarges and one "unnamed other". We soon discover that this other is Dr. Manette, through the testimony of his statement (his own account of his imprisonment, written in the Bastille in the "last month of the tenth year of [his] captivity"); Manette does not know that his statement has been found, and is horrified when his words are used to condemn Darnay.
On an errand, Miss Pross is amazed to see her long-lost brother, Solomon Pross, but Pross does not want to be recognised. Sydney Carton suddenly appears (stepping forward from the shadows much as he had done after Darnay's first trial in London) and identifies Solomon Pross as John Barsad, one of the men who tried to frame Darnay for treason at his first trial in London. Carton threatens to reveal Solomon's identity as a Briton and an opportunist who spies for the French or the British as it suits him. If this were revealed, Solomon would surely be executed, so Carton's hand is strong.
Darnay is confronted at the tribunal by Monsieur Defarge, who identifies Darnay as the Marquis St. Evrémonde and reads the letter Dr. Manette had hidden in his cell in the Bastille. Defarge can identify Darnay as Evrémonde because Barsad told him Darnay's identity when Barsad was fishing for information at the Defarges' wine shop in Book 2, Chapter 16. The letter describes how Dr. Manette was locked away in the Bastille by the deceased Marquis Evrémonde (Darnay's father) and his twin brother (who held the title of Marquis when we met him earlier in the book, and is the Marquis who was killed by Gaspard; Darnay's uncle) for trying to report their crimes against a peasant family. The younger brother had become infatuated with a girl. He had kidnapped and raped her and killed her husband, the knowledge of which killed her father, and her brother died in the act of fighting to protect her honor. Prior to his death, the brother of the raped peasant had hidden the last member of the family, his younger sister, "somewhere safe". The paper concludes by condemning the Evrémondes, "them and their descendants, to the last of their race". Dr. Manette is horrified, but his protests are ignored—he is not allowed to take back his condemnation. Darnay is sent to the Conciergerie and sentenced to be guillotined the next day.
Carton wanders into the Defarges' wine shop, where he overhears Madame Defarge talking about her plans to have the rest of Darnay's family (Lucie and "Little Lucie") condemned. Carton discovers that Madame Defarge was the surviving sister of the peasant family savaged by the Evrémondes. The only plot detail that might give one any sympathy for Madame Defarge is the loss of her family and that she has no (family) name. "Defarge" is her married name, and Dr. Manette cannot learn her family name, though he asks her dying sister for it. The next morning, when Dr. Manette returns shattered after having spent the previous night in many failed attempts to save Charles' life, he reverts to his obsessive shoemaking. Carton urges Lorry to flee Paris with Lucie, her father and "Little Lucie".
That same morning Carton visits Darnay in prison. Carton drugs Darnay, and Barsad (whom Carton is blackmailing) has Darnay carried out of the prison. Carton—who looks so similar to Darnay that a witness at Darnay's trial in England could not tell them apart—has decided to pretend to be Darnay, and to be executed in his place. He does this out of love for Lucie, recalling his earlier promise to her. Following Carton's earlier instructions, Darnay's family and Lorry flee Paris and France with an unconscious man in their coach who carries Carton's identification papers, but is actually Darnay.
Meanwhile Madame Defarge, armed with a pistol, goes to the residence of Lucie's family, hoping to catch them mourning for Darnay (since it was illegal to sympathise with or mourn for an enemy of the Republic); however, Lucie, her child, Dr. Manette and Mr. Lorry are already gone. To give them time to escape, Miss Pross confronts Madame Defarge and they struggle. Pross speaks only English and Defarge speaks only French, so neither can understand each other verbally. In the fight, Madame Defarge's pistol goes off, killing her; the noise of the shot and the shock of Madame Defarge's death cause Miss Pross to go permanently deaf.
The novel concludes with the guillotining of Sydney Carton. Carton's unspoken last thoughts are prophetic: Carton foresees that many of the revolutionaries, including Defarge, Barsad and The Vengeance (a lieutenant of Madame Defarge) will be sent to the guillotine themselves, and that Darnay and Lucie will have a son whom they will name after Carton: a son who will fulfill all the promise that Carton wasted. Lucie and Darnay have a first son earlier in the book who is born and dies within a single paragraph. It seems likely that this first son appears in the novel so that their later son, named after Carton, can represent another way in which Carton restores Lucie and Darnay through his sacrifice.
“ It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known. ”
—Final sentence of A Tale of Two Cities
Analysis
A Tale of Two Cities is one of only two works of historical fiction by Charles Dickens (Barnaby Rudge is the other one). It has fewer characters and sub-plots than a typical Charles Dickens novel. The author's primary historical source was The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle: Charles Dickens wrote in his Preface to Tale that "no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle's wonderful book" Carlyle's view that history cycles through destruction and resurrection was an important influence on the novel, illustrated especially well by the life and death of Sydney Carton.
Language
Dickens uses literal translations of French idioms for characters who can't speak English, such as "What the devil do you do in that galley there?!!" and "Where is my husband? ---Here you see me." The Penguin Classics edition of the novel notes that "Not all readers have regarded the experiment as a success."
Humor
Dickens is renowned for his humor, but A Tale of Two Cities is one of his least comical books. Nonetheless, Jerry Cruncher, Miss Pross, and Mr. Stryver provide much comedy. Dickens also uses sarcasm as humour in the book to show different points of view. The book is full of tragic situations, therefore, leaving little room for intended humor provided by Dickens.
Foreshadowing
A Tale of Two Cities contains much foreshadowing:
* Carton's promise to Lucie, the "echoing footsteps" heard by the Manettes in their quiet home, and the wine spilling from the wine cask are only a few of dozens of instances.
* Carton promises Lucie he would die for her because he loves her so much.
* Echoing footsteps can either be the people coming into their lives or the revolutionaries.
* The wine spilling in the streets can be blood running through the streets of France.
* The wine cask breaking is a corrupted government, freedom, or blood from guillotine.
* The negro cupids show danger, and death from the guillotine.
Themes
"Recalled to Life"
In Dickens' England, resurrection always sat firmly in a Christian context. Most broadly, Sydney Carton is resurrected in spirit at the novel's close (even as he, paradoxically, gives up his physical life to save Darnay's—just as, in Christian belief, Christ died for the sins of all people.) More concretely, "Book the First" deals with the rebirth of Dr. Manette from the living death of his incarceration.
Resurrection appears for the first time when Mr. Lorry replies to the message carried by Jerry Cruncher with the words "Recalled to Life". Resurrection also appears during Mr. Lorry's coach ride to Dover, as he constantly ponders a hypothetical conversation with Dr. Manette: ("Buried how long?" "Almost eighteen years." ... "You know that you are recalled to life?" "They tell me so.") He believes he is helping with Dr. Manette's revival, and imagines himself "digging" Dr. Manette up from his grave.
Resurrection is the main theme in the novel. In Jarvis Lorry's thoughts of Dr. Manette, resurrection is first spotted as a theme. It is also the last theme: Carton's sacrifice. Dickens originally wanted to call the entire novel Recalled to Life. (This instead became the title of the first of the novel's three "books".)
Jerry is also part of the recurring theme: he himself is involved in death and resurrection in way that the reader does not yet know. The first piece of foreshadowing comes in his remark to himself: "You'd be in a blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!" The black humour of this statement becomes obvious only much later on. Five years later, one cloudy and very dark night (in June 1780), Mr. Lorry reawakens the reader's interest in the mystery by telling Jerry it is "Almost a night ... to bring the dead out of their graves". Jerry responds firmly that he has never seen the night do that.
It turns out that Jerry Cruncher's involvement with the theme of resurrection is that he is what the Victorians called a "Resurrection Man", one who (illegally) digs up dead bodies to sell to medical men (there was no legal way to procure cadavers for study at that time).
The opposite of resurrection is of course death. Death and resurrection appear often in the novel. Dickens is angered that in France and England, courts hand out death sentences for insignificant crimes. In France, peasants are even put to death without any trial, at the whim of a noble. The Marquis tells Darnay with pleasure that "[I]n the next room (my bedroom), one fellow ... was poniarded on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter—his daughter!"
Interestingly, the demolition of Dr. Manette's shoe-making workbench by Miss Pross and Mr. Lorry is described as "the burning of the body". It seems clear that this is a rare case where death or destruction (the opposite of resurrection) has a positive connotation, since the "burning" helps liberate the doctor from the memory of his long imprisonment. But Dickens' description of this kind and healing act is strikingly odd:
"The Accomplices", an illustration for Book 2, Chapter 19 by "Phiz"
So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime.
Sydney Carton's martyrdom atones for all his past wrongdoings. He even finds God during the last few days of his life, repeating Christ's soothing words, "I am the resurrection and the life". Resurrection is the dominant theme of the last part of the novel. Darnay is rescued at the last moment and recalled to life; Carton chooses death and resurrection to a life better than that which he has ever known: "it was the peacefullest man's face ever beheld there ... he looked sublime and prophetic".
In the broadest sense, at the end of the novel Dickens foresees a resurrected social order in France, rising from the ashes of the old one.
Water
Many in the Jungian archetypal tradition might agree with Hans Biedermann, who writes that water "is the fundamental symbol of all the energy of the unconscious—an energy that can be dangerous when it overflows its proper limits (a frequent dream sequence)." This symbolism suits Dickens' novel; in A Tale of Two Cities, the frequent images of water stand for the building anger of the peasant mob, an anger that Dickens sympathises with to a point, but ultimately finds irrational and even animalistic.
Early in the book, Dickens suggests this when he writes, “[T]he sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction.” The sea here represents the coming mob of revolutionaries. After Gaspard murders the Marquis, he is “hanged there forty feet high—and is left hanging, poisoning the water.” The poisoning of the well represents the bitter impact of Gaspard's execution on the collective feeling of the peasants.
After Gaspard’s death, the storming of the Bastille is led (from the St. Antoine neighbourhood, at least) by the Defarges; “As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled around Defarge’s wine shop, and every human drop in the cauldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex...” The crowd is envisioned as a sea. “With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into a detested word [the word Bastille], the living sea rose, wave upon wave, depth upon depth, and overflowed the city...”
Darnay’s jailer is described as “unwholesomely bloated in both face and person, as to look like a man who had been drowned and filled with water.” Later, during the Reign of Terror, the revolution had grown “so much more wicked and distracted ... that the rivers of the South were encumbered with bodies of the violently drowned by night...” Later a crowd is “swelling and overflowing out into the adjacent streets ... the Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirled them away.”
During the fight with Miss Pross, Madame Defarge clings to her with “more than the hold of a drowning woman”. Commentators on the novel have noted the irony that Madame Defarge is killed by her own gun, and perhaps Dickens means by the above quote to suggest that such vicious vengefulness as Madame Defarge's will eventually destroy even its perpetrators.
So many read the novel in a Freudian light, as exalting the (British) superego over the (French) id. Yet in Carton's last walk, he watches an eddy that "turned and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it onto the sea"—his fulfilment, while masochistic and superego-driven, is nonetheless an ecstatic union with the subconscious.
Darkness and light
As is common in English literature, good and evil are symbolised with light and darkness. Lucie Manette is often associated with light and Madame Defarge with darkness.
Lucie meets her father for the first time in a room kept by the Defarges:." Lucie's hair symbolises joy as she winds "the golden thread that bound them all together". She is adorned with "diamonds, very bright and sparkling", and symbolic of the happiness of the day of her marriage.
Darkness represents uncertainty, fear and peril. It is dark when Mr. Lorry rides to Dover; it is dark in the prisons; dark shadows follow Madame Defarge; dark, gloomy doldrums disturb Dr. Manette; his capture and captivity are shrouded in darkness; the Marquis’s estate is burned in the dark of night; Jerry Cruncher raids graves in the darkness; Charles's second arrest also occurs at night. Both Lucie and Mr. Lorry feel the dark threat that is Madame Defarge. "That dreadful woman seems to throw a shadow on me," remarks Lucie. Although Mr. Lorry tries to comfort her, "the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon himself". Madame Defarge is "like a shadow over the white road", the snow symbolising purity and Madame Defarge's darkness corruption. Dickens also compares the dark colour of blood to the pure white snow: the blood takes on the shade of the crimes of its shedders.
Social injustice
Charles Dickens was a champion of the maltreated poor because of his terrible experience when he was forced to work in a factory as a child. His sympathies, however, lie only up to a point with the revolutionaries; he condemns the mob madness which soon sets in. When madmen and -women massacre eleven hundred detainees in one night and hustle back to sharpen their weapons on the grindstone, they display "eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun".
The reader is shown the poor are brutalised in France and England alike. As crime proliferates, the executioner in England is "stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now hanging housebreaker ... now burning people in the hand" or hanging a broke man for stealing sixpence. In France, a boy is sentenced to have his hands removed and be burned alive, only because he did not kneel down in the rain before a parade of monks passing some fifty yards away. At the lavish residence of Monseigneur, we find "brazen ecclesiastics of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives ... Military officers destitute of military knowledge ... [and] Doctors who made great fortunes ... for imaginary disorders".
The Marquis recalls with pleasure the days when his family had the right of life and death over their slaves, "when many such dogs were taken out to be hanged". He won't even allow a widow to put up a board bearing her dead husband’s name, to discern his resting place from all the others. He orders Madame Defarge's sick brother-in-law to heave a cart all day and allay frogs at night to exacerbate the young man's illness and hasten his death.
In England, even banks endorse unbalanced sentences: a man may be condemned to death for nicking a horse or opening a letter. Conditions in the prisons are dreadful. "Most kinds of debauchery and villainy were practised, and ... dire diseases were bred", sometimes killing the judge before the accused.
So riled is Dickens at the brutality of English law that he depicts some of its punishments with sarcasm: "the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action". He faults the law for not seeking reform: "Whatever is right" is the dictum of the Old Bailey. The gruesome portrayal of quartering highlights its atrocity.
Without entirely forgiving him, Dickens understands that Jerry Cruncher robs graves only to feed his son, and reminds the reader that Mr. Lorry is more likely to rebuke Jerry for his humble social status than anything else. Jerry reminds Mr. Lorry that doctors, men of the cloth, undertakers and watchmen are also conspirators in the selling of bodies.
Dickens wants his readers to be careful that the same revolution that so damaged France will not happen in Britain, which (at least at the beginning of the book) is shown to be nearly as unjust as France. But his warning is addressed not to the British lower classes, but to the aristocracy. He repeatedly uses the metaphor of sowing and reaping; if the aristocracy continues to plant the seeds of a revolution through behaving unjustly, they can be certain of harvesting that revolution in time. The lower classes do not have any agency in this metaphor: they simply react to the behaviour of the aristocracy. In this sense it can be said that while Dickens sympathises with the poor, he identifies with the rich: they are the book's audience, its "us" and not its "them". "Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind".
Relation to Dickens' personal life
Some have argued that in A Tale of Two Cities Dickens reflects on his recently begun affair with eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan, which was possibly asexual but certainly romantic. Lucie Manette resembles Ternan physically, and some have seen "a sort of implied emotional incest" in the relationship between Dr. Manette and his daughter.
After starring in a play by Wilkie Collins entitled The Frozen Deep, Dickens was first inspired to write Tale. In the play, Dickens played the part of a man who sacrifices his own life so that his rival may have the woman they both love; the love triangle in the play became the basis for the relationships between Charles Darnay, Lucie Manette, and Sydney Carton in Tale.
Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay may also bear importantly on Dickens' personal life. The plot hinges on the near-perfect resemblance between Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay; the two look so alike that Carton twice saves Darnay through the inability of others to tell them apart. It is implied that Carton and Darnay not only look alike, but they have the same "genetic" endowments (to use a term that Dickens would not have known): Carton is Darnay made bad. Carton suggests as much:
'Do you particularly like the man [Darnay]?' he muttered, at his own image [which he is regarding in a mirror]; 'why should you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing in you to like; you know that. Ah, confound you! What a change you have made in yourself! A good reason for talking to a man, that he shows you what you have fallen away from and what you might have been! Change places with him, and would you have been looked at by those blue eyes [belonging to Lucie Manette] as he was, and commiserated by that agitated face as he was? Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow.'
Many have felt that Carton and Darnay are doppelgängers, which Eric Rabkin defines as a pair "of characters that together, represent one psychological persona in the narrative". If so, they would prefigure such works as Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Darnay is worthy and respectable but dull (at least to most modern readers), Carton disreputable but magnetic.
One can only suspect whose psychological persona it is that Carton and Darnay together embody (if they do), but it is often thought to be the psyche of Dickens himself. Dickens was quite aware that between them, Carton and Darnay shared his own initials.
Characters
Many of Dickens' characters are "flat", not "round", in the novelist E. M. Forster's famous terms, meaning roughly that they have only one mood. In Tale, for example, the Marquis is unremittingly wicked and relishes being so; Lucie is perfectly loving and supportive. (As a corollary, Dickens often gives these characters verbal tics or visual quirks that he mentions over and over, such as the dints in the nose of the Marquis.) Forster believed that Dickens never truly created rounded characters, but a character such as Carton surely at least comes closer to roundness.
* Sydney Carton – A quick-minded but depressed English barrister alcoholic, and cynic; his Christ-like self-sacrifice redeems his own life and that of Charles Darnay.
* Lucie Manette – An ideal Victorian lady, perfect in every way. She was loved by both Carton and Charles Darnay (whom she marries), and is the daughter of Dr. Manette. She is the "golden thread" after whom Book Two is named, so called because she holds her father's and her family's lives together (and because of her blond hair like her mother's). She also ties nearly every character in the book together.
* Charles Darnay – A young French noble of the Evrémonde family. In disgust at the cruelty of his family to the French peasantry, he has taken on the name "Darnay" (after his mother's maiden name, D'Aulnais) and left France for England.
* Dr. Alexandre Manette – Lucie's father, kept a prisoner in the Bastille for eighteen years.
* Monsieur Ernest Defarge – The owner of a French wine shop and leader of the Jacquerie; husband of Madame Defarge; servant to Dr. Manette as a youth. One of the key revolutionary leaders, he leads the revolution with a noble cause, unlike many of other revolutionaries.
* Madame Therese Defarge – A vengeful female revolutionary, arguably the novel's antagonist
* The Vengeance – A companion of Madame Defarge referred to as her "shadow" and lieutenant, a member of the sisterhood of women revolutionaries in Saint Antoine, and revolutionary zealot. (Many Frenchmen and women did change their names to show their enthusiasm for the Revolution)
* Jarvis Lorry – An elderly manager at Tellson's Bank and a dear friend of Dr. Manette.
* Miss Pross – Lucie Manette's governess since Lucie was ten years old. Fiercely loyal to Lucie and to England.
* The Marquis St. Evrémonde – The cruel uncle of Charles Darnay.
* John Barsad (real name Solomon Pross) – A spy for Britain who later becomes a spy for France (at which point he must hide that he is British). He is the long-lost brother of Miss Pross.
* Roger Cly – Another spy, Barsad's collaborator.
* Jerry Cruncher – Porter and messenger for Tellson's Bank and secret "Resurrection Man" (body-snatcher). His first name is short for Jeremiah.
* Young Jerry Cruncher - Son of Jerry and Mrs. Cruncher. Young Jerry often follows his father around to his father's odd jobs, and at one point in the story, follows his father at night and discovers that his father is a resurrection man. Young Jerry looks up to his father as a role model, and aspires to become a resurrection man himself when he grows up.
* Mrs. Cruncher - Wife of Jerry Cruncher. She is a very religious woman, but her husband, being a bit paranoid, claims she is praying against him, and that is why he doesn't succeed at work often. She is often abused verbally, and almost as often, abused physically, by Jerry, but at the end of the story, he appears to feel a bit guilty about this.
* Mr. Stryver – An arrogant and ambitious barrister, senior to Sydney Carton. There is a frequent mis-perception that Stryver's full name is "C. J. Stryver", but this is very unlikely. The mistake comes from a line in Book 2, Chapter 12: "After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was satisfied that no plainer case could be." The initials C. J. almost certainly refer to a legal title (probably "chief justice"); Stryver is imagining that he is playing every role in a trial in which he browbeats Lucie Manette into marrying him.
* The Seamstress – A young woman caught up in The Terror. She precedes Sydney Carton, who comforts her, to the guillotine.
* Gabelle – Gabelle is "the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary, united" for the tenants of the Marquis St. Evrémonde. Gabelle is imprisoned by the revolutionaries, and his beseeching letter brings Darnay to France. Gabelle is "named after the hated salt tax".
* Gaspard – Gaspard is the man whose son is run over by the Marquis. He then kills the Marquis and goes into hiding for a year. He eventually is found, arrested, and executed.
Adaptations
Films
There have been at least five feature films based on the book:
* A Tale of Two Cities, a 1911 silent film.
* A Tale of Two Cities, a 1917 silent film.
* A Tale of Two Cities, a 1922 silent film.
* A Tale of Two Cities, a 1935 black-and-white MGM film starring Ronald Colman, Elizabeth Allan, Reginald Owen, Basil Rathbone and Edna Mae Oliver. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
* A Tale of Two Cities, a 1958 version, starring Dirk Bogarde, Dorothy Tutin, Christopher Lee, Leo McKern and Donald Pleasance.
In the 1981 film History of the World, Part I, the French Revolution segment appears to be a pastiche of A Tale of Two Cities.
In the film A Simple Wish, the protagonist's father Oliver (possibly a reference to another of Dickens' famous novels, Oliver Twist) is vying for a spot in his theatre company's production of a musical of A Tale of Two Cities, of which we see the beginning and end, using the two famous quotes, including "It is a far, far better thing that I do", as part of a few solos.
Terry Gilliam also developed a film version in the mid-1990s with Mel Gibson and Liam Neeson. The project was eventually abandoned.
Radio
In 1938, The Mercury Theatre on the Air (aka The Campbell Playhouse) produced a radio adapted version starring Orson Welles.
In 1945, a portion of the novel was adapted to the syndicated program The Weird Circle as "Dr. Manette's Manuscript."
In 1950, a radio adaptation written by Terence Rattigan and John Gielgud was broadcast by the BBC. They had written it in 1935, as a stage play, but it was not produced.
In June 1989, BBC Radio 4 produced a 7-hour drama adapted for radio by Nick McCarty and directed by Ian Cotterell. This adaptation is occasionally repeated by BBC Radio 7. The cast included:
* Charles Dance as Sydney Carton
* Maurice Denham as Dr. Alexandre Manette
* Charlotte Attenborough as Lucie Manette
* Richard Pasco as Jarvis Lorry
* John Duttine as Charles Darnay
* Barbara Leigh-Hunt as Miss Pross
* Margaret Robertson as Madame Defarge
* John Hollis as Jerry Cruncher
* John Bull as Ernest Defarge
* Aubrey Woods as Mr. Stryver
* Eva Stuart as Mrs. Cruncher
* John Moffat as Marquis St. Evremonde
* Geoffrey Whitehead as John Barsad and Jacques #2
* Nicholas Courtney as Jacques #3 and The Woodcutter
Television programs
An 8-part mini-series was produced by the BBC in 1957 starring Peter Wyngarde as "Sydney Carton", Edward de Souza as "Charles Darnay" and Wendy Hutchinson as "Lucie Manette".
Another mini-series, this one in 10 parts, was produced by the BBC in 1965.
A third BBC mini-series (in 8 parts) was produced in 1980 starring Paul Shelley as "Carton/Darnay", Sally Osborne as "Lucie Manette" and Nigel Stock as "Jarvis Lorry".
The novel was adapted into a 1980 television movie starring Chris Sarandon as "Sydney Carton/Charles Darnay". Peter Cushing as "Dr. Alexandre Manette", Alice Krige as "Lucie Manette", Flora Robson as "Miss Pross", Barry Morse as "The Marquis St. Evremonde" and Billie Whitelaw as "Madame Defarge".
In 1989 Granada Television made a mini-series starring James Wilby as "Sydney Carton", Serena Gordon as "Lucie Manette", Xavier Deluc as "Charles Darnay", Anna Massey as "Miss Pross" and John Mills as "Jarvis Lorry", which was shown on American television as part of the PBS television series Masterpiece Theatre.
In the 1970 Monty Python's Flying Circus episode "The Attila the Hun Show", the sketch "The News for Parrots" included a scene of A Tale of Two Cities (As told for parrots).
The children's television series Wishbone adapted the novel for the episode "A Tale of Two Sitters".
This novel was also mentioned in the Nickelodeon show Hey Arnold, where Oscar was learning how to read.
Books
In Nicholas Meyer's novel The Canary Trainer, descended from Charles and Lucie, once more titled the Marquis de St. Evremonde, attends the Paris Opera during the events of The Phantom of the Opera.
American author Susanne Alleyn's novel A Far Better Rest, a reimagining of A Tale of Two Cities from the point of view of Sydney Carton, was published in the USA in 2000.
Diane Mayer self-published her novel Evremonde through iUniverse in 2005; it tells the story of Charles and Lucie Darnay and their children after the French Revolution.
Simplified versions of A Tale of Two Cities for English language learners have been published by Penguin Readers, in several levels of difficulty.
Stage musicals
There have been four musicals based on the novel:
A 1968 stage version, Two Cities, the Spectacular New Musical, with music by Jeff Wayne, lyrics by Jerry Wayne and starring Edward Woodward.
A Tale of Two Cities, Jill Santoriello's musical adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, was performed at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, in October and November 2007. James Stacy Barbour ("Sydney Carton") and Jessica Rush ("Lucie Manette") were among the cast. A production of the musical began previews on Broadway on 19 August 2008, opening on 18 September at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. Warren Carlyle is the director/choreographer; the cast includes James Stacy Barbour as "Sydney Carton", Brandi Burkhardt as "Lucie Manette", Aaron Lazar as "Charles Darnay", Gregg Edelman as "Dr. Manette", Katherine McGrath as "Miss Pross", Michael Hayward-Jones as "Jarvis Lorry" and Natalie Toro as "Madame Defarge".
In 2006, Howard Goodall collaborated with Joanna Read in writing a separate musical adaptation of the novel called Two Cities. The central plot and characters were maintained, though Goodall set the action during the Russian Revolution.
The novel has also been adapted as a musical by Takarazuka Revue, the all-female opera company in Japan. The first production was in 1984, starring Mao Daichi at the Grand Theater, and the second was in 2003, starring Jun Sena at the Bow Hall.
Opera
Arthur Benjamin's operatic version of the novel, subtitled Romantic Melodrama in six scenes, was premiered by the BBC on 17 April 1953, conducted by the composer; it received its stage premiere at Sadler's Wells on 22 July 1957, under the baton of Leon Lovett.
雙城記-創作團隊
導演： 傑剋·康威 羅伯特·Z·倫納德
主演： 羅納德·考爾曼 唐納德·伍茲 伊麗莎白·艾蘭
編劇 Writer：查爾斯·狄更斯 Charles Dickens 塞繆爾·N·貝爾曼 S.N. Behrman W.P. Lipscomb Thomas
製作人 Produced by：大衛·O·塞爾茲尼剋 David O. Selznick
雙城記-影評
這是一個最好的時代，也是一個最壞的時代；這是明智的時代，這是愚昧的時代；這是信任的紀元，這是懷疑的紀元；這是光明的季節，這是黑暗的季節；這是希望的春日，這是失望的鼕日；我們面前應有盡有，我們面前一無所有；我們都將直上天堂，我們都將直下地獄。。。
——狄更斯 《雙城記》
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.
——Charles Dichens (A Tale of Two Cities)
為什麽叫雙城記？狄更斯的這部作品，讓我想起了卡薩布蘭卡，為了所愛的人，放棄了所愛的人。瞭解這個時代的背景是很重要的，不然前面會覺的轉的太快。總的來說，大作傢的小說還是無懈可擊的。當下的社會與狄更斯眼中書中的時代是否相似？我們的出口又在哪裏？欣賞狄更斯的這段名言。
雙城記-幕後花絮
本片改編自狄更斯的同名不朽名著《雙城記》，在大製作傢大衛．塞茨尼剋與導演傑剋．康韋的傾力攝製下，完成了這部反映法國大革命時代悲劇的傑作，也是根據本書拍攝的六個電影版本中成績最好的一部。狄更斯的小說利用各種元素描述一個動人心魄催人淚下的愛情故事，自出版以來受到無數讀者的熱心追捧，一版再版。本片並沒有完全包括小說展現出來的所有元素，但卻沒有遺漏任何最為重要的情節。當然，沒有哪一部通過優秀的小說改編的電...
雙城記-《雙城記》原著簡介：
1775年12月的一個月夜，寓居巴黎的年輕醫生梅尼特散步時，突然被厄弗裏蒙地侯爵兄弟強迫出診。在侯爵府第中，他目睹一個發狂的絶色農婦和一個身受劍傷的少年飲恨而死的慘狀，並獲悉侯爵兄弟為了片刻淫樂殺害他們全家的內情。他拒絶侯爵兄弟的重金賄賂，寫信嚮朝廷告發。不料控告信落到被告人手中，醫生被關進巴士底獄，從此與世隔絶，杳無音訊。兩年後，妻子心碎而死。幼小的孤女路茜被好友勞雷接到倫敦，在善良的女僕普洛斯撫養下長大。
18 年後，梅尼特醫生獲釋。這位精神失常的白發老人被巴黎聖安東尼區的一名酒販、他舊日的僕人得伐石收留。這時，女兒路茜已經成長，專程接他去英國居住。旅途上，他們邂逅法國青年查理·代爾納，受到他的細心照料。
原來代爾納就是侯爵的兒子。他憎恨自己傢族的罪惡，毅然放棄財産的繼承權和貴族的姓氏，移居倫敦，當了一名法語教師。在與梅尼特父女的交往中，他對路茜産生了真誠的愛情。梅尼特為了女兒的幸福，决定埋葬過去，欣然同意他們的婚事。
在法國，代爾納父母相繼去世，叔父厄弗裏蒙地侯爵繼續為所欲為。當他那狂載的馬車若無其事地軋死一個農民的孩子後，終於被孩子父親用刀殺死。一場革命的風暴正在醖釀之中，得伐石的酒店就是革命活動的聯絡點，他的妻子不停地把貴族的暴行編織成不同的花紋，記錄在圍巾上，渴望復仇。
1739年法國大革命的風暴終於襲來了。巴黎人民攻占了巴士底獄，把貴族一個個送上斷頭臺。遠在倫敦的代爾納為了營救管傢蓋白勒，冒險回國，一到巴黎就被捕入獄。梅尼特父女聞訊後星夜趕到。醫生的出庭作證使代爾納回到妻子的身邊。可是，幾小時後，代爾納又被逮捕。在法庭上，得伐石宣讀了當年醫生在獄中寫下的血書：嚮蒼天和大地控告厄弗裏蒙地傢族的最後一個人。法庭判處代爾納死刑。
就在這時，一直暗暗愛慕路茜的律師助手卡爾登來到巴黎，買通獄卒，混入監獄，頂替了昏迷中的代爾納，梅尼特父女早已準備就緒，代爾納一到，馬上出發。一行人順利地離開法國。
得伐石太太在代爾納被判决後，又到梅尼特住所搜捕路茜及其幼女，在與普洛斯的爭鬥中，因槍支走火而斃命。而斷頭臺上，卡爾登為了愛情，從容獻身。
雙城記-導讀
雙城記雙城記
世界名著《雙城記》---作者狄更斯"A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) by Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870)
《雙城記》是狄更斯最重要的代表作之一。早在創作《雙城記》之前很久，狄更斯就對法國大革命極為關註，反復研讀英國歷史學家卡萊爾的《法國革命史》和其他學者的有關著作。他對法國大革命的濃厚興趣發端於對當時英國潛伏着的嚴重的社會危機的擔憂。1854年底，他說：“我相信，不滿情緒像這樣冒煙比火燒起來還要壞得多，這特別像法國在第一次革命爆發前的公衆心理，這就有危險，由於千百種原因——如收成不好、貴族階級的專橫與無能把已經緊張的局面最後一次加緊、海外戰爭的失利、國內偶發事件等等——變成那次從未見過的一場可怕的大火。”可見，《雙城記》這部歷史小說的創作動機在於藉古諷今，以法國大革命的歷史經驗為藉鑒，給英國統治階級敲響警鐘；同時，通過對革命恐怖的極端描寫，也對心懷憤懣、希圖以暴力對抗暴政的人民群衆提出警告，幻想為社會矛盾日益加深的英國現狀尋找一條出路。
從這個目的出發，小說深刻地揭露了法國大革命前深深激化了的社會矛盾，強烈地抨擊貴族階級的荒淫殘暴，並深切地同情下層人民的苦難。作品尖銳地指出，人民群衆的忍耐是有限度的，在貴族階級的殘暴統治下，人民群衆迫於生計，必然奮起反抗。這種反抗是正義的。小說還描繪了起義人民攻擊巴士底獄等壯觀場景，表現了人民群衆的偉大力量。然而，作者站在資産階級人道主義的立場上，即反對殘酷壓迫人民的暴政，也反對革命人民反抗暴政的暴力。在狄更斯筆下，整個革命被描寫成一場毀滅一切的巨大災難，它無情地懲罰罪惡的貴族階級，也盲目地殺害無辜的人們。
這部小說塑造了三類人物。一類是以厄弗裏蒙地侯爵兄弟為代表的封建貴族，他們“唯一不可動搖的哲學就是壓迫人”，是作者痛加鞭撻的對象。另一類是得伐石夫婦等革命群衆。必須指出的是，他們的形象是被扭麯的。例如得伐石的妻子狄安娜，她出生於被侮辱、被迫害的農傢，對封建貴族懷着深仇大恨，作者深切地同情她的悲慘遭遇，革命爆發前後很贊賞她堅強的性格、卓越的才智和非凡的組織領導能力；但當革命進一步深入時，就筆鋒一轉，把她貶斥為一個冷酷、兇狠、狹隘的復仇者。尤其是當她到醫生住所搜捕路茜和小路茜時，更被表現為嗜血成性的狂人。最後，作者讓她死在自己的槍口之下，明確地表示了否定的態度。第三類是理想化人物，是作者心目中以人道主義解决社會矛盾、以博愛戰勝仇恨的榜樣，包括梅尼特父女、代爾納、勞雷和卡爾登等。梅尼特醫生被侯爵兄弟害得傢破人亡，對侯爵兄弟懷有深仇大恨，但是為了女兒的愛，可以摒棄宿仇舊恨；代爾納是侯爵兄弟的子侄，他大徹大悟，譴責自己傢族的罪惡，拋棄爵位和財産，决心以自己的行動來“贖罪”。這對互相輝映的人物，一個是貴族暴政的受害者，寬容為懷；一個是貴族侯爵的繼承人，主張仁愛。他們中間，更有作為女兒和妻子的路茜。在愛的紐帶的維係下，他們組成一個互相諒解、感情融洽的幸福家庭。這顯然是作者設想的一條與暴力革命截然相反的解决社會矛盾的出路，是不切實際的。
《雙城記》有其不同於一般歷史小說的地方，它的人物和主要情節都是虛構的。在法國大革命廣阔的真實背景下，作者以虛構人物梅尼特醫生的經歷為主綫索，把冤獄、愛情與復仇三個互相獨立而又互相關聯的故事交織在一起，情節錯綜，頭緒紛繁。作者采取倒敘、插敘、伏筆、鋪墊等手法，使小說結構完整嚴密，情節麯折緊張而富有戲劇性，表現了卓越的藝術技巧。《雙城記》風格肅穆、沉鬱，充滿憂憤，但缺少早期作品的幽默。
It depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same time period. It follows the lives of several protagonists through these events, most notably Charles Darnay, a French once-aristocrat who falls victim to the indiscriminate wrath of the revolution despite his virtuous nature, and Sydney Carton, a dissipated British barrister who endeavours to redeem his ill-spent life out of love for Darnay's wife, Lucie Manette.
The novel was published in weekly installments (not monthly, as with most of his other novels). The first installment ran in the first issue of Dickens' literary periodical All the Year Round appearing on 30 April 1859; the thirty-first and last ran on 25 November of the same year.
Plot summary
Book the First: Recalled to Life
“ It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... ”
—Opening line of A Tale of Two Cities
It is 1775. Jarvis Lorry, an employee of Tellson's Bank, is travelling from England to France to bring Dr. Alexandre Manette to London. At Dover, before crossing to France, he meets seventeen-year-old Lucie Manette and reveals to her that her father, Dr. Manette, is not dead, as she had been told. He has been a prisoner in the Bastille for the last 18 years.
Lorry and Lucie travel to Saint Antoine, a suburb of Paris, where they meet the Defarges. Monsieur Ernest and Madame Therese Defarge own a wine shop. They also (secretly) lead a band of revolutionaries, who refer to each other by the codename "Jacques" (drawn from the name of an actual French revolutionary group, the Jacquerie).
Monsieur Defarge (who was Dr. Manette's servant before Manette's imprisonment, and now has care of him) takes them to see Dr. Manette. Manette has withdrawn from reality due to the horror of his imprisonment. He sits in a dark room all day making shoes, a trade he had learned whilst imprisoned. At first he does not know his daughter, but eventually recognizes her by her long golden hair which resembles her mother's. Dr. Manette had long kept a strand of his wife's hair which was found on his sleeve when he was imprisoned. Lucie's eyes are blue also just like his. Lorry and Lucie take him back to England.
Book the Second: The Golden Thread
"The Golden Thread" redirects here. For the legal judgement, see Golden thread (law).
It is now 1780. French emigrant Charles Darnay is being tried at the Old Bailey for treason. Two British spies, John Barsad and Roger Cly, are trying to frame the innocent Darnay for their own gain. They claim that Darnay, a Frenchman, gave information about British troops in North America to the French. Darnay is acquitted when a witness who claims he would be able to recognise Darnay anywhere cannot tell Darnay apart from a barrister present in court (not one of those defending Darnay), Sydney Carton, who just happens to look almost identical to him.
In Paris, the Marquis St. Evrémonde (Monseigneur), Darnay's uncle, runs over and kills the son of the peasant Gaspard; he throws a coin to Gaspard to compensate him for his loss. Monsieur Defarge comforts Gaspard. As the Marquis's coach drives off, Defarge throws the coin back into the coach, enraging the Marquis.
Arriving at his château, the Marquis meets with his nephew: Charles Darnay. (Darnay's real surname, therefore, is Evrémonde; out of disgust with his family, Darnay has adopted a version of his mother's maiden name, D'Aulnais.) They argue: Darnay has sympathy for the peasantry, while the Marquis is cruel and heartless:
"Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend," observed the Marquis, "will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof," looking up to it, "shuts out the sky."
That night, Gaspard (who has followed the Marquis to his château, hanging under his coach) murders the Marquis in his sleep. He leaves a note saying, "Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from JACQUES."
In London, Darnay gets Dr. Manette's permission to wed Lucie. But Carton confesses his love to Lucie as well. Knowing she will not love him in return, Carton promises to "embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you".
On the morning of the marriage, Darnay, at Dr. Manette's request, reveals who his family is, a detail which Dr. Manette had asked him to withhold until then. This unhinges Dr. Manette, who reverts to his obsessive shoemaking. His sanity is restored before Lucie returns from her honeymoon; to prevent a further relapse, Lorry destroys the shoemaking bench, which Dr. Manette had brought with him from Paris.
It is 14 July 1789. The Defarges help to lead the storming of the Bastille. Defarge enters Dr. Manette's former cell, "One Hundred and Five, North Tower". The reader does not know what Monsieur Defarge is searching for until Book 3, Chapter 9. (It is a statement in which Dr. Manette explains why he was imprisoned.)
In the summer of 1792, a letter reaches Tellson's bank. Mr. Lorry, who is planning to go to Paris to save the French branch of Tellson's, announces that the letter is addressed to Evrémonde. Nobody knows who Evrémonde is, because Darnay has kept his real name name a secret in England. Darnay acquires the letter by pretending Evrémonde is an acquaintance of his. The letter turns out to be from Gabelle, a servant of the former Marquis. Gabelle has been imprisoned, and begs the new Marquis to come to his aid. Darnay, who feels guilty, leaves for Paris to help Gabelle.
Book the Third: The Track of a Storm
"The Sea Rises", an illustration for Book 2, Chapter 21 by "Phiz"
In France, Darnay is denounced for emigrating from France, and imprisoned in La Force Prison in Paris. Dr. Manette and Lucie—along with Miss Pross, Jerry Cruncher, and "Little Lucie", the daughter of Charles and Lucie Darnay—come to Paris and meet Mr. Lorry to try to free Darnay. A year and three months pass, and Darnay is finally tried.
Dr. Manette, who is seen as a hero for his imprisonment in the hated Bastille, is able to get him released. But that same evening Darnay is again arrested, and is put on trial again the next day, under new charges brought by the Defarges and one "unnamed other". We soon discover that this other is Dr. Manette, through the testimony of his statement (his own account of his imprisonment, written in the Bastille in the "last month of the tenth year of [his] captivity"); Manette does not know that his statement has been found, and is horrified when his words are used to condemn Darnay.
On an errand, Miss Pross is amazed to see her long-lost brother, Solomon Pross, but Pross does not want to be recognised. Sydney Carton suddenly appears (stepping forward from the shadows much as he had done after Darnay's first trial in London) and identifies Solomon Pross as John Barsad, one of the men who tried to frame Darnay for treason at his first trial in London. Carton threatens to reveal Solomon's identity as a Briton and an opportunist who spies for the French or the British as it suits him. If this were revealed, Solomon would surely be executed, so Carton's hand is strong.
Darnay is confronted at the tribunal by Monsieur Defarge, who identifies Darnay as the Marquis St. Evrémonde and reads the letter Dr. Manette had hidden in his cell in the Bastille. Defarge can identify Darnay as Evrémonde because Barsad told him Darnay's identity when Barsad was fishing for information at the Defarges' wine shop in Book 2, Chapter 16. The letter describes how Dr. Manette was locked away in the Bastille by the deceased Marquis Evrémonde (Darnay's father) and his twin brother (who held the title of Marquis when we met him earlier in the book, and is the Marquis who was killed by Gaspard; Darnay's uncle) for trying to report their crimes against a peasant family. The younger brother had become infatuated with a girl. He had kidnapped and raped her and killed her husband, the knowledge of which killed her father, and her brother died in the act of fighting to protect her honor. Prior to his death, the brother of the raped peasant had hidden the last member of the family, his younger sister, "somewhere safe". The paper concludes by condemning the Evrémondes, "them and their descendants, to the last of their race". Dr. Manette is horrified, but his protests are ignored—he is not allowed to take back his condemnation. Darnay is sent to the Conciergerie and sentenced to be guillotined the next day.
Carton wanders into the Defarges' wine shop, where he overhears Madame Defarge talking about her plans to have the rest of Darnay's family (Lucie and "Little Lucie") condemned. Carton discovers that Madame Defarge was the surviving sister of the peasant family savaged by the Evrémondes. The only plot detail that might give one any sympathy for Madame Defarge is the loss of her family and that she has no (family) name. "Defarge" is her married name, and Dr. Manette cannot learn her family name, though he asks her dying sister for it. The next morning, when Dr. Manette returns shattered after having spent the previous night in many failed attempts to save Charles' life, he reverts to his obsessive shoemaking. Carton urges Lorry to flee Paris with Lucie, her father and "Little Lucie".
That same morning Carton visits Darnay in prison. Carton drugs Darnay, and Barsad (whom Carton is blackmailing) has Darnay carried out of the prison. Carton—who looks so similar to Darnay that a witness at Darnay's trial in England could not tell them apart—has decided to pretend to be Darnay, and to be executed in his place. He does this out of love for Lucie, recalling his earlier promise to her. Following Carton's earlier instructions, Darnay's family and Lorry flee Paris and France with an unconscious man in their coach who carries Carton's identification papers, but is actually Darnay.
Meanwhile Madame Defarge, armed with a pistol, goes to the residence of Lucie's family, hoping to catch them mourning for Darnay (since it was illegal to sympathise with or mourn for an enemy of the Republic); however, Lucie, her child, Dr. Manette and Mr. Lorry are already gone. To give them time to escape, Miss Pross confronts Madame Defarge and they struggle. Pross speaks only English and Defarge speaks only French, so neither can understand each other verbally. In the fight, Madame Defarge's pistol goes off, killing her; the noise of the shot and the shock of Madame Defarge's death cause Miss Pross to go permanently deaf.
The novel concludes with the guillotining of Sydney Carton. Carton's unspoken last thoughts are prophetic: Carton foresees that many of the revolutionaries, including Defarge, Barsad and The Vengeance (a lieutenant of Madame Defarge) will be sent to the guillotine themselves, and that Darnay and Lucie will have a son whom they will name after Carton: a son who will fulfill all the promise that Carton wasted. Lucie and Darnay have a first son earlier in the book who is born and dies within a single paragraph. It seems likely that this first son appears in the novel so that their later son, named after Carton, can represent another way in which Carton restores Lucie and Darnay through his sacrifice.
“ It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known. ”
—Final sentence of A Tale of Two Cities
Analysis
A Tale of Two Cities is one of only two works of historical fiction by Charles Dickens (Barnaby Rudge is the other one). It has fewer characters and sub-plots than a typical Charles Dickens novel. The author's primary historical source was The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle: Charles Dickens wrote in his Preface to Tale that "no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle's wonderful book" Carlyle's view that history cycles through destruction and resurrection was an important influence on the novel, illustrated especially well by the life and death of Sydney Carton.
Language
Dickens uses literal translations of French idioms for characters who can't speak English, such as "What the devil do you do in that galley there?!!" and "Where is my husband? ---Here you see me." The Penguin Classics edition of the novel notes that "Not all readers have regarded the experiment as a success."
Humor
Dickens is renowned for his humor, but A Tale of Two Cities is one of his least comical books. Nonetheless, Jerry Cruncher, Miss Pross, and Mr. Stryver provide much comedy. Dickens also uses sarcasm as humour in the book to show different points of view. The book is full of tragic situations, therefore, leaving little room for intended humor provided by Dickens.
Foreshadowing
A Tale of Two Cities contains much foreshadowing:
* Carton's promise to Lucie, the "echoing footsteps" heard by the Manettes in their quiet home, and the wine spilling from the wine cask are only a few of dozens of instances.
* Carton promises Lucie he would die for her because he loves her so much.
* Echoing footsteps can either be the people coming into their lives or the revolutionaries.
* The wine spilling in the streets can be blood running through the streets of France.
* The wine cask breaking is a corrupted government, freedom, or blood from guillotine.
* The negro cupids show danger, and death from the guillotine.
Themes
"Recalled to Life"
In Dickens' England, resurrection always sat firmly in a Christian context. Most broadly, Sydney Carton is resurrected in spirit at the novel's close (even as he, paradoxically, gives up his physical life to save Darnay's—just as, in Christian belief, Christ died for the sins of all people.) More concretely, "Book the First" deals with the rebirth of Dr. Manette from the living death of his incarceration.
Resurrection appears for the first time when Mr. Lorry replies to the message carried by Jerry Cruncher with the words "Recalled to Life". Resurrection also appears during Mr. Lorry's coach ride to Dover, as he constantly ponders a hypothetical conversation with Dr. Manette: ("Buried how long?" "Almost eighteen years." ... "You know that you are recalled to life?" "They tell me so.") He believes he is helping with Dr. Manette's revival, and imagines himself "digging" Dr. Manette up from his grave.
Resurrection is the main theme in the novel. In Jarvis Lorry's thoughts of Dr. Manette, resurrection is first spotted as a theme. It is also the last theme: Carton's sacrifice. Dickens originally wanted to call the entire novel Recalled to Life. (This instead became the title of the first of the novel's three "books".)
Jerry is also part of the recurring theme: he himself is involved in death and resurrection in way that the reader does not yet know. The first piece of foreshadowing comes in his remark to himself: "You'd be in a blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!" The black humour of this statement becomes obvious only much later on. Five years later, one cloudy and very dark night (in June 1780), Mr. Lorry reawakens the reader's interest in the mystery by telling Jerry it is "Almost a night ... to bring the dead out of their graves". Jerry responds firmly that he has never seen the night do that.
It turns out that Jerry Cruncher's involvement with the theme of resurrection is that he is what the Victorians called a "Resurrection Man", one who (illegally) digs up dead bodies to sell to medical men (there was no legal way to procure cadavers for study at that time).
The opposite of resurrection is of course death. Death and resurrection appear often in the novel. Dickens is angered that in France and England, courts hand out death sentences for insignificant crimes. In France, peasants are even put to death without any trial, at the whim of a noble. The Marquis tells Darnay with pleasure that "[I]n the next room (my bedroom), one fellow ... was poniarded on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter—his daughter!"
Interestingly, the demolition of Dr. Manette's shoe-making workbench by Miss Pross and Mr. Lorry is described as "the burning of the body". It seems clear that this is a rare case where death or destruction (the opposite of resurrection) has a positive connotation, since the "burning" helps liberate the doctor from the memory of his long imprisonment. But Dickens' description of this kind and healing act is strikingly odd:
"The Accomplices", an illustration for Book 2, Chapter 19 by "Phiz"
So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime.
Sydney Carton's martyrdom atones for all his past wrongdoings. He even finds God during the last few days of his life, repeating Christ's soothing words, "I am the resurrection and the life". Resurrection is the dominant theme of the last part of the novel. Darnay is rescued at the last moment and recalled to life; Carton chooses death and resurrection to a life better than that which he has ever known: "it was the peacefullest man's face ever beheld there ... he looked sublime and prophetic".
In the broadest sense, at the end of the novel Dickens foresees a resurrected social order in France, rising from the ashes of the old one.
Water
Many in the Jungian archetypal tradition might agree with Hans Biedermann, who writes that water "is the fundamental symbol of all the energy of the unconscious—an energy that can be dangerous when it overflows its proper limits (a frequent dream sequence)." This symbolism suits Dickens' novel; in A Tale of Two Cities, the frequent images of water stand for the building anger of the peasant mob, an anger that Dickens sympathises with to a point, but ultimately finds irrational and even animalistic.
Early in the book, Dickens suggests this when he writes, “[T]he sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction.” The sea here represents the coming mob of revolutionaries. After Gaspard murders the Marquis, he is “hanged there forty feet high—and is left hanging, poisoning the water.” The poisoning of the well represents the bitter impact of Gaspard's execution on the collective feeling of the peasants.
After Gaspard’s death, the storming of the Bastille is led (from the St. Antoine neighbourhood, at least) by the Defarges; “As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled around Defarge’s wine shop, and every human drop in the cauldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex...” The crowd is envisioned as a sea. “With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into a detested word [the word Bastille], the living sea rose, wave upon wave, depth upon depth, and overflowed the city...”
Darnay’s jailer is described as “unwholesomely bloated in both face and person, as to look like a man who had been drowned and filled with water.” Later, during the Reign of Terror, the revolution had grown “so much more wicked and distracted ... that the rivers of the South were encumbered with bodies of the violently drowned by night...” Later a crowd is “swelling and overflowing out into the adjacent streets ... the Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirled them away.”
During the fight with Miss Pross, Madame Defarge clings to her with “more than the hold of a drowning woman”. Commentators on the novel have noted the irony that Madame Defarge is killed by her own gun, and perhaps Dickens means by the above quote to suggest that such vicious vengefulness as Madame Defarge's will eventually destroy even its perpetrators.
So many read the novel in a Freudian light, as exalting the (British) superego over the (French) id. Yet in Carton's last walk, he watches an eddy that "turned and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it onto the sea"—his fulfilment, while masochistic and superego-driven, is nonetheless an ecstatic union with the subconscious.
Darkness and light
As is common in English literature, good and evil are symbolised with light and darkness. Lucie Manette is often associated with light and Madame Defarge with darkness.
Lucie meets her father for the first time in a room kept by the Defarges:." Lucie's hair symbolises joy as she winds "the golden thread that bound them all together". She is adorned with "diamonds, very bright and sparkling", and symbolic of the happiness of the day of her marriage.
Darkness represents uncertainty, fear and peril. It is dark when Mr. Lorry rides to Dover; it is dark in the prisons; dark shadows follow Madame Defarge; dark, gloomy doldrums disturb Dr. Manette; his capture and captivity are shrouded in darkness; the Marquis’s estate is burned in the dark of night; Jerry Cruncher raids graves in the darkness; Charles's second arrest also occurs at night. Both Lucie and Mr. Lorry feel the dark threat that is Madame Defarge. "That dreadful woman seems to throw a shadow on me," remarks Lucie. Although Mr. Lorry tries to comfort her, "the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon himself". Madame Defarge is "like a shadow over the white road", the snow symbolising purity and Madame Defarge's darkness corruption. Dickens also compares the dark colour of blood to the pure white snow: the blood takes on the shade of the crimes of its shedders.
Social injustice
Charles Dickens was a champion of the maltreated poor because of his terrible experience when he was forced to work in a factory as a child. His sympathies, however, lie only up to a point with the revolutionaries; he condemns the mob madness which soon sets in. When madmen and -women massacre eleven hundred detainees in one night and hustle back to sharpen their weapons on the grindstone, they display "eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun".
The reader is shown the poor are brutalised in France and England alike. As crime proliferates, the executioner in England is "stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now hanging housebreaker ... now burning people in the hand" or hanging a broke man for stealing sixpence. In France, a boy is sentenced to have his hands removed and be burned alive, only because he did not kneel down in the rain before a parade of monks passing some fifty yards away. At the lavish residence of Monseigneur, we find "brazen ecclesiastics of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives ... Military officers destitute of military knowledge ... [and] Doctors who made great fortunes ... for imaginary disorders".
The Marquis recalls with pleasure the days when his family had the right of life and death over their slaves, "when many such dogs were taken out to be hanged". He won't even allow a widow to put up a board bearing her dead husband’s name, to discern his resting place from all the others. He orders Madame Defarge's sick brother-in-law to heave a cart all day and allay frogs at night to exacerbate the young man's illness and hasten his death.
In England, even banks endorse unbalanced sentences: a man may be condemned to death for nicking a horse or opening a letter. Conditions in the prisons are dreadful. "Most kinds of debauchery and villainy were practised, and ... dire diseases were bred", sometimes killing the judge before the accused.
So riled is Dickens at the brutality of English law that he depicts some of its punishments with sarcasm: "the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action". He faults the law for not seeking reform: "Whatever is right" is the dictum of the Old Bailey. The gruesome portrayal of quartering highlights its atrocity.
Without entirely forgiving him, Dickens understands that Jerry Cruncher robs graves only to feed his son, and reminds the reader that Mr. Lorry is more likely to rebuke Jerry for his humble social status than anything else. Jerry reminds Mr. Lorry that doctors, men of the cloth, undertakers and watchmen are also conspirators in the selling of bodies.
Dickens wants his readers to be careful that the same revolution that so damaged France will not happen in Britain, which (at least at the beginning of the book) is shown to be nearly as unjust as France. But his warning is addressed not to the British lower classes, but to the aristocracy. He repeatedly uses the metaphor of sowing and reaping; if the aristocracy continues to plant the seeds of a revolution through behaving unjustly, they can be certain of harvesting that revolution in time. The lower classes do not have any agency in this metaphor: they simply react to the behaviour of the aristocracy. In this sense it can be said that while Dickens sympathises with the poor, he identifies with the rich: they are the book's audience, its "us" and not its "them". "Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind".
Relation to Dickens' personal life
Some have argued that in A Tale of Two Cities Dickens reflects on his recently begun affair with eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan, which was possibly asexual but certainly romantic. Lucie Manette resembles Ternan physically, and some have seen "a sort of implied emotional incest" in the relationship between Dr. Manette and his daughter.
After starring in a play by Wilkie Collins entitled The Frozen Deep, Dickens was first inspired to write Tale. In the play, Dickens played the part of a man who sacrifices his own life so that his rival may have the woman they both love; the love triangle in the play became the basis for the relationships between Charles Darnay, Lucie Manette, and Sydney Carton in Tale.
Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay may also bear importantly on Dickens' personal life. The plot hinges on the near-perfect resemblance between Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay; the two look so alike that Carton twice saves Darnay through the inability of others to tell them apart. It is implied that Carton and Darnay not only look alike, but they have the same "genetic" endowments (to use a term that Dickens would not have known): Carton is Darnay made bad. Carton suggests as much:
'Do you particularly like the man [Darnay]?' he muttered, at his own image [which he is regarding in a mirror]; 'why should you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing in you to like; you know that. Ah, confound you! What a change you have made in yourself! A good reason for talking to a man, that he shows you what you have fallen away from and what you might have been! Change places with him, and would you have been looked at by those blue eyes [belonging to Lucie Manette] as he was, and commiserated by that agitated face as he was? Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow.'
Many have felt that Carton and Darnay are doppelgängers, which Eric Rabkin defines as a pair "of characters that together, represent one psychological persona in the narrative". If so, they would prefigure such works as Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Darnay is worthy and respectable but dull (at least to most modern readers), Carton disreputable but magnetic.
One can only suspect whose psychological persona it is that Carton and Darnay together embody (if they do), but it is often thought to be the psyche of Dickens himself. Dickens was quite aware that between them, Carton and Darnay shared his own initials.
Characters
Many of Dickens' characters are "flat", not "round", in the novelist E. M. Forster's famous terms, meaning roughly that they have only one mood. In Tale, for example, the Marquis is unremittingly wicked and relishes being so; Lucie is perfectly loving and supportive. (As a corollary, Dickens often gives these characters verbal tics or visual quirks that he mentions over and over, such as the dints in the nose of the Marquis.) Forster believed that Dickens never truly created rounded characters, but a character such as Carton surely at least comes closer to roundness.
* Sydney Carton – A quick-minded but depressed English barrister alcoholic, and cynic; his Christ-like self-sacrifice redeems his own life and that of Charles Darnay.
* Lucie Manette – An ideal Victorian lady, perfect in every way. She was loved by both Carton and Charles Darnay (whom she marries), and is the daughter of Dr. Manette. She is the "golden thread" after whom Book Two is named, so called because she holds her father's and her family's lives together (and because of her blond hair like her mother's). She also ties nearly every character in the book together.
* Charles Darnay – A young French noble of the Evrémonde family. In disgust at the cruelty of his family to the French peasantry, he has taken on the name "Darnay" (after his mother's maiden name, D'Aulnais) and left France for England.
* Dr. Alexandre Manette – Lucie's father, kept a prisoner in the Bastille for eighteen years.
* Monsieur Ernest Defarge – The owner of a French wine shop and leader of the Jacquerie; husband of Madame Defarge; servant to Dr. Manette as a youth. One of the key revolutionary leaders, he leads the revolution with a noble cause, unlike many of other revolutionaries.
* Madame Therese Defarge – A vengeful female revolutionary, arguably the novel's antagonist
* The Vengeance – A companion of Madame Defarge referred to as her "shadow" and lieutenant, a member of the sisterhood of women revolutionaries in Saint Antoine, and revolutionary zealot. (Many Frenchmen and women did change their names to show their enthusiasm for the Revolution)
* Jarvis Lorry – An elderly manager at Tellson's Bank and a dear friend of Dr. Manette.
* Miss Pross – Lucie Manette's governess since Lucie was ten years old. Fiercely loyal to Lucie and to England.
* The Marquis St. Evrémonde – The cruel uncle of Charles Darnay.
* John Barsad (real name Solomon Pross) – A spy for Britain who later becomes a spy for France (at which point he must hide that he is British). He is the long-lost brother of Miss Pross.
* Roger Cly – Another spy, Barsad's collaborator.
* Jerry Cruncher – Porter and messenger for Tellson's Bank and secret "Resurrection Man" (body-snatcher). His first name is short for Jeremiah.
* Young Jerry Cruncher - Son of Jerry and Mrs. Cruncher. Young Jerry often follows his father around to his father's odd jobs, and at one point in the story, follows his father at night and discovers that his father is a resurrection man. Young Jerry looks up to his father as a role model, and aspires to become a resurrection man himself when he grows up.
* Mrs. Cruncher - Wife of Jerry Cruncher. She is a very religious woman, but her husband, being a bit paranoid, claims she is praying against him, and that is why he doesn't succeed at work often. She is often abused verbally, and almost as often, abused physically, by Jerry, but at the end of the story, he appears to feel a bit guilty about this.
* Mr. Stryver – An arrogant and ambitious barrister, senior to Sydney Carton. There is a frequent mis-perception that Stryver's full name is "C. J. Stryver", but this is very unlikely. The mistake comes from a line in Book 2, Chapter 12: "After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was satisfied that no plainer case could be." The initials C. J. almost certainly refer to a legal title (probably "chief justice"); Stryver is imagining that he is playing every role in a trial in which he browbeats Lucie Manette into marrying him.
* The Seamstress – A young woman caught up in The Terror. She precedes Sydney Carton, who comforts her, to the guillotine.
* Gabelle – Gabelle is "the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary, united" for the tenants of the Marquis St. Evrémonde. Gabelle is imprisoned by the revolutionaries, and his beseeching letter brings Darnay to France. Gabelle is "named after the hated salt tax".
* Gaspard – Gaspard is the man whose son is run over by the Marquis. He then kills the Marquis and goes into hiding for a year. He eventually is found, arrested, and executed.
Adaptations
Films
There have been at least five feature films based on the book:
* A Tale of Two Cities, a 1911 silent film.
* A Tale of Two Cities, a 1917 silent film.
* A Tale of Two Cities, a 1922 silent film.
* A Tale of Two Cities, a 1935 black-and-white MGM film starring Ronald Colman, Elizabeth Allan, Reginald Owen, Basil Rathbone and Edna Mae Oliver. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
* A Tale of Two Cities, a 1958 version, starring Dirk Bogarde, Dorothy Tutin, Christopher Lee, Leo McKern and Donald Pleasance.
In the 1981 film History of the World, Part I, the French Revolution segment appears to be a pastiche of A Tale of Two Cities.
In the film A Simple Wish, the protagonist's father Oliver (possibly a reference to another of Dickens' famous novels, Oliver Twist) is vying for a spot in his theatre company's production of a musical of A Tale of Two Cities, of which we see the beginning and end, using the two famous quotes, including "It is a far, far better thing that I do", as part of a few solos.
Terry Gilliam also developed a film version in the mid-1990s with Mel Gibson and Liam Neeson. The project was eventually abandoned.
Radio
In 1938, The Mercury Theatre on the Air (aka The Campbell Playhouse) produced a radio adapted version starring Orson Welles.
In 1945, a portion of the novel was adapted to the syndicated program The Weird Circle as "Dr. Manette's Manuscript."
In 1950, a radio adaptation written by Terence Rattigan and John Gielgud was broadcast by the BBC. They had written it in 1935, as a stage play, but it was not produced.
In June 1989, BBC Radio 4 produced a 7-hour drama adapted for radio by Nick McCarty and directed by Ian Cotterell. This adaptation is occasionally repeated by BBC Radio 7. The cast included:
* Charles Dance as Sydney Carton
* Maurice Denham as Dr. Alexandre Manette
* Charlotte Attenborough as Lucie Manette
* Richard Pasco as Jarvis Lorry
* John Duttine as Charles Darnay
* Barbara Leigh-Hunt as Miss Pross
* Margaret Robertson as Madame Defarge
* John Hollis as Jerry Cruncher
* John Bull as Ernest Defarge
* Aubrey Woods as Mr. Stryver
* Eva Stuart as Mrs. Cruncher
* John Moffat as Marquis St. Evremonde
* Geoffrey Whitehead as John Barsad and Jacques #2
* Nicholas Courtney as Jacques #3 and The Woodcutter
Television programs
An 8-part mini-series was produced by the BBC in 1957 starring Peter Wyngarde as "Sydney Carton", Edward de Souza as "Charles Darnay" and Wendy Hutchinson as "Lucie Manette".
Another mini-series, this one in 10 parts, was produced by the BBC in 1965.
A third BBC mini-series (in 8 parts) was produced in 1980 starring Paul Shelley as "Carton/Darnay", Sally Osborne as "Lucie Manette" and Nigel Stock as "Jarvis Lorry".
The novel was adapted into a 1980 television movie starring Chris Sarandon as "Sydney Carton/Charles Darnay". Peter Cushing as "Dr. Alexandre Manette", Alice Krige as "Lucie Manette", Flora Robson as "Miss Pross", Barry Morse as "The Marquis St. Evremonde" and Billie Whitelaw as "Madame Defarge".
In 1989 Granada Television made a mini-series starring James Wilby as "Sydney Carton", Serena Gordon as "Lucie Manette", Xavier Deluc as "Charles Darnay", Anna Massey as "Miss Pross" and John Mills as "Jarvis Lorry", which was shown on American television as part of the PBS television series Masterpiece Theatre.
In the 1970 Monty Python's Flying Circus episode "The Attila the Hun Show", the sketch "The News for Parrots" included a scene of A Tale of Two Cities (As told for parrots).
The children's television series Wishbone adapted the novel for the episode "A Tale of Two Sitters".
This novel was also mentioned in the Nickelodeon show Hey Arnold, where Oscar was learning how to read.
Books
In Nicholas Meyer's novel The Canary Trainer, descended from Charles and Lucie, once more titled the Marquis de St. Evremonde, attends the Paris Opera during the events of The Phantom of the Opera.
American author Susanne Alleyn's novel A Far Better Rest, a reimagining of A Tale of Two Cities from the point of view of Sydney Carton, was published in the USA in 2000.
Diane Mayer self-published her novel Evremonde through iUniverse in 2005; it tells the story of Charles and Lucie Darnay and their children after the French Revolution.
Simplified versions of A Tale of Two Cities for English language learners have been published by Penguin Readers, in several levels of difficulty.
Stage musicals
There have been four musicals based on the novel:
A 1968 stage version, Two Cities, the Spectacular New Musical, with music by Jeff Wayne, lyrics by Jerry Wayne and starring Edward Woodward.
A Tale of Two Cities, Jill Santoriello's musical adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, was performed at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, in October and November 2007. James Stacy Barbour ("Sydney Carton") and Jessica Rush ("Lucie Manette") were among the cast. A production of the musical began previews on Broadway on 19 August 2008, opening on 18 September at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. Warren Carlyle is the director/choreographer; the cast includes James Stacy Barbour as "Sydney Carton", Brandi Burkhardt as "Lucie Manette", Aaron Lazar as "Charles Darnay", Gregg Edelman as "Dr. Manette", Katherine McGrath as "Miss Pross", Michael Hayward-Jones as "Jarvis Lorry" and Natalie Toro as "Madame Defarge".
In 2006, Howard Goodall collaborated with Joanna Read in writing a separate musical adaptation of the novel called Two Cities. The central plot and characters were maintained, though Goodall set the action during the Russian Revolution.
The novel has also been adapted as a musical by Takarazuka Revue, the all-female opera company in Japan. The first production was in 1984, starring Mao Daichi at the Grand Theater, and the second was in 2003, starring Jun Sena at the Bow Hall.
Opera
Arthur Benjamin's operatic version of the novel, subtitled Romantic Melodrama in six scenes, was premiered by the BBC on 17 April 1953, conducted by the composer; it received its stage premiere at Sadler's Wells on 22 July 1957, under the baton of Leon Lovett.
故事改編自狄更斯的作品《聖誕頌歌》，主要講述了性情刻薄、冷酷的守財奴艾柏納澤·斯剋魯奇，面對溫暖的聖誕節，卻討厭周遭的一切慶祝活動。於是上天派來 3個精靈讓他看看自己過去的所作所為，以及親友私下對他的態度。這一切漸漸喚醒他人性的另一面——同情、仁慈、愛心及喜悅，瞬間，他那固有的自私及冷酷迅速崩塌，消失殆盡，從此變成了一個樂善好施的人。
The book was written and published at a time when Britain was experiencing a nostalgic interest in its forgotten Christmas traditions, and at the time when new customs such as the Christmas tree and greeting cards were being introduced. Dickens's sources for the tale appear to be many and varied but are principally the humiliating experiences of his childhood, his sympathy for the poor, and the Christmas stories of Washington Irving.
The tale was pirated immediately, was adapted several times to the stage, and has been credited with restoring the holiday to one of merriment and festivity in Britain and America after a period of sobriety and sombreness. A Christmas Carol remains popular, has never been out of print, and has been adapted to film, opera, and other media.
The book was written and published at a time when Britain was experiencing a nostalgic interest in its forgotten Christmas traditions, and at the time when new customs such as the Christmas tree and greeting cards were being introduced. Dickens's sources for the tale appear to be many and varied but are principally the humiliating experiences of his childhood, his sympathy for the poor, and the Christmas stories of Washington Irving.
The tale was pirated immediately, was adapted several times to the stage, and has been credited with restoring the holiday to one of merriment and festivity in Britain and America after a period of sobriety and sombreness. A Christmas Carol remains popular, has never been out of print, and has been adapted to film, opera, and other media.
《大衛·科波菲爾》是英國小說傢查爾斯·狄更斯的第八部長篇小說，被稱為他“心中最寵愛的孩子”，於一八四九至一八五O年間，分二十個部分逐月發表全書采用第一人稱敘事語氣，其中融進了作者本人的許多生活經歷。狄更斯出身社會底層，祖父、祖母都長期在剋魯勳爵府當傭人。父親約翰是海軍軍需處職員，在狄更斯十二歲那年，因負債無力償還，帶纍妻子兒女和他一起住進了馬夏爾西債務人監獄。當時狄更斯在泰晤士河畔的華倫黑鞋油作坊當童工，比他大兩歲的姐姐範妮在皇傢音樂學院學習，全家人中衹有他倆沒有在獄中居住。父親出獄後，狄更斯曾一度進惠靈頓學校學習，不久又因傢貧而永久輟學，十五歲時進律師事務所當學徒。後來，他學會速記，被倫敦民事律師議會聘為審案記錄員。一八三一至一八三二年間，狄更斯先後擔任《議會鏡報》和《真陽報》派駐議會的記者。這些經歷有助於他日後走上寫作的道路。他一生所受學校教育不足四年，他的成功全靠自己的天才、勤奮以及艱苦生活的磨練。一八三六年，狄更斯終於以長篇小說《匹剋威剋外傳》而名滿天下，當時他年僅二十四歲。
一八四八年，範妮因患肺結核早逝，她的死使狄更斯非常悲傷，因為在衆多兄弟姐妹中，衹有他倆在才能、志趣上十分接近。他倆都有傑出的表演才能，童年時曾隨父親到羅徹斯特的米特爾飯店，站在大餐桌上表演歌舞，贏得衆人的贊嘆。範妮死後，狄更斯寫下一篇七千字的回憶文章，記錄他倆一起度過的充滿艱辛的童年。狄更斯身後，他的好友福斯特在《狄更斯傳》中首次嚮公衆披露了狄更斯的早年，小說，根據的正是這篇回憶。狄更斯寫這篇回憶是為創作一部自傳體長篇小說做準備。他小說主人公取過許多名字，最後纔想到“大衛·科波菲爾”。福斯特聽了，立刻叫好，因為這個名字的縮寫D.C.正是作者名字縮寫的顛倒。於是小說主人公的名字便定了下來。
狄更斯早期作品大多是結構鬆散的“流浪漢傳奇”，足憑藉靈感信筆揮灑的即興創作，而本書則是他的中期作品，更加註重結構技巧和藝術的分寸感。狄更斯在本書第十一章中，把他的創作方法概括為“經驗想象，糅合為一”。他寫小說，並不拘泥於臨摹實際發生的事，而是充分發揮想象力，利用生活素材進行嶄新的創造。儘管書中大衛幼年時跟母親學字母的情景是他本人的親身經歷，大衛在母親改嫁後，在極端孤寂的環境中閱讀的正是他本人在那個年齡所讀的書，母親被折磨死後，大衛被送去當童工的年齡也正是狄更斯當童工時的年齡，然而，小說和實事完全不同：狄更斯不是孤兒，而他筆下的大衛卻是“遺腹子”。同時，狄更斯又把自己父母的某些性格糅進了大衛的房東、推銷商米考伯夫婦身上。
大衛早年生活的篇章以孩子的心理視角嚮我們展示了一個早已被成年人淡忘的童年世界，寫得十分真切感人。例如：大衛以兒童特殊的敏感對追求母親的那個冷酷、殘暴、貪婪的商人默德斯東一開始就懷有敵意，當默德斯東虛情假意地伸手拍拍大衛時，他發現那衹手放肆地碰到母親的手，便生氣地把它推開。大衛嚮母親復述默德斯東帶他出去玩時的情景，當他說到默德斯東的一個朋友在談話中老提起一位“漂亮的小寡婦”時，母親一邊笑着，一邊要他把當時的情景講了一遍又一遍。敘事完全從天真無邪的孩子的視角出發，幼兒並不知道人傢講的就是自己的母親，而年輕寡婦要求再醮、對幸福生活的熱烈憧憬已躍然紙上。又如：大衛跟保姆佩葛蒂到她哥哥傢去玩，她的哥哥闢果提先生是一位漁民。大衛看見他從海上作業後回來洗臉，覺得他與蝦蟹具有某種相似之處，因為那張黑臉被熱水一燙，立刻就發紅了。這個奇特的聯想，充滿童趣和狄更斯特有的幽默。
Plot summary
The story deals with the life of David Copperfield from childhood to maturity. David is born in England in about 1820. David's father had died six months before he was born, and seven years later, his mother marries Mr Edward Murdstone. David is given good reason to dislike his stepfather and has similar feelings for Mr Murdstone's sister Jane, who moves into the house soon afterwards. Mr Murdstone thrashes David for falling behind with his studies. Following one of these thrashings, David bites him and is sent away to a boarding school, Salem House, with a ruthless headmaster, Mr. Creakle. Here he befriends James Steerforth and Tommy Traddles, both of whom he meets again later on.
David returns home for the holidays to find out that his mother has had a baby boy. Soon after David goes back to Salem House, his mother and her baby die and David has to return home immediately. Mr Murdstone sends him to work in a factory in London, of which Murdstone is a joint owner. The grim reality of hand-to-mouth factory existence echoes Dickens' own travails in a blacking factory. His landlord, Mr Wilkins Micawber, is sent to a debtor's prison (the King's Bench Prison) after going bankrupt, and is there for several months before being released and moving to Plymouth. David now has nobody left to care for him in London, and decides to run away.
He walks all the way from London to Dover, to find his only relative, his aunt Miss Betsey. The eccentric Betsey Trotwood agrees to bring him up, despite Mr Murdstone visiting in a bid to regain custody of David. David's aunt renames him 'Trotwood Copperfield', soon shortened to "Trot", and for the rest of the novel he is called by either name, depending on whether he is communicating with someone he has known for a long time, or someone he has only recently met.
The story follows David as he grows to adulthood, and is enlivened by the many well-known characters who enter, leave and re-enter his life. These include Peggotty, his faithful former housekeeper for his mother, her family, and their orphaned niece Little Em'ly who lives with them and charms the young David. David's romantic but self-serving schoolfriend, Steerforth, seduces and dishonors Little Em'ly, triggering the novel's greatest tragedy; and his landlord's daughter and ideal "angel in the house," Agnes Wickfield, becomes his confidante. The two most familiar characters are David's sometime mentor, the constantly debt-ridden Mr Wilkins Micawber, and the devious and fraudulent clerk, Uriah Heep, whose misdeeds are eventually discovered with Micawber's assistance. Micawber is painted as a sympathetic character, even as the author deplores his financial ineptitude; and Micawber, like Dickens's own father, is briefly imprisoned for insolvency.
In typical Dickens fashion, the major characters get some measure of what they deserve, and few narrative threads are left hanging. Dan Peggotty safely transports Little Em'ly to a new life in Australia; accompanying these two central characters are Mrs. Gummidge and the Micawbers. Everybody involved finally finds security and happiness in their new lives in Australia. David first marries the beautiful but naïve Dora Spenlow, but she dies after failing to recover from a miscarriage early in their marriage. David then does some soul-searching and eventually marries and finds true happiness with the sensible Agnes, who had secretly always loved him. They have several children, including a daughter named in honor of Betsey Trotwood.
Analysis
The story is told almost entirely from the point of view of the first person narrator, David Copperfield himself, and was the first Dickens novel to be written as such a narration.
Critically, it is considered a Bildungsroman, i.e., a novel of self-cultivation, and would be influential in the genre which included Dickens's own Great Expectations (1861), Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, published only two years prior, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay, D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Tolstoy regarded Dickens as the best of all English novelists, and considered Copperfield to be his finest work, ranking the "Tempest" chapter (chapter 55, LV – the story of Ham and the storm and the shipwreck) the standard by which the world's great fiction should be judged. Henry James remembered hiding under a small table as a boy to hear instalments read by his mother. Dostoyevsky read it enthralled in a Siberian prison camp. Franz Kafka called his first book Amerika a "sheer imitation". James Joyce paid it reverence through parody in Ulysses. Virginia Woolf, who normally had little regard for Dickens, confessed the durability of this one novel, belonging to "the memories and myths of life". It was Freud's favourite novel.
Characters in David Copperfield
* David Copperfield – An optimistic, diligent, and persevering character, he is the protagonist. He is later called "Trotwood Copperfield" by some ("David Copperfield" is also the name of the hero's father, who dies before David is born). He has many nicknames: James Steerforth nicknames him "Daisy", Dora calls him "Doady", and his aunt refers to him, as a reference to his would-be sister (if he had been born a girl), in and on "Trot" – as in Betsey Trotwood Copperfield.
* Clara Copperfield – David's kind mother, described as being innocently childish, who dies while David is at Salem House. She dies just after the birth of her second child, who dies along with her.
* Peggotty – The faithful servant of the Copperfield family and a lifelong companion to David (referred to at times as Mrs. Barkis after her marriage to Mr. Barkis). Inherits £3,000—a large sum in the mid-19th century—when Mr. Barkis dies. After his death, she becomes Betsey Trotwood's servant.
* Betsey Trotwood – David's eccentric and temperamental yet kindhearted great-aunt; she becomes his guardian after he runs away from Grinby and Murdstone's warehouse in Blackfriars (London). She is present on the night of David's birth but leaves after hearing that Clara Copperfield's child is a boy instead of a girl.
* Mr. Chillip – A shy doctor who assists at David's birth and faces the wrath of Betsey Trotwood after he informs her that Clara's baby is a boy instead of a girl.
* Mr. Barkis – An aloof carter who declares his intention to marry Peggotty. He says to David: "Tell her, 'Barkis is willin'!' Just so." He is a bit of a miser, and hides his surprisingly vast liquid wealth in a plain box labeled "Old Clothes". He bequeaths to his wife the then astronomical sum of £3,000 when he dies about ten years later.
* Edward Murdstone – Young David's cruel stepfather, who canes him for falling behind in his studies. David reacts by biting Mr Murdstone, who then sends him to Salem House, the private school owned by his friend Mr. Creakle. After David's mother dies, Mr Murdstone sends him to work in a factory, where he has to clean wine bottles. He appears at Betsey Trotwood's house after David runs away. Mr Murdstone appears to show signs of repentance when confronted with Copperfield's aunt, but later in the book we hear he has married another young woman and applied his old principles of "firmness."
* Jane Murdstone – Mr. Murdstone's equally cruel sister, who moves into the Copperfield house after Mr. Murdstone marries Clara Copperfield. She is the "Confidential Friend" of David's first wife, Dora Spenlow, and encourages many of the problems that occur between David Copperfield and Dora's father, Mr. Spenlow. Later, she rejoins her brother and his new wife in a relationship very much like the one they had with David's mother.
* Daniel Peggotty – Peggotty's brother; a humble but generous Yarmouth fisherman who takes his nephew Ham and niece Emily into his custody after each of them has been orphaned. After Emily's departure, he travels around the world in search of her. He eventually finds her in London, and after that they emigrate to Australia.
* Emily (Little Em'ly) – A niece of Mr. Peggotty. She is a childhood friend of David Copperfield, who loves her in his childhood days. She leaves her cousin and fiancé, Ham, for Steerforth, but returns after Steerforth deserts her. She emigrates to Australia with Mr. Peggotty after being rescued from a London brothel.
* Ham Peggotty – A good-natured nephew of Mr. Peggotty and the fiancé of Emily before she leaves him for Steerforth. He later loses his life while attempting to rescue a sailor, who happens to be Steerforth, from a shipwreck. His death is hidden from his family due to the fact that David does not want them to worry on the brink of their journey.
* Mrs. Gummidge – The widow of Daniel Peggotty's partner in a boat. She is a self-described "lone, lorn creetur" who spends much of her time pining for "the old 'un" (her late husband). After Emily runs away from home with Steerforth, she changes her attitude to better comfort everyone around her and tries to be very caring and motherly. She too emigrates to Australia with Dan and the rest of the surviving family.
* Martha Endell – A young woman of a bad reputation who helps Daniel Peggotty find his niece after she returns to London. She has worked as a prostitute, and been victim to the idea of suicide.
* Mr. Creakle – The harsh headmaster of young David's boarding school, who is assisted by Tungay. Mr. Creakle is a friend of Mr. Murdstone. He singles out David for extra torment. Later he becomes a Middlesex magistrate, and is considered enlightened for his day.
"I am married". Etching by Phiz.
* James Steerforth – A close friend of David, he is of a romantic and charming disposition and has known David ever since his first days at Salem House. Although well-liked by most, he proves himself to be lacking in character by seducing and later abandoning Little Em'ly. He eventually drowns at Yarmouth with Ham Peggotty, who had been trying to rescue him.
* Tommy Traddles – David's friend from Salem House. They meet again later and become eventual lifelong friends. Traddles works hard but faces great obstacles because of his lack of money and connections. He eventually succeeds in making a name and a career for himself.
* Wilkins Micawber – A gentle man who befriends David as a young boy. He suffers from much financial difficulty and even has to spend time in a debtor's prison. Eventually he emigrates to Australia where he enjoys a successful career as a sheep farmer and becomes a magistrate. He is based on Dickens' father, John Dickens.
* Mr. Dick (Richard Babley) – A slightly deranged, rather childish but amiable man who lives with Betsey Trotwood. His madness is amply described in as much as that he claims to have the "trouble" of King Charles I in his head.
* Dr. Strong – The headmaster of David's Canterbury school, whom he visits on various occasions.
* Anne Strong – The young wife of Dr. Strong. Although she remains loyal to him, she fears that he suspects that she is involved in an affair with Jack Maldon.
* Jack Maldon – A cousin and childhood sweetheart of Anne Strong. He continues to bear affection for her and tries to seduce her into leaving Dr. Strong.
* Mr. Wickfield – The father of Agnes Wickfield and lawyer to Betsey Trotwood. He is prone to alcoholism.
* Agnes Wickfield – Mr. Wickfield's mature and lovely daughter and close friend of David since childhood. She later becomes David's second wife and mother of their children.
* Uriah Heep – A wicked young man who serves as partner to Mr. Wickfield. He is finally discovered to have stolen money and is imprisoned as a punishment. He always talks of being "'umble" (humble) and nurtures a deep hatred of David Copperfield and many others.
* Mrs. Steerforth – The wealthy widowed mother of James Steerforth. She herself is incredibly like her son.
* Miss Dartle – A strange, vitriolic woman who lives with Mrs. Steerforth. She has a secret love for Steerforth and blames others such as Emily and even Steerforth's own mother for corrupting him. She is described as being extremely skinny and displays a visible scar on her lip caused by Steerforth. She is also Steerforth's cousin.
* Mr. Spenlow – An employer of David's during his days as a proctor and the father of Dora Spenlow. He dies suddenly of a heart attack while driving his phaeton home.
* Dora Spenlow – The adorable but foolish daughter of Mr. Spenlow who becomes David's first wife. She is described as being impractical and with many similarities to David's mother. She dies of illness on the same day as her dog, Jip.
* Mr.Sharp – He was the chief teacher of Salem House and had more authority than Mr.Mell.He looked weak,both in health and character;his head seemed to be very heavy for him:he walked on one side.He had a big nose.
* Mr.Mell – A tall, thin young man with hollow cheeks.His hair was dusty and dry too,with rather short sleeves and legs.
一八四八年，範妮因患肺結核早逝，她的死使狄更斯非常悲傷，因為在衆多兄弟姐妹中，衹有他倆在才能、志趣上十分接近。他倆都有傑出的表演才能，童年時曾隨父親到羅徹斯特的米特爾飯店，站在大餐桌上表演歌舞，贏得衆人的贊嘆。範妮死後，狄更斯寫下一篇七千字的回憶文章，記錄他倆一起度過的充滿艱辛的童年。狄更斯身後，他的好友福斯特在《狄更斯傳》中首次嚮公衆披露了狄更斯的早年，小說，根據的正是這篇回憶。狄更斯寫這篇回憶是為創作一部自傳體長篇小說做準備。他小說主人公取過許多名字，最後纔想到“大衛·科波菲爾”。福斯特聽了，立刻叫好，因為這個名字的縮寫D.C.正是作者名字縮寫的顛倒。於是小說主人公的名字便定了下來。
狄更斯早期作品大多是結構鬆散的“流浪漢傳奇”，足憑藉靈感信筆揮灑的即興創作，而本書則是他的中期作品，更加註重結構技巧和藝術的分寸感。狄更斯在本書第十一章中，把他的創作方法概括為“經驗想象，糅合為一”。他寫小說，並不拘泥於臨摹實際發生的事，而是充分發揮想象力，利用生活素材進行嶄新的創造。儘管書中大衛幼年時跟母親學字母的情景是他本人的親身經歷，大衛在母親改嫁後，在極端孤寂的環境中閱讀的正是他本人在那個年齡所讀的書，母親被折磨死後，大衛被送去當童工的年齡也正是狄更斯當童工時的年齡，然而，小說和實事完全不同：狄更斯不是孤兒，而他筆下的大衛卻是“遺腹子”。同時，狄更斯又把自己父母的某些性格糅進了大衛的房東、推銷商米考伯夫婦身上。
大衛早年生活的篇章以孩子的心理視角嚮我們展示了一個早已被成年人淡忘的童年世界，寫得十分真切感人。例如：大衛以兒童特殊的敏感對追求母親的那個冷酷、殘暴、貪婪的商人默德斯東一開始就懷有敵意，當默德斯東虛情假意地伸手拍拍大衛時，他發現那衹手放肆地碰到母親的手，便生氣地把它推開。大衛嚮母親復述默德斯東帶他出去玩時的情景，當他說到默德斯東的一個朋友在談話中老提起一位“漂亮的小寡婦”時，母親一邊笑着，一邊要他把當時的情景講了一遍又一遍。敘事完全從天真無邪的孩子的視角出發，幼兒並不知道人傢講的就是自己的母親，而年輕寡婦要求再醮、對幸福生活的熱烈憧憬已躍然紙上。又如：大衛跟保姆佩葛蒂到她哥哥傢去玩，她的哥哥闢果提先生是一位漁民。大衛看見他從海上作業後回來洗臉，覺得他與蝦蟹具有某種相似之處，因為那張黑臉被熱水一燙，立刻就發紅了。這個奇特的聯想，充滿童趣和狄更斯特有的幽默。
Plot summary
The story deals with the life of David Copperfield from childhood to maturity. David is born in England in about 1820. David's father had died six months before he was born, and seven years later, his mother marries Mr Edward Murdstone. David is given good reason to dislike his stepfather and has similar feelings for Mr Murdstone's sister Jane, who moves into the house soon afterwards. Mr Murdstone thrashes David for falling behind with his studies. Following one of these thrashings, David bites him and is sent away to a boarding school, Salem House, with a ruthless headmaster, Mr. Creakle. Here he befriends James Steerforth and Tommy Traddles, both of whom he meets again later on.
David returns home for the holidays to find out that his mother has had a baby boy. Soon after David goes back to Salem House, his mother and her baby die and David has to return home immediately. Mr Murdstone sends him to work in a factory in London, of which Murdstone is a joint owner. The grim reality of hand-to-mouth factory existence echoes Dickens' own travails in a blacking factory. His landlord, Mr Wilkins Micawber, is sent to a debtor's prison (the King's Bench Prison) after going bankrupt, and is there for several months before being released and moving to Plymouth. David now has nobody left to care for him in London, and decides to run away.
He walks all the way from London to Dover, to find his only relative, his aunt Miss Betsey. The eccentric Betsey Trotwood agrees to bring him up, despite Mr Murdstone visiting in a bid to regain custody of David. David's aunt renames him 'Trotwood Copperfield', soon shortened to "Trot", and for the rest of the novel he is called by either name, depending on whether he is communicating with someone he has known for a long time, or someone he has only recently met.
The story follows David as he grows to adulthood, and is enlivened by the many well-known characters who enter, leave and re-enter his life. These include Peggotty, his faithful former housekeeper for his mother, her family, and their orphaned niece Little Em'ly who lives with them and charms the young David. David's romantic but self-serving schoolfriend, Steerforth, seduces and dishonors Little Em'ly, triggering the novel's greatest tragedy; and his landlord's daughter and ideal "angel in the house," Agnes Wickfield, becomes his confidante. The two most familiar characters are David's sometime mentor, the constantly debt-ridden Mr Wilkins Micawber, and the devious and fraudulent clerk, Uriah Heep, whose misdeeds are eventually discovered with Micawber's assistance. Micawber is painted as a sympathetic character, even as the author deplores his financial ineptitude; and Micawber, like Dickens's own father, is briefly imprisoned for insolvency.
In typical Dickens fashion, the major characters get some measure of what they deserve, and few narrative threads are left hanging. Dan Peggotty safely transports Little Em'ly to a new life in Australia; accompanying these two central characters are Mrs. Gummidge and the Micawbers. Everybody involved finally finds security and happiness in their new lives in Australia. David first marries the beautiful but naïve Dora Spenlow, but she dies after failing to recover from a miscarriage early in their marriage. David then does some soul-searching and eventually marries and finds true happiness with the sensible Agnes, who had secretly always loved him. They have several children, including a daughter named in honor of Betsey Trotwood.
Analysis
The story is told almost entirely from the point of view of the first person narrator, David Copperfield himself, and was the first Dickens novel to be written as such a narration.
Critically, it is considered a Bildungsroman, i.e., a novel of self-cultivation, and would be influential in the genre which included Dickens's own Great Expectations (1861), Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, published only two years prior, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay, D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Tolstoy regarded Dickens as the best of all English novelists, and considered Copperfield to be his finest work, ranking the "Tempest" chapter (chapter 55, LV – the story of Ham and the storm and the shipwreck) the standard by which the world's great fiction should be judged. Henry James remembered hiding under a small table as a boy to hear instalments read by his mother. Dostoyevsky read it enthralled in a Siberian prison camp. Franz Kafka called his first book Amerika a "sheer imitation". James Joyce paid it reverence through parody in Ulysses. Virginia Woolf, who normally had little regard for Dickens, confessed the durability of this one novel, belonging to "the memories and myths of life". It was Freud's favourite novel.
Characters in David Copperfield
* David Copperfield – An optimistic, diligent, and persevering character, he is the protagonist. He is later called "Trotwood Copperfield" by some ("David Copperfield" is also the name of the hero's father, who dies before David is born). He has many nicknames: James Steerforth nicknames him "Daisy", Dora calls him "Doady", and his aunt refers to him, as a reference to his would-be sister (if he had been born a girl), in and on "Trot" – as in Betsey Trotwood Copperfield.
* Clara Copperfield – David's kind mother, described as being innocently childish, who dies while David is at Salem House. She dies just after the birth of her second child, who dies along with her.
* Peggotty – The faithful servant of the Copperfield family and a lifelong companion to David (referred to at times as Mrs. Barkis after her marriage to Mr. Barkis). Inherits £3,000—a large sum in the mid-19th century—when Mr. Barkis dies. After his death, she becomes Betsey Trotwood's servant.
* Betsey Trotwood – David's eccentric and temperamental yet kindhearted great-aunt; she becomes his guardian after he runs away from Grinby and Murdstone's warehouse in Blackfriars (London). She is present on the night of David's birth but leaves after hearing that Clara Copperfield's child is a boy instead of a girl.
* Mr. Chillip – A shy doctor who assists at David's birth and faces the wrath of Betsey Trotwood after he informs her that Clara's baby is a boy instead of a girl.
* Mr. Barkis – An aloof carter who declares his intention to marry Peggotty. He says to David: "Tell her, 'Barkis is willin'!' Just so." He is a bit of a miser, and hides his surprisingly vast liquid wealth in a plain box labeled "Old Clothes". He bequeaths to his wife the then astronomical sum of £3,000 when he dies about ten years later.
* Edward Murdstone – Young David's cruel stepfather, who canes him for falling behind in his studies. David reacts by biting Mr Murdstone, who then sends him to Salem House, the private school owned by his friend Mr. Creakle. After David's mother dies, Mr Murdstone sends him to work in a factory, where he has to clean wine bottles. He appears at Betsey Trotwood's house after David runs away. Mr Murdstone appears to show signs of repentance when confronted with Copperfield's aunt, but later in the book we hear he has married another young woman and applied his old principles of "firmness."
* Jane Murdstone – Mr. Murdstone's equally cruel sister, who moves into the Copperfield house after Mr. Murdstone marries Clara Copperfield. She is the "Confidential Friend" of David's first wife, Dora Spenlow, and encourages many of the problems that occur between David Copperfield and Dora's father, Mr. Spenlow. Later, she rejoins her brother and his new wife in a relationship very much like the one they had with David's mother.
* Daniel Peggotty – Peggotty's brother; a humble but generous Yarmouth fisherman who takes his nephew Ham and niece Emily into his custody after each of them has been orphaned. After Emily's departure, he travels around the world in search of her. He eventually finds her in London, and after that they emigrate to Australia.
* Emily (Little Em'ly) – A niece of Mr. Peggotty. She is a childhood friend of David Copperfield, who loves her in his childhood days. She leaves her cousin and fiancé, Ham, for Steerforth, but returns after Steerforth deserts her. She emigrates to Australia with Mr. Peggotty after being rescued from a London brothel.
* Ham Peggotty – A good-natured nephew of Mr. Peggotty and the fiancé of Emily before she leaves him for Steerforth. He later loses his life while attempting to rescue a sailor, who happens to be Steerforth, from a shipwreck. His death is hidden from his family due to the fact that David does not want them to worry on the brink of their journey.
* Mrs. Gummidge – The widow of Daniel Peggotty's partner in a boat. She is a self-described "lone, lorn creetur" who spends much of her time pining for "the old 'un" (her late husband). After Emily runs away from home with Steerforth, she changes her attitude to better comfort everyone around her and tries to be very caring and motherly. She too emigrates to Australia with Dan and the rest of the surviving family.
* Martha Endell – A young woman of a bad reputation who helps Daniel Peggotty find his niece after she returns to London. She has worked as a prostitute, and been victim to the idea of suicide.
* Mr. Creakle – The harsh headmaster of young David's boarding school, who is assisted by Tungay. Mr. Creakle is a friend of Mr. Murdstone. He singles out David for extra torment. Later he becomes a Middlesex magistrate, and is considered enlightened for his day.
"I am married". Etching by Phiz.
* James Steerforth – A close friend of David, he is of a romantic and charming disposition and has known David ever since his first days at Salem House. Although well-liked by most, he proves himself to be lacking in character by seducing and later abandoning Little Em'ly. He eventually drowns at Yarmouth with Ham Peggotty, who had been trying to rescue him.
* Tommy Traddles – David's friend from Salem House. They meet again later and become eventual lifelong friends. Traddles works hard but faces great obstacles because of his lack of money and connections. He eventually succeeds in making a name and a career for himself.
* Wilkins Micawber – A gentle man who befriends David as a young boy. He suffers from much financial difficulty and even has to spend time in a debtor's prison. Eventually he emigrates to Australia where he enjoys a successful career as a sheep farmer and becomes a magistrate. He is based on Dickens' father, John Dickens.
* Mr. Dick (Richard Babley) – A slightly deranged, rather childish but amiable man who lives with Betsey Trotwood. His madness is amply described in as much as that he claims to have the "trouble" of King Charles I in his head.
* Dr. Strong – The headmaster of David's Canterbury school, whom he visits on various occasions.
* Anne Strong – The young wife of Dr. Strong. Although she remains loyal to him, she fears that he suspects that she is involved in an affair with Jack Maldon.
* Jack Maldon – A cousin and childhood sweetheart of Anne Strong. He continues to bear affection for her and tries to seduce her into leaving Dr. Strong.
* Mr. Wickfield – The father of Agnes Wickfield and lawyer to Betsey Trotwood. He is prone to alcoholism.
* Agnes Wickfield – Mr. Wickfield's mature and lovely daughter and close friend of David since childhood. She later becomes David's second wife and mother of their children.
* Uriah Heep – A wicked young man who serves as partner to Mr. Wickfield. He is finally discovered to have stolen money and is imprisoned as a punishment. He always talks of being "'umble" (humble) and nurtures a deep hatred of David Copperfield and many others.
* Mrs. Steerforth – The wealthy widowed mother of James Steerforth. She herself is incredibly like her son.
* Miss Dartle – A strange, vitriolic woman who lives with Mrs. Steerforth. She has a secret love for Steerforth and blames others such as Emily and even Steerforth's own mother for corrupting him. She is described as being extremely skinny and displays a visible scar on her lip caused by Steerforth. She is also Steerforth's cousin.
* Mr. Spenlow – An employer of David's during his days as a proctor and the father of Dora Spenlow. He dies suddenly of a heart attack while driving his phaeton home.
* Dora Spenlow – The adorable but foolish daughter of Mr. Spenlow who becomes David's first wife. She is described as being impractical and with many similarities to David's mother. She dies of illness on the same day as her dog, Jip.
* Mr.Sharp – He was the chief teacher of Salem House and had more authority than Mr.Mell.He looked weak,both in health and character;his head seemed to be very heavy for him:he walked on one side.He had a big nose.
* Mr.Mell – A tall, thin young man with hollow cheeks.His hair was dusty and dry too,with rather short sleeves and legs.
艱難時世（Hard Times）是英國作傢狄更斯的長篇小說作品，發表於1854年，故事描寫某工業市鎮的生活。
紡織廠廠主、銀行傢龐得貝（Josiah Bounderby）和退休的五金批發商人、國會議員兼教育傢湯瑪斯·葛萊恩（Thomas Gradgrind）是好朋友，他們一起控製著市鎮的經濟體係與教育機構。他們註重實利而且不講情義，自命不凡，以功利主義作為生活原則。負責侍候龐得貝的是寡婦史巴斯特太太。
葛萊恩對子女的教育主張“實事求是，腳踏實地”，他們在學會走路時，就被趕進教室，終日和數字打交道，他們不允許閱讀詩歌和故事。葛雷梗把年輕的女兒露意莎（Louisa）嫁給了年齡比她大得多的龐得貝，寡婦史巴斯特太太嫉妒她，使她受盡痛苦，導致女兒婚姻破裂。她責備父親：“你的哲學和教育都不能救我了。”在葛萊恩自己的教育主張下，他的兒子湯姆（Tom）被迫協助龐得貝工作，他生活放蕩且負債纍纍，偷了龐得貝銀行的錢逃跑，躲到馬戲團裏，扮演一名小醜的角色。經過了一連串的慘痛教訓，又受到馬戲團的女孩西絲·朱浦（Sissy, Cecilia Jupe）的感化，逐漸的改變了生活態度，被父親送到美洲。但病死在省親的途中。龐得貝喜歡吹噓自己白手起傢，誣衊工人由於妄想過奢侈生活纔産生不滿情緒。五年後龐得貝中風猝死在焦煤鎮的街上，露意莎再嫁了人。
Background
The novel is unusual in that it did not contain illustrations; nor is it set in or around London (both usual in Dickens' novels). Instead the story is set in the fictitious Victorian industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town partially based upon 19th-century Preston.
Dickens' reasons for writing Hard Times were mostly monetary. Sales of his weekly periodical, Household Words, were low, and he hoped the inclusion of this novel in instalments would increase sales. Since publication it has received a mixed response from a diverse range of critics, such as F.R. Leavis, George Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Macaulay, mainly focusing on Dickens' treatment of trade unions and his post-Industrial Revolution pessimism regarding the divide between capitalistic mill owners and undervalued workers during the Victorian era.
Prevalence of utilitarianism
The Utilitarians were one of the targets of this novel. Utilitarianism was a prevalent school of thought during this period, its most famous proponents being Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Theoretical Utilitarian ethics hold that promotion of general social welfare is the ultimate goal for the individual and society in general: "the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people." Dickens believed that in practical terms, the pursuit of a totally rationalized society could lead to great misery.
Bentham's former secretary, Edwin Karbunkle, helped design the Poor Law of 1834, which deliberately made workhouse life as uncomfortable as possible. In the novel, this is conveyed in Bitzer's response to Gradgrind's appeal for compassion.
Dickens was appalled by what was, in his interpretation, a selfish philosophy, which was combined with materialist laissez-faire capitalism in the education of some children at the time, as well as in industrial practices. In Dickens' interpretation, the prevalence of utilitarian values in educational institutions promoted contempt between mill owners and workers, creating young adults whose imaginations had been neglected, due to an over-emphasis on facts at the expense of more imaginative pursuits.
Dickens wished to satirize radical Utilitarians whom he described in a letter to Charles Knight as "see[ing] figures and averages, and nothing else." He also wished to campaign for reform of working conditions. Dickens had visited factories in Manchester as early as 1839, and was appalled by the environment in which workers toiled. Drawing upon his own childhood experiences, Dickens resolved to "strike the heaviest blow in my power" for those who laboured in horrific conditions.
John Stuart Mill had a similar, rigorous education to that of Louisa Gradgrind, consisting of analytical, logical, mathematical, and statistical exercises. In his twenties, Mill had a nervous breakdown, believing his capacity for emotion had been enervated by his father's stringent emphasis on analysis and mathematics in his education. In the book, Louisa herself follows a parallel course, being unable to express herself and falling into a temporary depression as a result of her dry education.
Publication
The novel was published as a serial in his weekly publication, Household Words. Sales were highly responsive and encouraging for Dickens who remarked that he was "Three parts mad, and the fourth delirious, with perpetual rushing at Hard Times". The novel was serialised, every week, between April 1 and August 12, 1854. It sold well, and a complete volume was published in August, totalling 110,000 words. Another related novel, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, was also published in this magazine.
Synopsis
The novel follows a classical tripartite structure, and the titles of each book are related to Galatians 6:7, "For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." The interpretation of this quote being, whatever is effected upon or done in the present will have a direct effect on what happens later. Book I is entitled "Sowing", Book II is entitled "Reaping", and the third is "Garnering."
Book I: Sowing
Mr. Gradgrind, whose voice is "dictatorial", opens the novel by stating "Now, what I want is facts" at his school in Coketown. He is a man of "facts and calculations." He interrogates one of his pupils, Sissy, whose father is involved with the circus, the members of which are "Fancy" in comparison to Gradgrind's espousal of "Fact." Since her father rides and tends to horses, Gradgrind offers Sissy the definition of horse. She is rebuffed for not being able to define a horse factually; her classmate Bitzer does, however, provide a more zoological profile description and factual definition. She does not learn easily, and is censured for suggesting that she would carpet a floor with pictures of flowers "So you would carpet your room—or your husband's room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would you? Why would you?" She is taught to disregard Fancy altogether. It is Fancy Vs Fact.
Louisa and Thomas, two of Mr. Gradgrind's children, pay a visit after school to the touring circus run by Mr. Sleary, only to find their father, who is disconcerted by their trip since he believes the circus to be the bastion of Fancy and conceit. With their father, Louisa and Tom trudge off in a despondent mood. Mr. Gradgrind has three younger children: Adam Smith, (after the famous theorist of laissez-faire policy), Malthus (after Rev. Thomas Malthus, who wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population, warning of the dangers of future overpopulation) and Jane.
Gradgrind apprehends Louisa and Tom, his two eldest children, at the circus.
Josiah Bounderby, "a man perfectly devoid of sentiment", is revealed as being Gradgrind's boss. Bounderby is a manufacturer and mill owner who is affluent as a result of his enterprise and capital. Bounderby is what one might call a "self-made man" who has risen from the gutter. He is not averse to giving dramatic summaries of his childhood, which terrify Mr. Gradgrind's wife who is often rendered insensate by these horrific stories. He is described in an acerbic manner as being "the Bully of Humility."
Mr. Gradgrind and Bounderby visit the public-house where Sissy resides to inform her that she cannot attend the school anymore due to the risk of her ideas propagating in the class. Sissy meets the two collaborators, informing them her father has abandoned her not out of malice, but out of desire for Sissy to lead a better life without him. This was the reasoning behind him enlisting her at Gradgrind's school and Gradgrind is outraged at this desertion. At this point members of the circus appear, fronted by their manager Mr. Sleary. Mr. Gradgrind gives Sissy a choice: either to return to the circus and forfeit her education, or to continue her education and never to return to the circus. Sleary and Gradgrind both have their say on the matter, and at the behest of Josephine Sleary she decides to leave the circus and bid all the close friends she had formed farewell.
Back at the Gradgrind house, Tom and Louisa sit down and discuss their feelings, however repressed they seem to be. Tom, already at this present stage of education finds himself in a state of dissatisfaction, and Louisa also expresses her discontent at her childhood while staring into the fire. Louisa's ability to wonder, however, has not been entirely extinguished by her rigorous education based in Fact.
We are introduced to the workers at the mills, known as the "Hands." Amongst them is a man named Stephen Blackpool or "Old Stephen" who has led a toilsome life. He is described as a "man of perfect integrity." He has ended his day's work, and his close companion Rachael is about somewhere. He eventually meets up with her, and they walk home discussing their day. On entering his house he finds that his drunken wretch of a wife, who has been in exile from Coketown, has made an unwelcome return to his house. She is unwell, and mumbles inebriated remarks to Stephen, who is greatly perturbed by this event.
The next day, Stephen makes a visit to Bounderby to try and end his woeful, childless marriage through divorce. Mrs. Sparsit, Mr. Bounderby's paid companion, is "dejected by the impiety" of Stephen and Bounderby explains that he could not afford to effect an annulment anyway. Stephen is very bewildered and dejected by this verdict given by Bounderby.
Meanwhile, Mr. Gradgrind prepares to talk to his daughter about a "business proposal", but she is seemingly apathetic in his company, and this seems to frustrate Mr. Gradgrind's efforts. He says that a proposal of marriage has been made to Louisa by Josiah Bounderby, who is some 30 years her senior. Gradgrind uses statistics to prove that an age inequity in marriage does not prove an unhappy or short marriage however. Louisa passively accepts this offer. Bounderby is rendered ecstatic by the news, as is Louisa's mother, who again is so overwhelmed that she is overcome yet again. Sissy is confounded by but piteous of Louisa.
Bounderby and Louisa get married, and they set out to their honeymoon in "Lyon"; so Bounderby can observe the progress of his 'Hands' (labourers who work in his factories there). Tom, her brother, bumps into her before they leave. They hug each other, Tom bidding her farewell and promising to look for her after they come back from their honeymoon.
Book 2: Reaping
Book Two opens with the attention focused on Bounderby's new bank in Coketown, of which Bitzer alongside the austere Mrs. Sparsit keep watch at night for intruders or burglars. A dashing gentleman enters, asking for directions to Bounderby's house, as Gradgrind has sent him from London, along with a letter. It is James Harthouse, a languid fellow, who was unsure what to do with his life, so became an MP as he saw it as a way out. For this, Dickens despises him.
Harthouse is introduced to Bounderby, who again reverts to almost improbable stories of his childhood to entertain Gradgrind. Harthouse is utterly bored by the blusterous millowner, yet is astounded by his wife, Louisa, and notices her melancholy nature. Louisa's brother Tom works for Bounderby, and he has become reckless and wayward in his conduct, despite his meticulous education. Tom decides to take a liking to James Harthouse, on the basis of his clothes, showing his superficiality. Tom is later debased to animal status, as he comes to be referred to as the "whelp", a denunciatory term for a young man. Tom is very forthcoming in his contempt for Bounderby in the presence of Harthouse, who soaks up all these secretive revelations.
Stephen is called to Bounderby's mansion, where he informs him of his abstention from joining the union led by the orator Slackbridge, and Bounderby accuses Stephen of fealty and of pledging an oath of secrecy to the union. Stephen denies this, and states that he avoided the Union because of a promise he'd made earlier to Rachael. Bounderby is bedevilled by this conflict of interest and accuses Stephen of being waspish. He dismisses him on the spot, on the basis that he has betrayed both employer and union. Later on a bank theft takes place at the Bounderby bank, and Stephen Blackpool is inculpated in the crime, due to him loitering around the bank at Tom's promise of better times to come, the night before the robbery.
Sparsit observes that the relationship between James Harthouse and Louisa is moving towards a near tryst. She sees Louisa as moving down her "staircase", metaphorically speaking. She sets off from the bank to spy upon them, and catches them at what seems to be a propitious moment. However, despite Harthouse confessing his love to Louisa, Louisa is restrained, and refuses an affair. Sparsit is infatuated with the idea that the two do not know they are being observed. Harthouse departs as does Louisa, and Mrs. Sparsit tries to stay in pursuit, thinking that Louisa is going to assent to the affair, though Louisa has not. She follows Louisa to the railway station assuming that Louisa has hired a coachman to dispatch her to Coketown. Sparsit however, misses the fact that Louisa has instead boarded a train to her father's house. Sparsit relinquishes defeat and proclaims "I have lost her!" When Louisa arrives at her father's house, she is revealed to be in an extreme state of disconsolate grief. She accuses her father of denying her the opportunity to have an innocent childhood, and that her rigorous education has stifled her ability to express her emotions. Louisa collapses at her father's feet, into an insensible torpor.
Book 3: Garnering
Mrs. Sparsit arrives at Mr. Bounderby's house, and reveals to him the news her surveillance has brought. Mr. Bounderby, who is rendered irate by this news, journeys to Stone Lodge, where Louisa is resting. Mr. Gradgrind tries to disperse calm upon the scene, and reveals that Louisa resisted the temptation of adultery. Bounderby is inconsolable and he is immensely indignant and ill-mannered towards everyone present, including Mrs. Sparsit, for her falsehood. Bounderby finishes by offering the ultimatum to Louisa of returning to him, by 12 o'clock the next morning, else the marriage is forfeited. Suffice it to say, Mr. Bounderby resumes his bachelorhood when the request is not met.
The discomfited Harthouse leaves Coketown, on an admonition from Sissy Jupe, never to return. He submits. Meanwhile, Mr. Gradgrind and Louisa cast suspicions that Tom, the "whelp", may have committed the bank robbery. Stephen Blackpool who has been absent from Coketown, trying to find mill work under a pseudonym, tries to exculpate himself from the robbery. On walking back to Coketown, he falls down the Old Hell Shaft, an old pit, completing his terminal bad luck in life. He is rescued by villagers, but after speaking to Rachael for the last time, he dies.
Louisa suspects that Tom had a word with Stephen, making a false offer to him, and therefore urging him to loiter outside of the bank. Mr. Gradgrind and Sissy concur with this theory and resolve to find Tom, since he is in danger. Sissy makes a plan for rescue and escape, however, and she reveals that she suspected Tom early on during the proceedings. She sends Tom off to the circus that she used to be a part of, namely Mr. Sleary's. Louisa and Sissy travel to the circus; Tom is there, disguised in blackface. Remorselessly, Tom says that he had little money, and that robbery was the only solution to his dilemma. Mr. Sleary is not aware of this and agrees to help him reach Liverpool, and Mr. Gradgrind, prays that his son is able to board a ship that will send him to the faraway Americas. The party is stopped, however, by Bitzer, who is anxious to claim his reward for the misdemeanour. The "excellent young man" is entreated to show compassion and questions whether he has a heart, to which Bitzer, cynically responds, that of course he has a heart, and that the "circulation could not be carried on without one." Sleary is dismayed by this revelation, and agrees to take Bitzer and Tom to the bank without any further delays. However, he sees that Mr. Gradgrind has been kind to Sissy, and agrees to detain and divert Bitzer whilst Tom leaves for Liverpool.
Returning to Coketown, Mrs. Sparsit is relieved of her duty to Bounderby who has no qualms about firing a lady, however "highly connected" she may be. The final chapter of the book details the fates of the characters. Mrs. Sparsit returns to live with her aunt, Lady Scadgers. The two have feelings of acrimony towards each other. Bounderby dies of a fit in a street one day. Tom dies in the Americas, having begged for penitence in a half-written letter to his sister, Louisa. Louisa herself grows old and never remarries. Mr. Gradgrind abandons his Utilitarian stance, which brings contempt from his fellow MPs, who give him a hard time. Rachael continues to labour while still consistently maintaining her work ethic and honesty. Sissy is the moral victor of the story, as her children have also escaped the desiccative education of the Gradgrind school and grown learned in "childish lore."
Major characters
Mr. Gradgrind
Thomas Gradgrind is a utilitarian who is the founder of the educational system in Coketown. "Eminently practical" is Gradgrind's recurring description throughout the novel, and practicality is something he zealously aspires to. He represents the stringency of Fact, statistics and other materialistic pursuits. He is a "square" person and this can be seen not only through Dickens´description of his personality but also through the description of his physical appearance, "square shoulders".
Only after his daughter's breakdown does he come to a realisation that things such as poetry, fiction and other pursuits are not "destructive nonsense." In the third book, not only does he notice the existence of the unknown thought of "fancy" but he ironically asks Bitzer (one of his students in book the first, who gives a perfect description of a horse) if he has a heart (to save Tom) and in this situation, Bitzer again gives a very scientific response.
Mr. Bounderby
Josiah Bounderby is a business associate of Mr. Gradgrind. A thunderous merchant given to lecturing others, and boasting about being a self-made man. He employs many of the other central characters of the novel, and his rise to prosperity is shown to be an example of social mobility. He marries Mr. Gradgrind's daughter Louisa, some 30 years his junior, in what turns out to be a loveless marriage. They then had no children. Bounderby is the main target of Dickens' attack on the supposed moral superiority of the wealthy, and is revealed to be an hypocrite in his sensational comeuppance at the end of the novel. He is the " bully of humility" as he tells everyone that he is a "self made man" and that his mother left him to be looked after by his grandmother but then, due to Mrs. Sparsit's wrong accusation of thinking that Mrs. Pegler was the bank robber, we find that he has been lying.
He uses Mrs. Sparsit in order to give him status as she belonged to the "Powlers" a very important family in the same way as Bounderby takes advantage of Mrs. Sparsit expecting people of a lower status to respect her presence.
Louisa
Louisa (Loo) Gradgrind, later Louisa Bounderby, is the unemotional, distant and eldest child of the Gradgrind family. She has been taught to abnegate her emotions, and finds it hard to express herself clearly, saying as a child she has "unmanageable thoughts." She is married to Josiah Bounderby, in a very logical and businesslike manner, representing the emphasis on factuality and business pathos of her education. Her union is a disaster and she is tempted into adultery by James Harthouse, yet she manages to resist this temptation with help from Sissy.
All her life she has been "gazing into the fire" "wondering" in the first book we find that she wonders not knowing what it is she is wondering about, in book two with Mrs. Gradgrind's death we get the impression that she well will find out as Mrs. Gradgrind (another victim of the system) says: "there is something wrong" she dies without knowing what it is. It is at the end of book two after Harthouse's love declaration when Louisa understands the meaning of love, fancy, everything that until that moment her life had lacked. She realizes how immature the decision of marrying Bounderby was (only because of Tom's insistence). She then goes to complain to her father and all he says is: "I never knew you were unhappy my child". This shows how Louisa has made him recognize the existence of fancy. Fancy is transmitted through a chain, as Harthouse does to Louisa and Louisa to Gradgrind. The chain breaks at the end of the novel when Gradgrind tries to pass it onto Bitzer.
Sissy Jupe
Cecilia (Sissy) Jupe is the embodiment of imagination, hope and faith. Abandoned by her father, a circus performer at Sleary's circus. Gradgrind offers Sissy the chance to study at his school and to come and live at Stone Lodge with the Gradgrind children. Sleary also offers her a place and tells her she will be treated like one of the family, but Sissy follows her father's wishes of her having a good education, goes to live with Gradgrind. She goes through "hard times" when she is with the Gradgrinds at the beginning because she does not understand the difference between a life based upon facts and one based upon fancy, like hers. When she does notice this, she leaves school in order to look after ill Mrs. Gradgrind. She always asks Mr. Gradgrind if a letter from her father arrived.
Due to Sissy's high morals and natural warm-heartedness she has a huge influence on the Gradgrind family. When Mrs Gradgrind dies she largely takes over the role of mothering the younger Gradgrind Children: Jane, Adam Smith and Malthus.
She is the biggest representative of fancy in the novel. She offers the contrast between fact and fancy. She finishes happy and surrounded by children.
Tom
Thomas (Tom) Gradgrind, Junior is the eldest son and second child of the Gradgrinds. Tom develops as a thoroughly contemptible character. Initially sullen and bitterly resentful of his father's Utilitarian Gradgrindian education, Tom has a very strong relationship with his sister Louisa. At length, Tom starts work in Bounderby's bank (which he later robs), and descends into sybaritic gambling and drinking - he is indiscreet over Louisa's marriage to Bounderby with James Harthouse. Nonetheless Louisa never ceases to deeply adore Tom, and she aids Sissy and Mr. Gradgrind in saving her brother from arrest. It is also hinted that Tom has romantic feelings for Sissy that are partly reciprocated. He is, ultimately, an insecure wastrel.
Known as "the whelp" (small puppy) this is the way of Dickens mocking this character. He takes advantage of his loving sister in order to get out of the life that his father is giving him which he doesn't like. We might feel sympathy towards him at some points of the novel (mostly in book one) as he has the same kind of feelings as Louisa.
He tells Blackpool to wait for him outside the bank and if he has something to give him, he will make sure Bitzer gives it to him. He tricks him by doing so as he only does so in order to make him look as if it was him who robbed the bank, maybe as a form of revenge after Bounderby sacking him. He is found out in book three where Blackpool is shown to be innocent. Mr. Gradgrind makes signs to put them up in the whole town clearing Blackpool's name and putting the blame on his own son.
Old Stephen
Stephen Blackpool, or "Old Stephen" as he is referred to by his fellow Hands, is a worker at one of Bounderby's mills. His life is immensely strenuous, and he is married to a constantly inebriated wife who comes and goes throughout the novel. She remains anonymous and unidentified throughout the novel. He forms a close bond with Rachael, a co-worker. After a dispute with Bounderby, he is dismissed from his work at the Coketown mills and is forced to find work elsewhere. Whilst absent from Coketown he is accused of a crime for which he has been framed. Tragically, on his way back to vindicate himself, he falls down a mine-shaft. He is rescued but dies of his injuries.
Stephen is a man "of perfect integrity", a man who will never give up his moral standpoint to follow along with the crowd, a quality which leads to the conflict with Slackbridge and the Trade Union.
Other characters
Bitzer – is a very pale classmate of Sissy's and brought up on facts and is taught to operate according to self-interest. He takes up a job in Bounderby's bank, and later tries to arrest Tom.
Mrs. Sparsit – is a "classical" widow who has fallen upon despairing circumstances. She is employed by Bounderby, yet her officiousness and prying get her fired in a humorous send-off by Bounderby.
James Harthouse – enters the novel in the 2nd book. James is an indolent, languid, upper-class gentleman, who attempts to woo Louisa, and gets sent away by Sissy.
Mrs. Pegler – a "mysterious old woman" who turns out to be Bounderby's mother.
Slackbridge – trade union leader
Various circus folk", including Signor Jupe (Sissy's father, who never actually appears in the novel), his dog Merrylegs, Mr. Sleary (the lisping manager of the circus) and Cupid, used to represent that the world of the circus is not always as pure as is represented by Sissy and Sleary.
Mrs. Gradgrind – the wife of Mr. Gradgrind, who is an invalid and complains constantly. Her marriage to Thomas is a precursor of Louisa's marriage to Bounderby.
Mr. M'Choakumchild – the teacher of the class containing Sissy Jupe and Bitzer, says very little but his name suggests a cold personality that stifles imagination.
Major themes
Relating back to Dickens' aim to "strike the heaviest blow in my power," he wished to educate readers about the working conditions of some of the factories in the industrial towns of Manchester, and Preston. Relating to this also, Dickens wished to expose the assumption that prosperity runs parallel to morality, something which is cruelly shattered in this novel by his portrayal of the moral monsters, Mr. Bounderby, and James Harthouse, the cynical aristocrats. Dickens was also campaigning for the importance of imagination in life, and not for people's life to be reduced to a collection of material facts and statistical analyses. Dickens' favourable portrayal of the Circus, which he describes as caring so "little for Plain Fact", is an example of this.
Fact vs. Fancy
This theme is developed early on, the bastion of Fact being the eminently practical Mr. Gradgrind, and his model school, which teaches nothing but Facts. Any imaginative or aesthetic subjects are eradicated from the curriculum, but analysis, deduction and mathematics are emphasised. Conversely, Fancy is the opposite of Fact, encompassing, fiction, music, poetry, and novelty shows such as Sleary's circus. It is interesting that Mr. Sleary is reckoned to be a fool by the Fact men, but it is Sleary who realises people must be "amuthed" (amused). This is made cognisant by Tom's sybaritic gambling and Louisa, who is virtually soulless as a young child, and as a married woman. Bitzer, who has adhered to Gradgrind's teachings as a child, turns out to be an uncompassionate egotist.
Officiousness and spying
Prying and knowledge is key to several characters, namely Mrs. Sparsit and Mr. Bounderby. Mr. Bounderby spends his whole time fabricating stories about his childhood, covering up the real nature of his upbringing, which is solemnly revealed at the end of the novel. While not a snooper himself, he is undone by Sparsit unwittingly revealing the mysterious old woman to be his own mother, and she unravels Josiah's secrets about his upbringing and fictitious stories. Mr. Bounderby himself superintends through calculating tabular statements and statistics, and is always secretly rebuking the people of Coketown for indulging in conceitful activities. This gives Bounderby a sense of superiority, as it does with Mrs. Sparsit, who prides herself on her salacious knowledge gained from spying on others. All "superintendents" of the novel are undone in one way, or another.
Honesty
This is closely related to Dickens' typical social commentary, which is a theme he uses throughout his entire œuvre. Dickens portrays the wealthy in this novel as being morally corrupt. Bounderby has no moral scruples; he fires Blackpool "for a novelty". He also conducts himself without any shred of decency, frequently losing his temper. He is cynically false about his childhood. Harthouse, a leisured gent, is compared to an "iceberg" who will cause a wreck unwittingly, due to him being "not a moral sort of fellow", as he states himself. Stephen Blackpool, a destitute worker, is equipped with perfect morals, always abiding by his promises, and always thoughtful and considerate of others, as is Sissy Jupe.
Literary significance & criticism
Critics have had a diverse range of opinions on the novel. Renowned critic John Ruskin declared Hard Times to be his favourite Dickens work due to its exploration of important social questions. However, Thomas Macaulay branded it "sullen socialism", on the grounds that Dickens did not fully comprehend the politics of the time. This point was also made by George Bernard Shaw, who decreed Hard Times to be a novel of "passionate revolt against the whole industrial order of the modern world." Shaw criticized the novel for its failure to provide an accurate account of trade unionism of the time, deeming Dickens' character of Slackbridge, the poisonous orator as "a mere figment of middle-class imagination."
F. R. Leavis, in his controversial book, The Great Tradition, described the book as essentially being a moral fable, and awarded it the distinction of being a work of art, decreeing it the only significant novel of Dickens worth scrutinizing.
Walter Allen, in an introduction to an alternative edition, characterised Hard Times as being an unsurpassed "critique of industrial society", which was later superseded by works of D. H. Lawrence. Other writers have described the novel as being, as G. K. Chesterton commented in his work Appreciations and Criticisms, "the harshest of his stories"; whereas George Orwell praised the novel (and Dickens himself) for "generous anger."
紡織廠廠主、銀行傢龐得貝（Josiah Bounderby）和退休的五金批發商人、國會議員兼教育傢湯瑪斯·葛萊恩（Thomas Gradgrind）是好朋友，他們一起控製著市鎮的經濟體係與教育機構。他們註重實利而且不講情義，自命不凡，以功利主義作為生活原則。負責侍候龐得貝的是寡婦史巴斯特太太。
葛萊恩對子女的教育主張“實事求是，腳踏實地”，他們在學會走路時，就被趕進教室，終日和數字打交道，他們不允許閱讀詩歌和故事。葛雷梗把年輕的女兒露意莎（Louisa）嫁給了年齡比她大得多的龐得貝，寡婦史巴斯特太太嫉妒她，使她受盡痛苦，導致女兒婚姻破裂。她責備父親：“你的哲學和教育都不能救我了。”在葛萊恩自己的教育主張下，他的兒子湯姆（Tom）被迫協助龐得貝工作，他生活放蕩且負債纍纍，偷了龐得貝銀行的錢逃跑，躲到馬戲團裏，扮演一名小醜的角色。經過了一連串的慘痛教訓，又受到馬戲團的女孩西絲·朱浦（Sissy, Cecilia Jupe）的感化，逐漸的改變了生活態度，被父親送到美洲。但病死在省親的途中。龐得貝喜歡吹噓自己白手起傢，誣衊工人由於妄想過奢侈生活纔産生不滿情緒。五年後龐得貝中風猝死在焦煤鎮的街上，露意莎再嫁了人。
Background
The novel is unusual in that it did not contain illustrations; nor is it set in or around London (both usual in Dickens' novels). Instead the story is set in the fictitious Victorian industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town partially based upon 19th-century Preston.
Dickens' reasons for writing Hard Times were mostly monetary. Sales of his weekly periodical, Household Words, were low, and he hoped the inclusion of this novel in instalments would increase sales. Since publication it has received a mixed response from a diverse range of critics, such as F.R. Leavis, George Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Macaulay, mainly focusing on Dickens' treatment of trade unions and his post-Industrial Revolution pessimism regarding the divide between capitalistic mill owners and undervalued workers during the Victorian era.
Prevalence of utilitarianism
The Utilitarians were one of the targets of this novel. Utilitarianism was a prevalent school of thought during this period, its most famous proponents being Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Theoretical Utilitarian ethics hold that promotion of general social welfare is the ultimate goal for the individual and society in general: "the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people." Dickens believed that in practical terms, the pursuit of a totally rationalized society could lead to great misery.
Bentham's former secretary, Edwin Karbunkle, helped design the Poor Law of 1834, which deliberately made workhouse life as uncomfortable as possible. In the novel, this is conveyed in Bitzer's response to Gradgrind's appeal for compassion.
Dickens was appalled by what was, in his interpretation, a selfish philosophy, which was combined with materialist laissez-faire capitalism in the education of some children at the time, as well as in industrial practices. In Dickens' interpretation, the prevalence of utilitarian values in educational institutions promoted contempt between mill owners and workers, creating young adults whose imaginations had been neglected, due to an over-emphasis on facts at the expense of more imaginative pursuits.
Dickens wished to satirize radical Utilitarians whom he described in a letter to Charles Knight as "see[ing] figures and averages, and nothing else." He also wished to campaign for reform of working conditions. Dickens had visited factories in Manchester as early as 1839, and was appalled by the environment in which workers toiled. Drawing upon his own childhood experiences, Dickens resolved to "strike the heaviest blow in my power" for those who laboured in horrific conditions.
John Stuart Mill had a similar, rigorous education to that of Louisa Gradgrind, consisting of analytical, logical, mathematical, and statistical exercises. In his twenties, Mill had a nervous breakdown, believing his capacity for emotion had been enervated by his father's stringent emphasis on analysis and mathematics in his education. In the book, Louisa herself follows a parallel course, being unable to express herself and falling into a temporary depression as a result of her dry education.
Publication
The novel was published as a serial in his weekly publication, Household Words. Sales were highly responsive and encouraging for Dickens who remarked that he was "Three parts mad, and the fourth delirious, with perpetual rushing at Hard Times". The novel was serialised, every week, between April 1 and August 12, 1854. It sold well, and a complete volume was published in August, totalling 110,000 words. Another related novel, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, was also published in this magazine.
Synopsis
The novel follows a classical tripartite structure, and the titles of each book are related to Galatians 6:7, "For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." The interpretation of this quote being, whatever is effected upon or done in the present will have a direct effect on what happens later. Book I is entitled "Sowing", Book II is entitled "Reaping", and the third is "Garnering."
Book I: Sowing
Mr. Gradgrind, whose voice is "dictatorial", opens the novel by stating "Now, what I want is facts" at his school in Coketown. He is a man of "facts and calculations." He interrogates one of his pupils, Sissy, whose father is involved with the circus, the members of which are "Fancy" in comparison to Gradgrind's espousal of "Fact." Since her father rides and tends to horses, Gradgrind offers Sissy the definition of horse. She is rebuffed for not being able to define a horse factually; her classmate Bitzer does, however, provide a more zoological profile description and factual definition. She does not learn easily, and is censured for suggesting that she would carpet a floor with pictures of flowers "So you would carpet your room—or your husband's room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would you? Why would you?" She is taught to disregard Fancy altogether. It is Fancy Vs Fact.
Louisa and Thomas, two of Mr. Gradgrind's children, pay a visit after school to the touring circus run by Mr. Sleary, only to find their father, who is disconcerted by their trip since he believes the circus to be the bastion of Fancy and conceit. With their father, Louisa and Tom trudge off in a despondent mood. Mr. Gradgrind has three younger children: Adam Smith, (after the famous theorist of laissez-faire policy), Malthus (after Rev. Thomas Malthus, who wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population, warning of the dangers of future overpopulation) and Jane.
Gradgrind apprehends Louisa and Tom, his two eldest children, at the circus.
Josiah Bounderby, "a man perfectly devoid of sentiment", is revealed as being Gradgrind's boss. Bounderby is a manufacturer and mill owner who is affluent as a result of his enterprise and capital. Bounderby is what one might call a "self-made man" who has risen from the gutter. He is not averse to giving dramatic summaries of his childhood, which terrify Mr. Gradgrind's wife who is often rendered insensate by these horrific stories. He is described in an acerbic manner as being "the Bully of Humility."
Mr. Gradgrind and Bounderby visit the public-house where Sissy resides to inform her that she cannot attend the school anymore due to the risk of her ideas propagating in the class. Sissy meets the two collaborators, informing them her father has abandoned her not out of malice, but out of desire for Sissy to lead a better life without him. This was the reasoning behind him enlisting her at Gradgrind's school and Gradgrind is outraged at this desertion. At this point members of the circus appear, fronted by their manager Mr. Sleary. Mr. Gradgrind gives Sissy a choice: either to return to the circus and forfeit her education, or to continue her education and never to return to the circus. Sleary and Gradgrind both have their say on the matter, and at the behest of Josephine Sleary she decides to leave the circus and bid all the close friends she had formed farewell.
Back at the Gradgrind house, Tom and Louisa sit down and discuss their feelings, however repressed they seem to be. Tom, already at this present stage of education finds himself in a state of dissatisfaction, and Louisa also expresses her discontent at her childhood while staring into the fire. Louisa's ability to wonder, however, has not been entirely extinguished by her rigorous education based in Fact.
We are introduced to the workers at the mills, known as the "Hands." Amongst them is a man named Stephen Blackpool or "Old Stephen" who has led a toilsome life. He is described as a "man of perfect integrity." He has ended his day's work, and his close companion Rachael is about somewhere. He eventually meets up with her, and they walk home discussing their day. On entering his house he finds that his drunken wretch of a wife, who has been in exile from Coketown, has made an unwelcome return to his house. She is unwell, and mumbles inebriated remarks to Stephen, who is greatly perturbed by this event.
The next day, Stephen makes a visit to Bounderby to try and end his woeful, childless marriage through divorce. Mrs. Sparsit, Mr. Bounderby's paid companion, is "dejected by the impiety" of Stephen and Bounderby explains that he could not afford to effect an annulment anyway. Stephen is very bewildered and dejected by this verdict given by Bounderby.
Meanwhile, Mr. Gradgrind prepares to talk to his daughter about a "business proposal", but she is seemingly apathetic in his company, and this seems to frustrate Mr. Gradgrind's efforts. He says that a proposal of marriage has been made to Louisa by Josiah Bounderby, who is some 30 years her senior. Gradgrind uses statistics to prove that an age inequity in marriage does not prove an unhappy or short marriage however. Louisa passively accepts this offer. Bounderby is rendered ecstatic by the news, as is Louisa's mother, who again is so overwhelmed that she is overcome yet again. Sissy is confounded by but piteous of Louisa.
Bounderby and Louisa get married, and they set out to their honeymoon in "Lyon"; so Bounderby can observe the progress of his 'Hands' (labourers who work in his factories there). Tom, her brother, bumps into her before they leave. They hug each other, Tom bidding her farewell and promising to look for her after they come back from their honeymoon.
Book 2: Reaping
Book Two opens with the attention focused on Bounderby's new bank in Coketown, of which Bitzer alongside the austere Mrs. Sparsit keep watch at night for intruders or burglars. A dashing gentleman enters, asking for directions to Bounderby's house, as Gradgrind has sent him from London, along with a letter. It is James Harthouse, a languid fellow, who was unsure what to do with his life, so became an MP as he saw it as a way out. For this, Dickens despises him.
Harthouse is introduced to Bounderby, who again reverts to almost improbable stories of his childhood to entertain Gradgrind. Harthouse is utterly bored by the blusterous millowner, yet is astounded by his wife, Louisa, and notices her melancholy nature. Louisa's brother Tom works for Bounderby, and he has become reckless and wayward in his conduct, despite his meticulous education. Tom decides to take a liking to James Harthouse, on the basis of his clothes, showing his superficiality. Tom is later debased to animal status, as he comes to be referred to as the "whelp", a denunciatory term for a young man. Tom is very forthcoming in his contempt for Bounderby in the presence of Harthouse, who soaks up all these secretive revelations.
Stephen is called to Bounderby's mansion, where he informs him of his abstention from joining the union led by the orator Slackbridge, and Bounderby accuses Stephen of fealty and of pledging an oath of secrecy to the union. Stephen denies this, and states that he avoided the Union because of a promise he'd made earlier to Rachael. Bounderby is bedevilled by this conflict of interest and accuses Stephen of being waspish. He dismisses him on the spot, on the basis that he has betrayed both employer and union. Later on a bank theft takes place at the Bounderby bank, and Stephen Blackpool is inculpated in the crime, due to him loitering around the bank at Tom's promise of better times to come, the night before the robbery.
Sparsit observes that the relationship between James Harthouse and Louisa is moving towards a near tryst. She sees Louisa as moving down her "staircase", metaphorically speaking. She sets off from the bank to spy upon them, and catches them at what seems to be a propitious moment. However, despite Harthouse confessing his love to Louisa, Louisa is restrained, and refuses an affair. Sparsit is infatuated with the idea that the two do not know they are being observed. Harthouse departs as does Louisa, and Mrs. Sparsit tries to stay in pursuit, thinking that Louisa is going to assent to the affair, though Louisa has not. She follows Louisa to the railway station assuming that Louisa has hired a coachman to dispatch her to Coketown. Sparsit however, misses the fact that Louisa has instead boarded a train to her father's house. Sparsit relinquishes defeat and proclaims "I have lost her!" When Louisa arrives at her father's house, she is revealed to be in an extreme state of disconsolate grief. She accuses her father of denying her the opportunity to have an innocent childhood, and that her rigorous education has stifled her ability to express her emotions. Louisa collapses at her father's feet, into an insensible torpor.
Book 3: Garnering
Mrs. Sparsit arrives at Mr. Bounderby's house, and reveals to him the news her surveillance has brought. Mr. Bounderby, who is rendered irate by this news, journeys to Stone Lodge, where Louisa is resting. Mr. Gradgrind tries to disperse calm upon the scene, and reveals that Louisa resisted the temptation of adultery. Bounderby is inconsolable and he is immensely indignant and ill-mannered towards everyone present, including Mrs. Sparsit, for her falsehood. Bounderby finishes by offering the ultimatum to Louisa of returning to him, by 12 o'clock the next morning, else the marriage is forfeited. Suffice it to say, Mr. Bounderby resumes his bachelorhood when the request is not met.
The discomfited Harthouse leaves Coketown, on an admonition from Sissy Jupe, never to return. He submits. Meanwhile, Mr. Gradgrind and Louisa cast suspicions that Tom, the "whelp", may have committed the bank robbery. Stephen Blackpool who has been absent from Coketown, trying to find mill work under a pseudonym, tries to exculpate himself from the robbery. On walking back to Coketown, he falls down the Old Hell Shaft, an old pit, completing his terminal bad luck in life. He is rescued by villagers, but after speaking to Rachael for the last time, he dies.
Louisa suspects that Tom had a word with Stephen, making a false offer to him, and therefore urging him to loiter outside of the bank. Mr. Gradgrind and Sissy concur with this theory and resolve to find Tom, since he is in danger. Sissy makes a plan for rescue and escape, however, and she reveals that she suspected Tom early on during the proceedings. She sends Tom off to the circus that she used to be a part of, namely Mr. Sleary's. Louisa and Sissy travel to the circus; Tom is there, disguised in blackface. Remorselessly, Tom says that he had little money, and that robbery was the only solution to his dilemma. Mr. Sleary is not aware of this and agrees to help him reach Liverpool, and Mr. Gradgrind, prays that his son is able to board a ship that will send him to the faraway Americas. The party is stopped, however, by Bitzer, who is anxious to claim his reward for the misdemeanour. The "excellent young man" is entreated to show compassion and questions whether he has a heart, to which Bitzer, cynically responds, that of course he has a heart, and that the "circulation could not be carried on without one." Sleary is dismayed by this revelation, and agrees to take Bitzer and Tom to the bank without any further delays. However, he sees that Mr. Gradgrind has been kind to Sissy, and agrees to detain and divert Bitzer whilst Tom leaves for Liverpool.
Returning to Coketown, Mrs. Sparsit is relieved of her duty to Bounderby who has no qualms about firing a lady, however "highly connected" she may be. The final chapter of the book details the fates of the characters. Mrs. Sparsit returns to live with her aunt, Lady Scadgers. The two have feelings of acrimony towards each other. Bounderby dies of a fit in a street one day. Tom dies in the Americas, having begged for penitence in a half-written letter to his sister, Louisa. Louisa herself grows old and never remarries. Mr. Gradgrind abandons his Utilitarian stance, which brings contempt from his fellow MPs, who give him a hard time. Rachael continues to labour while still consistently maintaining her work ethic and honesty. Sissy is the moral victor of the story, as her children have also escaped the desiccative education of the Gradgrind school and grown learned in "childish lore."
Major characters
Mr. Gradgrind
Thomas Gradgrind is a utilitarian who is the founder of the educational system in Coketown. "Eminently practical" is Gradgrind's recurring description throughout the novel, and practicality is something he zealously aspires to. He represents the stringency of Fact, statistics and other materialistic pursuits. He is a "square" person and this can be seen not only through Dickens´description of his personality but also through the description of his physical appearance, "square shoulders".
Only after his daughter's breakdown does he come to a realisation that things such as poetry, fiction and other pursuits are not "destructive nonsense." In the third book, not only does he notice the existence of the unknown thought of "fancy" but he ironically asks Bitzer (one of his students in book the first, who gives a perfect description of a horse) if he has a heart (to save Tom) and in this situation, Bitzer again gives a very scientific response.
Mr. Bounderby
Josiah Bounderby is a business associate of Mr. Gradgrind. A thunderous merchant given to lecturing others, and boasting about being a self-made man. He employs many of the other central characters of the novel, and his rise to prosperity is shown to be an example of social mobility. He marries Mr. Gradgrind's daughter Louisa, some 30 years his junior, in what turns out to be a loveless marriage. They then had no children. Bounderby is the main target of Dickens' attack on the supposed moral superiority of the wealthy, and is revealed to be an hypocrite in his sensational comeuppance at the end of the novel. He is the " bully of humility" as he tells everyone that he is a "self made man" and that his mother left him to be looked after by his grandmother but then, due to Mrs. Sparsit's wrong accusation of thinking that Mrs. Pegler was the bank robber, we find that he has been lying.
He uses Mrs. Sparsit in order to give him status as she belonged to the "Powlers" a very important family in the same way as Bounderby takes advantage of Mrs. Sparsit expecting people of a lower status to respect her presence.
Louisa
Louisa (Loo) Gradgrind, later Louisa Bounderby, is the unemotional, distant and eldest child of the Gradgrind family. She has been taught to abnegate her emotions, and finds it hard to express herself clearly, saying as a child she has "unmanageable thoughts." She is married to Josiah Bounderby, in a very logical and businesslike manner, representing the emphasis on factuality and business pathos of her education. Her union is a disaster and she is tempted into adultery by James Harthouse, yet she manages to resist this temptation with help from Sissy.
All her life she has been "gazing into the fire" "wondering" in the first book we find that she wonders not knowing what it is she is wondering about, in book two with Mrs. Gradgrind's death we get the impression that she well will find out as Mrs. Gradgrind (another victim of the system) says: "there is something wrong" she dies without knowing what it is. It is at the end of book two after Harthouse's love declaration when Louisa understands the meaning of love, fancy, everything that until that moment her life had lacked. She realizes how immature the decision of marrying Bounderby was (only because of Tom's insistence). She then goes to complain to her father and all he says is: "I never knew you were unhappy my child". This shows how Louisa has made him recognize the existence of fancy. Fancy is transmitted through a chain, as Harthouse does to Louisa and Louisa to Gradgrind. The chain breaks at the end of the novel when Gradgrind tries to pass it onto Bitzer.
Sissy Jupe
Cecilia (Sissy) Jupe is the embodiment of imagination, hope and faith. Abandoned by her father, a circus performer at Sleary's circus. Gradgrind offers Sissy the chance to study at his school and to come and live at Stone Lodge with the Gradgrind children. Sleary also offers her a place and tells her she will be treated like one of the family, but Sissy follows her father's wishes of her having a good education, goes to live with Gradgrind. She goes through "hard times" when she is with the Gradgrinds at the beginning because she does not understand the difference between a life based upon facts and one based upon fancy, like hers. When she does notice this, she leaves school in order to look after ill Mrs. Gradgrind. She always asks Mr. Gradgrind if a letter from her father arrived.
Due to Sissy's high morals and natural warm-heartedness she has a huge influence on the Gradgrind family. When Mrs Gradgrind dies she largely takes over the role of mothering the younger Gradgrind Children: Jane, Adam Smith and Malthus.
She is the biggest representative of fancy in the novel. She offers the contrast between fact and fancy. She finishes happy and surrounded by children.
Tom
Thomas (Tom) Gradgrind, Junior is the eldest son and second child of the Gradgrinds. Tom develops as a thoroughly contemptible character. Initially sullen and bitterly resentful of his father's Utilitarian Gradgrindian education, Tom has a very strong relationship with his sister Louisa. At length, Tom starts work in Bounderby's bank (which he later robs), and descends into sybaritic gambling and drinking - he is indiscreet over Louisa's marriage to Bounderby with James Harthouse. Nonetheless Louisa never ceases to deeply adore Tom, and she aids Sissy and Mr. Gradgrind in saving her brother from arrest. It is also hinted that Tom has romantic feelings for Sissy that are partly reciprocated. He is, ultimately, an insecure wastrel.
Known as "the whelp" (small puppy) this is the way of Dickens mocking this character. He takes advantage of his loving sister in order to get out of the life that his father is giving him which he doesn't like. We might feel sympathy towards him at some points of the novel (mostly in book one) as he has the same kind of feelings as Louisa.
He tells Blackpool to wait for him outside the bank and if he has something to give him, he will make sure Bitzer gives it to him. He tricks him by doing so as he only does so in order to make him look as if it was him who robbed the bank, maybe as a form of revenge after Bounderby sacking him. He is found out in book three where Blackpool is shown to be innocent. Mr. Gradgrind makes signs to put them up in the whole town clearing Blackpool's name and putting the blame on his own son.
Old Stephen
Stephen Blackpool, or "Old Stephen" as he is referred to by his fellow Hands, is a worker at one of Bounderby's mills. His life is immensely strenuous, and he is married to a constantly inebriated wife who comes and goes throughout the novel. She remains anonymous and unidentified throughout the novel. He forms a close bond with Rachael, a co-worker. After a dispute with Bounderby, he is dismissed from his work at the Coketown mills and is forced to find work elsewhere. Whilst absent from Coketown he is accused of a crime for which he has been framed. Tragically, on his way back to vindicate himself, he falls down a mine-shaft. He is rescued but dies of his injuries.
Stephen is a man "of perfect integrity", a man who will never give up his moral standpoint to follow along with the crowd, a quality which leads to the conflict with Slackbridge and the Trade Union.
Other characters
Bitzer – is a very pale classmate of Sissy's and brought up on facts and is taught to operate according to self-interest. He takes up a job in Bounderby's bank, and later tries to arrest Tom.
Mrs. Sparsit – is a "classical" widow who has fallen upon despairing circumstances. She is employed by Bounderby, yet her officiousness and prying get her fired in a humorous send-off by Bounderby.
James Harthouse – enters the novel in the 2nd book. James is an indolent, languid, upper-class gentleman, who attempts to woo Louisa, and gets sent away by Sissy.
Mrs. Pegler – a "mysterious old woman" who turns out to be Bounderby's mother.
Slackbridge – trade union leader
Various circus folk", including Signor Jupe (Sissy's father, who never actually appears in the novel), his dog Merrylegs, Mr. Sleary (the lisping manager of the circus) and Cupid, used to represent that the world of the circus is not always as pure as is represented by Sissy and Sleary.
Mrs. Gradgrind – the wife of Mr. Gradgrind, who is an invalid and complains constantly. Her marriage to Thomas is a precursor of Louisa's marriage to Bounderby.
Mr. M'Choakumchild – the teacher of the class containing Sissy Jupe and Bitzer, says very little but his name suggests a cold personality that stifles imagination.
Major themes
Relating back to Dickens' aim to "strike the heaviest blow in my power," he wished to educate readers about the working conditions of some of the factories in the industrial towns of Manchester, and Preston. Relating to this also, Dickens wished to expose the assumption that prosperity runs parallel to morality, something which is cruelly shattered in this novel by his portrayal of the moral monsters, Mr. Bounderby, and James Harthouse, the cynical aristocrats. Dickens was also campaigning for the importance of imagination in life, and not for people's life to be reduced to a collection of material facts and statistical analyses. Dickens' favourable portrayal of the Circus, which he describes as caring so "little for Plain Fact", is an example of this.
Fact vs. Fancy
This theme is developed early on, the bastion of Fact being the eminently practical Mr. Gradgrind, and his model school, which teaches nothing but Facts. Any imaginative or aesthetic subjects are eradicated from the curriculum, but analysis, deduction and mathematics are emphasised. Conversely, Fancy is the opposite of Fact, encompassing, fiction, music, poetry, and novelty shows such as Sleary's circus. It is interesting that Mr. Sleary is reckoned to be a fool by the Fact men, but it is Sleary who realises people must be "amuthed" (amused). This is made cognisant by Tom's sybaritic gambling and Louisa, who is virtually soulless as a young child, and as a married woman. Bitzer, who has adhered to Gradgrind's teachings as a child, turns out to be an uncompassionate egotist.
Officiousness and spying
Prying and knowledge is key to several characters, namely Mrs. Sparsit and Mr. Bounderby. Mr. Bounderby spends his whole time fabricating stories about his childhood, covering up the real nature of his upbringing, which is solemnly revealed at the end of the novel. While not a snooper himself, he is undone by Sparsit unwittingly revealing the mysterious old woman to be his own mother, and she unravels Josiah's secrets about his upbringing and fictitious stories. Mr. Bounderby himself superintends through calculating tabular statements and statistics, and is always secretly rebuking the people of Coketown for indulging in conceitful activities. This gives Bounderby a sense of superiority, as it does with Mrs. Sparsit, who prides herself on her salacious knowledge gained from spying on others. All "superintendents" of the novel are undone in one way, or another.
Honesty
This is closely related to Dickens' typical social commentary, which is a theme he uses throughout his entire œuvre. Dickens portrays the wealthy in this novel as being morally corrupt. Bounderby has no moral scruples; he fires Blackpool "for a novelty". He also conducts himself without any shred of decency, frequently losing his temper. He is cynically false about his childhood. Harthouse, a leisured gent, is compared to an "iceberg" who will cause a wreck unwittingly, due to him being "not a moral sort of fellow", as he states himself. Stephen Blackpool, a destitute worker, is equipped with perfect morals, always abiding by his promises, and always thoughtful and considerate of others, as is Sissy Jupe.
Literary significance & criticism
Critics have had a diverse range of opinions on the novel. Renowned critic John Ruskin declared Hard Times to be his favourite Dickens work due to its exploration of important social questions. However, Thomas Macaulay branded it "sullen socialism", on the grounds that Dickens did not fully comprehend the politics of the time. This point was also made by George Bernard Shaw, who decreed Hard Times to be a novel of "passionate revolt against the whole industrial order of the modern world." Shaw criticized the novel for its failure to provide an accurate account of trade unionism of the time, deeming Dickens' character of Slackbridge, the poisonous orator as "a mere figment of middle-class imagination."
F. R. Leavis, in his controversial book, The Great Tradition, described the book as essentially being a moral fable, and awarded it the distinction of being a work of art, decreeing it the only significant novel of Dickens worth scrutinizing.
Walter Allen, in an introduction to an alternative edition, characterised Hard Times as being an unsurpassed "critique of industrial society", which was later superseded by works of D. H. Lawrence. Other writers have described the novel as being, as G. K. Chesterton commented in his work Appreciations and Criticisms, "the harshest of his stories"; whereas George Orwell praised the novel (and Dickens himself) for "generous anger."
《荒涼山莊》（Bleak House）
或譯為《蕭齋》，發表於1852年至1853年之間，是狄更斯最長的作品之一，它以錯綜復雜的情節揭露英國法律制度和司法機構的黑暗。
這部小說內容諷刺英國古老的“大法官庭”（Chancery）的作風，是司法體製顢頇、邪惡、無能的象徵。小說描寫了一件爭奪遺産的訴訟案，由於司法人員從中營私、徇訐，竟使得案情拖延二十年。在一個偶然機會裏，男爵夫人的私生女艾瑟?薩莫森（Esther Summerson）被那一群律師得知，於是追根究柢的律師藉此威脅男爵夫人，甚至整死一名流浪少年，男爵夫人被迫離傢出走，死於一場暴風雪。其中一名律師被他所利用的人殺害。這二十年期間申訴者居住在荒涼山莊，主人約翰?詹狄士（John Jarndyce）成為一對表兄妹的監護人，等待法官做最後的判决，最後整筆遺産正好全數支付有關的法律訴訟費用，跟訴訟案有關的人死的死，發瘋的發瘋。多數評論傢如蕭伯納、切斯特頓、康拉德、崔爾琳等人皆認為這部小說是“創下小說寫作高峰”，也是第一本“法律小說”。
At the novel's core is long-running litigation in England's Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which has far-reaching consequences for all involved. This case revolves around a testator who apparently made several wills, all of them seeking to bequeath money and land surrounding the Manor of Marr in South Yorkshire. The litigation, which already has consumed years and sixty to seventy thousand pounds sterling in court costs, is emblematic of the failure of Chancery. Dickens's assault on the flaws of the British judiciary system is based in part on his own experiences as a law clerk, and in part on his experiences as a Chancery litigant seeking to enforce his copyright on his earlier books. His harsh characterisation of the slow, arcane Chancery law process gave memorable form to pre-existing widespread frustration with the system. Though Chancery lawyers and judges criticized Dickens's portrait of Chancery as exaggerated and unmerited, his novel helped to spur an ongoing movement that culminated in enactment of the legal reform in the 1870s. In fact, Dickens was writing just as Chancery was reforming itself, with the Six Clerks and Masters mentioned in Chapter One abolished in 1842 and 1852 respectively: the need for further reform was being widely debated. These facts raise an issue as to when Bleak House is actually set. Technically it must be before 1842, and at least some of his readers at the time would have been aware of this. However, there is some question as to whether this timeframe is consistent with some of the themes of the novel. The great English legal historian Sir William Holdsworth (see below), set the action in 1827.
或譯為《蕭齋》，發表於1852年至1853年之間，是狄更斯最長的作品之一，它以錯綜復雜的情節揭露英國法律制度和司法機構的黑暗。
這部小說內容諷刺英國古老的“大法官庭”（Chancery）的作風，是司法體製顢頇、邪惡、無能的象徵。小說描寫了一件爭奪遺産的訴訟案，由於司法人員從中營私、徇訐，竟使得案情拖延二十年。在一個偶然機會裏，男爵夫人的私生女艾瑟?薩莫森（Esther Summerson）被那一群律師得知，於是追根究柢的律師藉此威脅男爵夫人，甚至整死一名流浪少年，男爵夫人被迫離傢出走，死於一場暴風雪。其中一名律師被他所利用的人殺害。這二十年期間申訴者居住在荒涼山莊，主人約翰?詹狄士（John Jarndyce）成為一對表兄妹的監護人，等待法官做最後的判决，最後整筆遺産正好全數支付有關的法律訴訟費用，跟訴訟案有關的人死的死，發瘋的發瘋。多數評論傢如蕭伯納、切斯特頓、康拉德、崔爾琳等人皆認為這部小說是“創下小說寫作高峰”，也是第一本“法律小說”。
At the novel's core is long-running litigation in England's Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which has far-reaching consequences for all involved. This case revolves around a testator who apparently made several wills, all of them seeking to bequeath money and land surrounding the Manor of Marr in South Yorkshire. The litigation, which already has consumed years and sixty to seventy thousand pounds sterling in court costs, is emblematic of the failure of Chancery. Dickens's assault on the flaws of the British judiciary system is based in part on his own experiences as a law clerk, and in part on his experiences as a Chancery litigant seeking to enforce his copyright on his earlier books. His harsh characterisation of the slow, arcane Chancery law process gave memorable form to pre-existing widespread frustration with the system. Though Chancery lawyers and judges criticized Dickens's portrait of Chancery as exaggerated and unmerited, his novel helped to spur an ongoing movement that culminated in enactment of the legal reform in the 1870s. In fact, Dickens was writing just as Chancery was reforming itself, with the Six Clerks and Masters mentioned in Chapter One abolished in 1842 and 1852 respectively: the need for further reform was being widely debated. These facts raise an issue as to when Bleak House is actually set. Technically it must be before 1842, and at least some of his readers at the time would have been aware of this. However, there is some question as to whether this timeframe is consistent with some of the themes of the novel. The great English legal historian Sir William Holdsworth (see below), set the action in 1827.
《董貝父子》無論從形式方面還是從內容方面而論，都在狄更斯的作品中占據特別重要的地位，它突破了早期作品中流浪漢體（thepicaresque）的影響，緊緊圍繞一個中心人物、一個主導觀念來展開故事，在狄更斯的小說中是第一部結構嚴謹的代表作。作者在序言、書信中多次提到，在寫《董貝父子》時，他時刻註意“扣緊該書的一般目的與設計，並以此嚴格束縛自己”。《董貝父子》形式上的新特點是跟內容方面的發展相聯繫的。在這以前，狄更斯在小說中曾抨擊了負債人監獄、新的濟貧法、地方上的所謂慈善事業以及大城市底層的罪惡與黑暗，多多少少把它們當作孤立的現象。《董貝父子》卻試圖在更嚴謹的形式中以現代城市為背景，通過一個資産者的典型形象表達出對資本主義社會的總體觀，而不復在個別社會弊病上做文章。當然，這並不一定意味着作者的小說藝術嚮着更高級階段發展——結構的嚴謹在美學上不一定比流浪漢體小說的鬆散更優越，它們可以各有各自的美，但無論如何，《董貝父子》代表了作者思想的深化，表現了他對社會問題的進一步思考。
英國19世紀小說專傢凱瑟琳·蒂洛遜在她的學術名著《19世紀40年代的小說》一書中把《董貝父子》列為40年代的代表作不是偶然的。《董貝父子》具有鮮明的時代特色：作者在這裏表現一個新時代——40年代工業發達的英國社會。小說中的倫敦是一個金融和商業中心、一個大港口，又是上流社會社交中心。董貝就是處在這樣生活漩渦中的巨商。《董貝父子》用不少篇幅描寫一個破落的航海儀器商所羅門·吉爾斯；他的小店鋪裏擺着些過時的儀器，從來沒有人光顧，除非是進來問路或兌換零錢。吉爾斯悲嘆道：“競爭、不停的競爭——新發明、層出不窮的新發明……世界把我拋在後邊了”。時代的落伍者所羅門·吉爾斯和他的小店鋪在小說中與董貝先生和他的大公司形成對比，愈加突出了《董貝父子》內容題材的時代特色。
狄更斯就是在這樣一種背景上塑造了一個資産者的典型形象。關於《董貝父子》的創作意圖，狄更斯曾說，在這裏他要處理的是“傲慢”問題，正如前一部小說《馬丁·柴則爾維持》裏要着重描寫“自私自利”。的確，在董貝形象的塑造上，作者是從傲慢入手的。小說一開始就寫到，在董貝先生看來，“世界是為了董貝父子經商而創造的，太陽和月亮是為了給他們光亮而創造的。河川和海洋是為了讓他們航船而構成的；虹霓使他們有逢到好天氣的希望；風的順逆影響他們實業的成敗；星辰在他們的軌道內運行，保持以他們為中心的一種不能侵犯的係統”。董貝公司稱霸四海，在當時的資本主義經濟體係中居於中心地位，於是董貝先生就自認是世界的中心，他的傲慢由此而來。他的傲慢不是由於作為一個人有任何優越於他人的地方，而是由於他的公司的地位、他的資本力量。在董貝的形象中，狄更斯不把問題局限於一般的自私貪婪，事實上在私德方面，董貝基本上是恩格斯說的那種“具有各種私德的可敬人物”。正如西方馬剋思主義者A·T·傑剋遜所指出的，“董貝的傲慢是他作為一傢大公司的頭目的地位帶給他的品質”。因此，傲慢衹是其表，而根本問題在於董貝作為人，與資本同一了。他失去了人的本質，衹是資本的化身，亦如某些西方評論所說的，是“19世紀企業精神”的象徵，“一種制度、競爭心理和冷酷無情”的典範。《董貝父子》以連載形式問世以後，當時便有評論指出： “描繪董貝這類的人物簡直是當務之急——倫敦的世界裏充滿了冷漠的、裝模作樣的、僵硬的、炫耀金錢的人物，想法跟董貝一模一樣……”可見董貝的形象在當時的英國社會是具有代表性的。
首先狄更斯強調了董貝作為一個資産者的非人性。他把感情完全排除在自己的視野之外：“董貝父子一嚮跟皮貨打交道，而不跟感情打交道”。實際上《董貝父子》很少涉及具體的商業活動，它其實是一部以家庭生活為題材的小說，通過家庭關係，表現了作為丈夫、作為父親的董貝，唯其如此，更加烘托了他的冷酷無情。
董貝父子-劇情
《董貝父子》有兩處描寫了董貝先生竟然流露了一種天然感情。第一次是在他太太生了男孩之後，他到臥室去看望，“對董貝太太居然也加上了一個親密的稱呼（雖然不是沒有一些猶豫，因為他畢竟是一個不慣於叫出那種稱呼的人），叫道：‘董貝太太，我的——我的親愛的’。”在他們夫妻之間這一稱呼是那樣生疏，以至“那位生病的太太擡起眼睛朝他望去的時候，頓時間臉上漲滿了微感驚訝的紅暈”。其實即使這一次難得的感情流露，也不是與公司無關的。董貝先生想到自己得了兒子，從此以後“咱們的公司，不但名義上，而且事實上，又該叫做‘董貝父子’啦，董——貝父子！”他是在品嚐這幾個字的甜美滋味時情不自禁地叫了一聲 “我的親愛的”！從他的內心感情來說，我們無從判斷這“親愛的”是指他的太太還是更多指他的公司。同樣，在《董貝父子》一書中我們始終無法判斷這“董貝父子”是指公司還是指這爺兒倆的關係。這種有意無意的含混自然是意味深長的。
董貝先生第二次感情流露是在看着剛出生的兒子時，他想到“他得成就一番命中註定的事業哪。命中註定的事業，小傢夥！”接着“把孩子的一隻手舉到自己的嘴唇上吻了一下，然後，好像深怕這種舉動有損他的尊嚴似的，他非常不自然地走開了”。總之，就是這兩次不可多得的感情流露，董貝先生也感到“猶豫”，“不習慣”，“有損尊嚴”，總之是“不自然”，即不合乎他那“資本化”了的本性。
在對董貝的描寫中，作者把他比作“雕像”、“木頭人”，“全身直挺挺的不會打彎”，或是“颳得光光、剪裁整齊的闊紳士，光溜利索，像剛印出來的鈔票”。作者用一係列冰、霜、雪之類的形象來渲染董貝的特點，他的住宅陰冷，他的辦公室凄涼。在保羅受洗禮的那一天，不僅教堂裏寒氣逼人，而且在董貝隨後舉行的宴會上擺着的食物都是冰冷的，與席上的整個氣氛一致，作者還說，坐在首席上的董貝本人猶如一個“冰凍紳士”的標本。總之，作者通過誇張的細節描寫，把董貝置於一層層冰霜的包裹之中，把他描寫成一位十足的沒有人性的冷血動物。
正如恩格斯所說的，資産階級“除了快快發財以外，不知道世界上還有別的快樂”一樣，繼承人意味着資本的延續，也就是資産階級理想中通嚮“永恆”與“不朽”的唯一道路，本質上還是發財的快樂。《董貝父子》一書的主綫和總的設計都是圍繞着董貝先生為自己，也是為公司，尋找繼承人的故事。如果按19世紀小說專傢史蒂芬·馬科斯的劃分，把作品劃分成四個部分，那麽可以看出，第一部分以繼承人小保羅的誕生開始，以他的死亡告終；第二部分描寫了董貝先生的悲痛以及他的第二次結婚，亦即再次要得到繼承人；第三部分表現了董貝先生婚後夫妻不睦，終於導致他的夫人私奔；第四部分描寫了董貝先生精神瓦解、企業倒閉，最後被他趕出傢門的女兒弗洛倫斯用自己的愛給他以安慰和力量，使老年的董貝在失去資本、失去繼承人之後恢復了自己的人性。而具有諷刺意味的是，“所謂董貝父子”，如書中一個人物說的“歸根結蒂是董貝父女”！但開始時，董貝先生哪裏能猜到等待他的命運！他把自己的感情全部傾註在公司的繼承人、剛剛誕生的兒子身上，至於女兒，既然不是繼承人，對董貝公司沒有意義，對他本人也就沒有意義，相當於“不能投資的一塊劣幣”。其實，就是對於他的兒子小保羅，董貝先生也衹能以自己的方式去愛。這是一種異化了的感情。他衹把保羅當作繼承人來對待，當作“董貝父子公司”中的“子”而不是作為一個有獨立生存權利的人、一個有權過快樂童年的兒童。董貝把保羅從降生到成人的時期都看作是難熬的過渡時期，“他急於進入未來，恨不得快點打發掉這中間的時光”。董貝對兒子的感情是那樣的獨占，他不信任奶娘波利·圖德爾，生怕兒子會對她有感情，從而受到“下等人”的沾染，後來董貝還是因為她擅自把保羅帶回傢而把這個好心的女人打發掉，致使嬰兒突然斷奶，從此體弱多病。董貝先生“望子成竜”心切，他把幼小的保羅送往布林伯博士學院。這是一座以填塞死知識著稱的住宿學校。在那裏，孩子們白天被逼得背誦天書一樣的古代典籍，晚上做夢都說希臘文！“那是一座大暖房，一架不停地移動的拔苗助長的機器，所有的孩子都提前‘開花’，但是不足三個禮拜就枯萎凋謝”。在那裏，可憐的小保羅的頭腦被塞滿了一大堆希臘羅馬的古董，他哭着說，“我要當兒童”，可那在董貝培養繼承人的計劃裏是不允許的。保羅在這些催化劑的作用下精神備受摧殘，不久以後便死去。具有諷刺意味的是，從解雇奶娘到提前送進學校的整個過程來看，不是別人，正是董貝先生自己一手促成了兒子的死亡。他完全按照自己性格的邏輯，按照他的“異化”了的感情行事，不可能有其他做法。這不能不說是董貝的悲劇。值得註意的還有，董貝不僅在兒子活着的時候對兒子的感情是“異化”的，而且在兒子死亡以後，他的反應也是“異化”的，那與其說是失去親骨肉的切膚之痛，倒更像是他的“自我”受到打擊、傲慢受到挫折而引起的痛苦。當老奶娘圖德爾的丈夫嚮董貝表示哀悼時，董貝不僅不為之感動，反而因為不相幹的人（與公司不相幹）妄想分擔他的痛苦而感到氣憤，好像自己受了污辱。這不是被資本“異化”了的感情又是什麽呢？
對董貝來說，更可悲的是，由於他的古板、冷漠、沒有人情味，他的兒子與他感情疏遠而衷心喜愛那些董貝所厭惡、鄙視的人——姐姐弗洛倫斯、奶娘波利·圖德爾，還有公司裏的小雇員沃爾特·蓋伊，在自己幼小生命的最後時刻對他們戀戀不捨而把自己的父親排除在外。在思想上父子二人更是格格不入；董貝是那樣急切盼望兒子成長為精明的生意人，而幼小的保羅卻問“錢能幹什麽？”，當父親說錢可以辦到一切，他並不信服，說“它不能救活我媽媽”。“它不是殘酷的嗎？”狄更斯通過兒童的眼光批判了董貝所代表的價值觀。
保羅雖然年紀幼小，卻總像是生活在一個彼岸世界，他“可以在糊墻紙上看出微型的老虎和獅子…… 看見一些人影衝着地板上的方塊和棱形圖案作怪臉，而別人卻什麽也看不見”。他像個老人似的長時間坐在海邊上，面對着一片天水茫茫沉思不語。他納悶“它沒結沒完地說些什麽呀？”——“我知道他們一直是在說些什麽的。說的總是同樣的事情。那兒是什麽地方呀？”他熱切地凝望那天水之際，在大海的喧騰中，聽到了時間老人的召喚，感到了死亡的預兆，最後在海濤聲中他安然與世長辭……。可以說，小保羅在任何意義上也不是董貝的繼承人。《董貝父子》的第一部分，也是最精采部分，便以董貝在培育繼承人方面的徹底失敗而告終。《董貝父子》最初連載發表時，保羅·羅貝夭亡的一章在當時讀者中引起強烈反響，“舉國上下，共同哀悼”，僅次於“自己傢裏辦喪事”。當時許多人，包括政界文化界著名人物都毫不隱諱自己為小保羅的死而痛哭流涕。這當然與當時盛行的感傷主義閱讀趣味分不開。小保羅的死，與《老古玩店》中小耐兒的死一樣，都是19世紀小說中公認的感傷主義的典範。但是，不可否認，保羅之死的著名篇章充滿了晶瑩的詩意—— “小船在波上的飄蕩已經引得他要去安眠了。河岸多麽蔥翠，長在河岸上的花草多麽明豔，那蘆葦又是多麽婷婷裊裊！這時小船已經駛到海裏，可是還在平靜地嚮前滑去”。小保羅去了，好像得到了他的天然歸宿。他不屬於公司，更遠離“貨幣、通貨、鈔票、外匯率”所構成的那個他命中要成就的“事業”。在那個孜孜名利的浮華世界上，保羅的死顯出了超塵拔俗的光彩，在默默無言之中對以“董貝父子公司”為代表的金錢利欲做出了最有力的批判。
經過第一個打擊，董貝並沒有總結教訓、達到自我認識。不久以後，他又處心積慮地為得到繼承人而設法。他跟年輕美貌的寡婦伊迪絲·格蘭傑結婚了。這純粹是一筆交易，董貝就像在騾馬市上相馬似地觀察伊迪絲的才華與教養，最後决定買下。伊迪絲憤然對她母親說“十年以來，奴隸市場上的奴隸和集市上的馬都沒有像我這樣被展覽出售，炫耀給看客。”在這第二次婚姻中，董貝又失敗了。在伊迪絲身上，他碰到了對手，跟他一樣傲慢，跟他一樣強硬。兩下裏衝突的結果，伊迪絲為報復丈夫而與公司的經理卡剋私奔，造成了倫敦上流社會的頭號醜聞。此外，董貝剛愎自用，在卡剋的縱恿下投資不當，在家庭危機的同時，他的商船“子嗣”號在海上遇難，他的公司倒閉，他本人宣告破産。昔日富麗堂皇的宅第被債僅人剝得一幹二淨，連老鼠都不願逗留，衹剩下一個董貝像個幽靈似地在空樓中遊蕩。在他舉刀自殺的那一剎那，女兒弗洛倫斯趕到他跟前，用自己的愛感化了他，使董貝終於認識到，自己是有罪的，“需要得到寬恕”。董貝那違背天理人性的傲慢被弗洛倫斯的愛剋服了。在老年，他終於開始過上一種合乎人性的生活。董貝的命運，並不取决於外部事態的發展；是董貝自己性格的內在邏輯導致他的全面崩潰。他是在自己懲罰自己，並在一重一重的懲罰中一層一層地暴露出資産階級本性中那些違反天理人情的因素。
若衹看故事情節，我們也不能否認《董貝父子》的結局是淺薄無力的。法國著名批評傢泰納說董貝的“轉變”毀了一本出色的小說。一位當代評論傢用不屑的口氣問道：難道要把董貝父子公司的世界貿易交給眼淚汪汪的弗洛倫斯去經營嗎？在這裏，我們又回到小說的時代特色問題。像弗洛倫斯那類的“安琪兒”是按照當時盛行的公式描寫的，本來就不現實，而董貝先生在鐵路四通八達國際貿易發達的時代是個真實的形象、一個階級的代表。弗洛倫斯怎麽可能用自己的眼淚去感化董貝的鐵石心腸呢？《董貝父子》一書的價值不在於作者虛構出怎麽樣的方案去解决矛盾，而在於他在四十年代資本主義經濟發達的歷史時期塑造了一個資産階級的典型形象，從而深刻地揭示了關於那個階級的真理。
也是在《董貝父子》一書中，狄更斯第一次采用了一個象徵來貫穿全書，以傳達出一個總的世界圖景、一種對時代、對社會的理解。他曾用過霧、濁流、垃圾等形象作為這種象徵，而在這裏是鐵路。鐵路——火車、鐵軌——的形象在書中出現多次，往往在關鍵時刻渲染氣氛，烘托主題。用鐵路的形象來概括四十年代工業化的英國，當然是最恰當不過的，在19世紀上半葉，鐵路的發展速度是驚人的。據統計，1825年還衹有25英裏的鐵路綫，到了1845年就發展成2200多公裏，即在不到二十年的時間裏便增加了一百倍。處在火車、電報時代的董貝比起乘驛車的匹剋威剋先生簡直屬於兩個完全不同的世界。鐵路的發展改變了人們的生活方式，改變了人們對空間和時間的概念，還産生了一支新的勞動隊伍：鐵路工人。鐵路意味着力量、運動和速度，意味着更快的生活節奏。這時，鐵路是社會變革的象徵，它給破爛不堪的舊址帶來了新的生命。書中寫到，由於鐵路的建設，波利·圖德爾一傢原來住的貧民區“斯塔格斯花園”已不復存在——“它從地面上消失了，原來一些朽爛的涼亭殘存的地方，現在聳立着高大的宮殿；大理石的圓柱兩邊開道，通嚮鐵路的新世界”。書中還寫到，原先堆放垃圾的空地已被吞沒，代之而起的是“一層層庫房，裏面裝滿了豐富的物資和貴重的商品”。而原是荒無人煙的地方現在修起了花園、別墅、教堂和令人心曠神怡的林蔭大道。過去以掘煤為生的圖德爾，現在也在新建設起來的鐵路上當上了一名司爐工。從這個角度可以說，狄更斯是站在贊賞的立場去看以鐵路為象徵的工業化對社會物質發展的積極意義。
但是，另一方面，鐵路、火車在狄更斯筆下又充滿了威脅，它力大無窮而又難以控製，它在急馳中似有自己的目的而把人的意願置於不顧。當保羅將要死去時，書中描寫了火車的運動：“日日夜夜，往返不停，翻騰的熱浪猶如生命的血流”。保羅在父親的培養下正在悄悄死去，而車聲隆隆正以雷霆萬鈞之勢駛來，顯得那樣冷酷無情。保羅死後，董貝乘火車旅行，火車的機械運動與董貝的沉重心情互相襯托，後來，董貝去追趕拐騙他妻子私奔的卡剋，他們一個在逃，一個緊追，這時火車像個可怕的怪獸，“混身冒火的魔鬼”，憤怒地奔騰咆哮，活像個復仇神，終於非常戲劇性地把卡剋碾死。
這裏，問題並不在於死在火車輪下的卡剋是罪有應得。重要的是，在這裏，火車的形象猙獰可怕；它的來臨“伴隨着大地的震響，在耳邊顫抖的聲浪，以及遙遠的尖叫聲；一片暗光由遠而近，剎那間變成兩支火紅的眼睛和一團烈火，一路上掉着燃燒的煤塊；接着，一個龐然大物咆哮着、擴展着，以不可抗拒的氣勢壓過來”。這個形象遠遠超脫了卡剋命運的區區小事，而提出了更大的問題：機械的物質運動所釋放出來的力量對於人類社會究竟意味着什麽？在這裏，狄更斯表現了一個真正大作傢的氣魄。他透過現象去捕捉本質，通過鐵路的象徵對資本主義物質文明的發展表示了深深的憂慮；這奔騰嚮前的力量將把人類社會帶往何處？這懷疑與憂慮是跟作者通過董貝的形象所提出的問題完全一致的，它們都匯為一個總的對時代的疑問：資本主義的工業——鐵路——改善了人們的生存條件，但它將引起什麽樣的社會變化？一個董貝先生是被女兒的淚水感化了，但以鐵路為標志的英國資本主義的發展不是會産生更多的董貝嗎？
《董貝父子》不是社會學論文。狄更斯的魔力就在於，他提出了當時社會最本質的問題，同時又寫出了人物衆多、情節復雜、情調多變的一部五光十色的小說巨著。在這裏，以董貝渴望子嗣的故事為中心，演出了那麽多扣人心弦的悲喜劇。社會地位有天壤之別的人物，命運卻那麽麯折地交織在一起：第二任董貝夫人伊迪絲跟被流放的娼妓愛麗絲不僅是同父異母的姐妹，而且也是被同一個男性——卡剋經理——欺辱的女性。這種情節性的背後不正是微妙地暗示着伊迪絲與董貝的婚姻的實質？《董貝父子》還充滿了陰謀和懸念。卡剋經理像個蜘蛛一樣坐在他編織的陰謀綱絡的中心，為董貝先生、伊迪絲，為弗洛倫斯和沃爾特，甚至為老實巴結的卡特爾船長都設下了圈套，派了釘哨。
可是到頭來，正是他這個心腹 ——不爭氣的少年羅伯——出賣了他，導致他粉身碎骨在車輪之下，可謂事件本身的嘲諷。在《董貝父子》中，與正劇的主綫平行，總有喜劇鬧劇的副綫，甚至形成一環扣一環的命運的鎖鏈。如在董貝先生物色第二位夫人的時候，溜須拍馬但又可憐可笑的托剋斯小姐覬覦董貝夫人的寶座，冷落了有意於她的白格斯托剋少校，而老姦巨猾的白格斯托剋為了挫敗托剋斯小姐的野心，把伊迪絲引見給董貝，導致了他的第二次災難性的婚姻。
在《董貝父子》一書中，狄更斯還描寫了許多小人物和他們的生活。破落小商人所羅門·吉爾斯、保羅的奶娘圖德爾一傢、弗洛倫斯的貼身女僕蘇珊等在各方面都與董貝形成對比。我們在書中看到，一方面是董貝的華貴府邸，另一方面是圖德爾一傢住的破爛不堪的貧民窟。儘管如此，前者冷若冰窖，後者熱氣騰騰，充滿友愛與歡樂。在那冷酷的資本主義社會，這些小人物身上體現了人情和人性中善良美好的本能。波利·圖德爾那興旺的傢族——她那豐富的乳汁和衆多的孩子都描寫的十分誇張、富於象徵意義，體現了生的歡樂和對未來的希望。有趣的是，在作者的巧妙安排之下，這些地位低賤的小人物又不斷跟董貝“遭遇”。如所羅門·吉爾斯的好友、落魄的船長內德·卡特爾竟跑去與董貝先生稱兄道弟，還以自己的糖俠子等可笑的“傳傢寶”來當抵押，要董貝藉款給他。這在董貝看來簡直是駭人聽聞。他擺出最威風凜凜的架勢，但最沒有現實感的卡特爾船長對此毫無察覺，弄得董貝反而手足無措。後來，女僕蘇珊又乘董貝臥病的當兒公然嚮他挑戰，指着他的鼻子數落他的不是，氣得董貝先生目瞪口呆。這些喜劇性場面烘托出了勞動人民生動活潑的形象；是他們戳破了董貝的傲慢，使他露出了底裏的空虛與軟弱。在四十年代描寫勞動人民形象的作品中，這種喜劇化的處理是別具一格的。
總之，穿插於故事中的衆多的陪襯人物都天真無邪，不是傻得可愛就是“狡猾”得可笑。他們不僅推動情節發展，而且為全書帶來了歡樂氣氛和幽默情趣，使《董貝父子》成為狄更斯小說中既有深度又饒有趣味的代表作。還在連載的時候，不識字的老百姓在一天的勞累之後就要聚在一起聽人朗讀《董貝父子》，直至今天，它還受到廣大讀者的喜愛。
Plot summary
The story concerns Paul Dombey, the wealthy owner of the shipping company of the book's title, whose dream is to have a son to continue his business. The book begins when his son is born, and Dombey's wife dies shortly after giving birth. Following the advice of Mrs Louisa Chick, his sister, Dombey employs a wet nurse named Mrs Richards (Toodle). Dombey already has a daughter, Florence, whom he neglects. One day, Mrs Richards, Florence and her maid, Susan Nipper, secretly pay a visit Mrs Richard's house in Stagg's Gardens in order that she can see her children. During this trip, Florence becomes separated and is kidnapped for a short time by Good Mrs Brown before being returned to the streets. She makes her way to Dombey and Son's offices in the City and is guided there by Walter Gay, an employee, who first introduces her to his uncle, the navigation instrument maker Solomon Gill, at his shop the Midshipman.
The child, also named Paul, is weak and often ill, and does not socialize normally with others; adults call him "old fashioned". He is intensely fond of his elder sister, Florence, who is deliberately neglected by her father as irrelevant and a distraction. He is sent away to Brighton, first for his health, where he and Florence lodge with the ancient and acidic Mrs Pipchin, and then for his education to Dr and Mrs Blimber's school, where he and the other boys undergo both an intense and arduous education under the tutelage of Mr Feeder, B.A. and Cornelia Blimber. It is here that Paul is befriended by a fellow pupil, the amiable Mr Toots.
Here, Paul's health declines even further in this 'great hothouse' and he finally dies, still only six years old. Dombey pushes his daughter away from him after the death of his son, while she futilely tries to earn his love. In the meantime, Walter, who works for Dombey and Son, is sent off to work in Barbados through the manipulations of the firm's manager, Mr James Carker, 'with his white teeth', who sees him as a potential rival through his association with Florence. His boat is reported lost and he is presumed drowned. Walter's uncle leaves to go in search of Walter, leaving his great friend Captain Edward Cuttle in charge of the Midshipman. Meanwhile, Florence is now left alone with few friends to keep her company.
Dombey goes to Leamington Spa with a new friend, Major Joseph B. Bagstock. The Major deliberately sets out to befriend Dombey in order to spite his neighbour in Princess's Place, Miss Tox, who has turned cold towards him owing to her hopes - through her close friendship with Mrs Chick - of marrying Mr Dombey. At the spa, Dombey is introduced via the Major to Mrs Skewton and her widowed daughter, Mrs Edith Granger. It is here that he develops an affection for Edith, encouraged by both the Major and the avaricious mother. After they return to London, Dombey remarries, effectively 'buying' the beautiful but haughty Edith as she and her mother are in a poor financial state. The marriage is loveless; his wife despises Dombey for his overbearing pride and herself for being shallow and worthless. Her love for Florence initially prevents her from leaving, but finally she conspires with Mr Carker to ruin Dombey's public image by running away together to Dijon. They do so after her last final argument with Dombey in which he once again attempts to subdue her to his will. When he discovers that she has left him, he blames Florence for siding with her step-mother, striking her on the breast in his anger, and she is forced to run away from home. Highly distraught, she finally makes her way to The Midshipman where she lodges with Captain Cuttle as he attempts to restore her back to health. They are visited frequently by Mr Toots and his boxing companion, the Chicken, since Mr Toots has been desperately in love with Florence since their time together in Brighton.
Dombey sets out to find his wife. He is helped in this by Mrs Brown and her daughter, Alice, who, it turns out, was a former lover of Mr Carker. After being transported as a convict after he involved her in some criminal activities, she is seeking her revenge against him now she is returned to England. Going to Mrs Brown's house, Dombey overhears the conversation between Rob the Grinder - who is in the employment of Mr Carker - and the old woman as to the couple's whereabouts and sets off in pursuit. In the meantime, in Dijon, Mrs Dombey informs Carker that she sees him in no better a light than she sees Dombey, that she will not stay with him and she flees their apartment. Distraught, with both his financial and personal hopes lost, Carker flees from his former employer's pursuit. He seeks refuge back in England but, being greatly overwrought, accidentally falls under a train and is killed.
After Carker's death, it is discovered that he had been running the firm far beyond its means. This information is gleaned by Carker's brother and sister, John and Harriet, from Mr Morfin, the assistant manager at Dombey and Son, who sets out to help John Carker. He often overheard the conversations between the two brothers in which James, the younger, often abused John, the older, who was just a lowly clerk and who is sacked by Dombey because of his filial relationship to the former manager. Meanwhile, back at the Midshipman, Walter reappears, having been saved by a passing ship after floating adrift with two other sailors on some wreckage. After some time, he and Florence are finally reunited - not as 'brother' and 'sister' but as lovers, and they marry prior to sailing for China on Walter's new ship. This is also the time when Sol Gills returns to the Midshipman. As he relates to his friends, he received news whilst in Barbados that a homeward-bound China trader had picked up Walter and so had returned to England immediately. He said he had sent letters whilst in the Caribbean to his friend Ned Cuttle c/o Mrs MacStinger at Cuttle's former lodgings, and the bemused Captain recounts how he fled the place, thus never receiving them.
Florence and Walter depart and Sol Gills is entrusted with a letter, written by Walter to her father, pleading for him to be reconciled towards them both. A year passes and Alice Brown has slowly been dying despite the tender care of Harriet Carker. One night Alice's mother reveals that Alice herself is the [illegitimate]] cousin of Edith Dombey (which accounts for their similarity in appearance when they both meet). In a chapter entitled 'Retribution', Dombey and Son goes bankrupt. Dombey retires to two rooms in his house and all its contents are put up for sale. Mrs Pipchin, for some time the housekeeper, dismisses all the servants and she herself returns to Brighton, to be replaced by Mrs Richards. Dombey spends his days sunk in gloom, seeing no-one and thinking only of his daughter:
“ He thought of her as she had been that night when he and his bride came home. He thought of her as she had been in all the home events of the abandoned house. He thought, now, that of all around him, she alone had never changed. His boy had faded into dust, his proud wife had sunk into a polluted creature, his flatterer and friend had been transformed into the worst of villains, his riches had melted away, the very walls that sheltered him looked on him as a stranger; she alone had turned the same, mild gentle look upon him always. Yes, to the latest and the last. She had never changed to him - nor had he ever changed to her - and she was lost. ”
However, one day Florence returns to the house with her son, Paul, and is lovingly reunited with her father.
Dombey accompanies his daughter to her and Walter's house where he slowly starts to decline, cared for by Florence and also Susan Nipper, now Mrs Toots. They receive a visit from Edth's Cousin Feenix who takes Florence to Edith for one final time - Feenix sought Edith out in France and she returned to England under his protection. Edith gives Florence a letter, asking Dombey to forgive her her crime before her departure to the South of Italy with her elderly relative. As she says to Florence, 'I will try, then to forgive him his share of the blame. Let him try to forgive me mine!'
The final chapter (LXII) sees Dombey now a white-haired old man, 'whose face bears heavy marks of care and suffering; but they are traces of a storm that has passed on for ever, and left a clear evening in its track'.. Sol Gills and Ned Cuttle are now partners at the Midshipman, a source of great pride to the latter, and Mr and Mrs Toots announce the birth of their third daughter. Walter is doing well in business, having been appointed to a position of great confidence and trust, and Dombey is the proud grandfather of both a grandson and grand-daughter of whom he dotes on, and the book ends with the highly moving lines:
“ 'Dear grandpapa, why do you cry when you kiss me?'
He only answers, 'Little Florence! Little Florence!' and smooths away the curls that shade her earnest eyes.
”
Source
Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens, Wordsworth Classics, 1995, ISBN 1 85326 257 9
Critical appreciation
Dombey and Son was conceived first and foremost as a continuous novel. A letter from Dickens to Forster on 26th July, 1846 shows the major details of the plot and theme already substantially worked out. According to the critic George Gissing, 'Dombey was begun at Lausanne, continued at Paris, completed in London, and at English seaside places; whilst the early parts were being written, a Christmas story, The Battle of Life, was also in hand, and Dickens found it troublesome to manage both together. That he overcame the difficulty -- that, soon after, we find him travelling about England as member of an amateur dramatic company -- that he undertook all sorts of public engagements and often devoted himself to private festivity -- Dombey going on the while, from month to month -- is matter enough for astonishment to those who know anything about artistic production. But such marvels become commonplaces in the life of Charles Dickens.'
As with most of Dickens' work, a number of socially significant themes are to be found in this book. In particular the book deals with the then-prevalent common practice of arranged marriages for financial gain. Other themes to be detected within this work include child cruelty (particularly in Dombey's treatment of Florence), familial relationships, and as ever in Dickens, betrayal and deceit and the consequences thereof. Another strong central theme, which the critic George Gissing elaborates on in detail in his 1925 work The Immortal Dickens, is that of pride and arrogance, of which Paul Dombey senior is the extreme exemplification in Dickens' work.
Gissing makes a number of points about certain key inadequacies in the novel, not the least that Dickens's central character is largely unsympathetic and an unsuitable vehicle and also that after the death of the young Paul Dombey the reader is somewhat estranged from the rest of what is to follow. He notes that 'the moral theme of this book was Pride -- pride of wealth, pride of place, personal arrogance. Dickens started with a clear conception of his central character and of the course of the story in so far as it depended upon that personage; he planned the action, the play of motive, with unusual definiteness, and adhered very closely in the working to this well-laid scheme'. However, he goes on to write that,'Dombey and Son is a novel which in its beginning promises more than its progress fulfils' and gives the following reasons why:
“ Impossible to avoid the reflection that the death of Dombey's son and heir marks the end of a complete story, that we feel a gap between Chapter XVI and what comes after (the author speaks of feeling it himself, of his striving to "transfer the interest to Florence") and that the narrative of the later part is ill-constructed, often wearisome, sometimes incredible. We miss Paul, we miss Walter Gay (shadowy young hero though he be); Florence is too colourless for deep interest, and the second Mrs. Dombey is rather forced upon us than accepted as a natural figure in the drama. Dickens's familiar shortcomings are abundantly exemplified. He is wholly incapable of devising a plausible intrigue, and shocks the reader with monstrous improbabilities such as all that portion of the denouement in which old Mrs. Brown and her daughter are concerned. A favourite device with him (often employed with picturesque effect) was to bring into contact persons representing widely severed social ranks; in this book the "effect" depends too often on "incidences of the boldest artificiality," as nearly always we end by neglecting the story as a story, and surrendering ourselves to the charm of certain parts, the fascination of certain characters.' ”
Characters in the novel
Karl Ashley Smith (the University of St Andrews) in his Introduction to Wordsworth Classics' Dombey and Son makes some reflections on the novel's characters. He believes that Dombey’s power to disturb comes from his belief that human relationships can be controlled by money, giving the following examples to support this viewpoint:
“ He tries to prevent Mrs Richards from developing an attachment to Paul by emphasising the wages he pays her. Mrs Pipchin’s small talk satisfies him as ‘the sort of think for which he paid her so much a quarter’ (p.132). Worst of all, he effectively buys his second wife and expects that his wealth and position in society will be enough to keep her in awed obedience to him. Paul’s questions about money are only the first indication of the naivety of his outlook'. ”
However, he also believes that the satire against this man is tempered with compassion.
Smith also draws attention to the fact that certain characters in the novel 'develop a pattern from Dickens's earlier novels, whilst pointing the way to future works'. One such character is Little Paul who is a direct descendant of Little Nell. Another is James Carker, the ever-smiling manager of Dombey and Son. Smith notes there are strong similarities between him and the likes of Jaggers in Great Expectations and, even more so, the evil barrister, Mr Tulkinghorn, in Bleak House:
“ From Fagin (Oliver Twist) onwards, the terrifying figure exerting power over others by an infallible knowledge of their secrets becomes one of the author’s trademarks ... His gentlemanly businesslike respectability marks him out as the ancestor of Tulkinghorn in Bleak House and even of Jaggers in Great Expectations. And his involvements in the secrets of others leads him to as sticky an end as Tulkinghorn’s. The fifty-fifth chapter, where he is forced to flee his outraged employer, magnificently continues the theme of the guilt-hunted man from Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist and Jonas’s restless sense of pursuit in Martin Chuzzlewit. There is always a strong sense in Dickens of the narrative drive of discovery catching up with those who deal in darkness...' ”
Gissing looks at some of the minor characters in the novel and is particularly struck by that of Edward (Ned) Cuttle.
“ Captain Cuttle has a larger humanity than his roaring friend [Captain Bunsby], he is the creation of humour. That the Captain suffered dire things at the hands of Mrs. MacStinger is as credible as it is amusing, but he stood in no danger of Bunsby's fate; at times he can play his part in a situation purely farcical, but the man himself moves on a higher level. He is one of the most familiar to us among Dickens's characters, an instance of the novelist's supreme power, which (I like to repeat) proves itself in the bodying forth of a human personality henceforth accepted by the world. His sentences have become proverbs; the mention of his name brings before the mind's eye an image of flesh and blood -- rude, tending to the grotesque, but altogether lovable. Captain Cuttle belongs to the world of Uncle Toby, with, to be sure, a subordinate position. Analyse him as you will, make the most of those extravagances which pedants of to-day cannot away with, and in the end you will still be face to face with something vital -- explicable only as the product of genius. ”
The growth of the railways
A strong theme is the destruction and degradation (of people and places) caused by industrialisation, illustrated in particular by the building of the new railway through Camden Town (assumed to represent the London and Birmingham Railway constructed between 1833 and 1837). This reflects Dickens's apparent antipathy towards railways[citation needed], later reinforced by his involvement in a train crash in 1865. Soon after this incident he wrote two short stories (Mugby Junction and The Signal-Man) which projected a morbid view of the railways.
Final thoughts
Gissing refers to Dickens's instinctive genius for reflecting the thoughts and morals of the common man in his writing. He observes that the author was in constant communication with Forster,
“ ... as to the feeling of his readers about some proposed incident or episode; not that he feared, in any ignoble sense, to offend his public, but because his view of art involved compliance with ideals of ordinary simple folk. He held that view as a matter of course. Quite recently it has been put forth with prophetic fervour by Tolstoy, who cites Dickens among the few novelists whose work will bear this test. An instinctive sympathy with the moral (and therefore the artistic) prejudices of the everyday man guided Dickens throughout his career, teaching him when, and how far, he might strike at things he thought evil, yet never defeat his prime purpose of sending forth fiction acceptable to the multitude. Himself, in all but his genius, a representative Englishman of the middle-class, he was able to achieve this task with unfailing zeal and with entire sincerity. ”
Karl Smith, in his turn, gives his specific reasons for what makes Dombey and Son - and the works of Dickens as a whole - worth reading again and again. He observes that this is based in part on Dickens's 'recognition that solemn themes require humour and verbal vigour to accompany and complement them' and goes on to conclude:
“ Grim psychological realism, social commentary, comic absurdity and symbolic transcendence are here brought together more than in any previous novel with the possible exception of Oliver Twist. Dombey and Son not only prepares the ground for Dickens’s later masterpieces, but demands to be enjoyed for its own energy and richness. ”
Characters in "Dombey and Son"
The "Wooden Midshipman" of Uncle Sol's nautical instrument shop of the same name. Statue in the Charles Dickens Museum.
* Mr Paul Dombey – the wealthy owner of the shipping company
* Edith Granger – proud widowed daughter of Mrs Skewton, becomes second Mrs Dombey
* Mrs Fanny Dombey – Mr Dombey's first wife, mother of Florence and Paul, dies soon after Paul is born
* Master Paul Dombey (Little Dombey) – the son, is weak and often ill
* Miss Florence (Floy) Dombey – the elder daughter whom Mr Dombey neglects
* Mrs Louisa Chick – Mr Dombey's sister
* Mr Chick – husband of Mrs Chick
* Miss Lucretia Tox – friend of Mrs Chick, great admirer of Mr Dombey, and neighbour of Major Joseph Bagstock
* James Carker (Mr Carker the Manager) – devious manager in Mr Dombey's business
* John Carker (Mr Carker the Junior) – disgraced older brother of James, lower level employee in Dombey's business
* Miss Harriet Carker – sister of James and John
* Mr Morfin – assistant manager in Mr Dombey's business
* Mr Perch – messenger in Mr Dombey's business
* Solomon (Uncle Sol) Gills – ships' instrument maker and owner of the "Wooden Midshipman", a shop
* Walter Gay – nephew of Gills, friend to Florence, employee of Mr Dombey, sent away by Carker the Manager
* Captain Edward (Ned) Cuttle – retired sea captain, friend of Gills
* Major Joseph Bagstock (Josh, Joe, J.B., Old Joe) – conceited retired army major, admirer of Miss Tox, friend of Mr Dombey until his downfall
* Briggs – schoolmate of Paul's
* Tozer – schoolmate of Paul's
* Mr P. Toots – schoolmate of Paul's, later a dandy in love with Florence
* The Game Chicken – rowdy companion of Mr Toots
* Miss Susan Nipper – Florence's loyal nurse, later marries Mr. Toots
* Mrs Cleopatra Skewton – Edith Dombey's infirm mother and former lover of Bagstock
* Mr Toodle – a railway engineer
* Polly Toodle (Mrs Richards) – wife of Mr Toodle, engaged as nurse to Paul under the name Mrs Richards (by Mr Dombey's order)
* Robin Toodle (Rob the Grinder, Biler) – son of Mr Toodle and Polly, sent to Charitable Grinders school, later engaged in service to Captain Cuttle and Mr. Carker the Manager
* Good Mrs. Brown – an elderly rag dealer
* Alice – daughter of Brown, former lover of Carker's, recently returned from transportation
* Jack Bunsby – commander of a ship, and regarded as an oracle by Captain Cuttle. Eventually is wedded to Mrs MaacStinger.
* Mrs MacStinger – Captain Cuttle's landlady and nemesis
* Mrs Pipchin – stern widow who keeps an 'infantine Boarding-House of a very select description' in Brighton, where Paul is sent for his health
* Master Bitherstone – a fellow-boarder at Mrs. Pipchin's, much later a student at Doctor Blimber's
* Miss Pankey – a fellow-boarder at Mrs. Pipchin's
* Sir Barnet Skettles –
* Lady Skettles –
* Master Skettles – Brighton school pupil
* Doctor Blimber – runs a school in Brighton which Paul briefly attends
* Mrs Blimber – Doctor Blimber's wife
* Miss Cornelia Blimber – Doctor Blimber's daughter, teacher at the school
* Mr Feeder, B.A. – Doctor Blimber's assistant, teacher at the school
* Diogenes (Di) – A dog from the school, befriended by Paul and adopted by Florence after Paul's death
Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
The novel has been adapted for the screen at least three times:
* 1917 - a silent starring Norman McKinnel as Paul Dombey and Hayford Hobbs as Walter Gay
* 1969 - a television mini-series starring John Carson as Paul Dombey and Derek Seaton as Walter Gay
* 1983 - a television mini-series starring Julian Glover as Paul Dombey and Max Gold as Walter Gay
There have also been BBC radio adaptations.
In 2007, a two-part French miniseries, Dombais et Fils, was produced by France 3, directed by Laurent Jaoui and starring Christophe Malavoy as "Charles Dombais" (Paul Dombey).
It was announced in September 2009 that Andrew Davies would no longer be writing a proposed television adaptation for the BBC.
Original publication
Dombey and Son was originally published in 19 monthly instalments; each cost one shilling (except for the last, which cost two shillings, being a double issue) and contained 32 pages of text with two illustrations by Phiz:
* I - October 1846 (chapters 1-4);
* II - November 1846 (chapters 5-7);
* III - December 1846 (chapters 8-10);
* IV - January 1847 (chapters 11-13);
* V - February 1847 (chapters 14-16);
* VI - March 1847 (chapters 17-19);
* VII - April 1847 (chapters 20-22);
* VIII - May 1847 (chapters 23-25);
* IX - June 1847 (chapters 26-28);
* X - July 1847 (chapters 29-31);
* XI - August 1847 (chapters 32-34);
* XII - September 1847 (chapters 35-38);
* XIII - October 1847 (chapters 39-41);
* XIV - November 1847 (chapters 42-45);
* XV - December 1847 (chapters 46-48);
* XVI - January 1848 (chapters 49-51);
* XVII - February 1848 (chapters 52-54);
* XVIII - March 1848 (chapters 55-57);
* XIX-XX - April 1848 (chapters 58-62).
Trivia
* The motto of the publication Notes and Queries, "When found, make a note of", comes from the novel.
* In the illustrated plate, "Major Bagstock is delighted to have that opportunity," the lettering "HOTEL" on the central building in the background is written in mirror-writing. Phiz, the illustrator, evidently forgot to reverse the lettering so that it would read correctly when the plate was printed. (However, strangely, he got the other lettering in the same plate correct.)
* Sir Harry Johnston wrote a sequel to Dombey and Son in about 1920, titled The Gay-Dombeys.
* In the novel Velocity by Dean Koontz, the comatose wife of the main protagonist often makes incoherent references to the works of Dickens, the 'most mysterious' coming from Dombey and Son, "I want to know what it says, the sea. What it is that it keeps on saying."
英國19世紀小說專傢凱瑟琳·蒂洛遜在她的學術名著《19世紀40年代的小說》一書中把《董貝父子》列為40年代的代表作不是偶然的。《董貝父子》具有鮮明的時代特色：作者在這裏表現一個新時代——40年代工業發達的英國社會。小說中的倫敦是一個金融和商業中心、一個大港口，又是上流社會社交中心。董貝就是處在這樣生活漩渦中的巨商。《董貝父子》用不少篇幅描寫一個破落的航海儀器商所羅門·吉爾斯；他的小店鋪裏擺着些過時的儀器，從來沒有人光顧，除非是進來問路或兌換零錢。吉爾斯悲嘆道：“競爭、不停的競爭——新發明、層出不窮的新發明……世界把我拋在後邊了”。時代的落伍者所羅門·吉爾斯和他的小店鋪在小說中與董貝先生和他的大公司形成對比，愈加突出了《董貝父子》內容題材的時代特色。
狄更斯就是在這樣一種背景上塑造了一個資産者的典型形象。關於《董貝父子》的創作意圖，狄更斯曾說，在這裏他要處理的是“傲慢”問題，正如前一部小說《馬丁·柴則爾維持》裏要着重描寫“自私自利”。的確，在董貝形象的塑造上，作者是從傲慢入手的。小說一開始就寫到，在董貝先生看來，“世界是為了董貝父子經商而創造的，太陽和月亮是為了給他們光亮而創造的。河川和海洋是為了讓他們航船而構成的；虹霓使他們有逢到好天氣的希望；風的順逆影響他們實業的成敗；星辰在他們的軌道內運行，保持以他們為中心的一種不能侵犯的係統”。董貝公司稱霸四海，在當時的資本主義經濟體係中居於中心地位，於是董貝先生就自認是世界的中心，他的傲慢由此而來。他的傲慢不是由於作為一個人有任何優越於他人的地方，而是由於他的公司的地位、他的資本力量。在董貝的形象中，狄更斯不把問題局限於一般的自私貪婪，事實上在私德方面，董貝基本上是恩格斯說的那種“具有各種私德的可敬人物”。正如西方馬剋思主義者A·T·傑剋遜所指出的，“董貝的傲慢是他作為一傢大公司的頭目的地位帶給他的品質”。因此，傲慢衹是其表，而根本問題在於董貝作為人，與資本同一了。他失去了人的本質，衹是資本的化身，亦如某些西方評論所說的，是“19世紀企業精神”的象徵，“一種制度、競爭心理和冷酷無情”的典範。《董貝父子》以連載形式問世以後，當時便有評論指出： “描繪董貝這類的人物簡直是當務之急——倫敦的世界裏充滿了冷漠的、裝模作樣的、僵硬的、炫耀金錢的人物，想法跟董貝一模一樣……”可見董貝的形象在當時的英國社會是具有代表性的。
首先狄更斯強調了董貝作為一個資産者的非人性。他把感情完全排除在自己的視野之外：“董貝父子一嚮跟皮貨打交道，而不跟感情打交道”。實際上《董貝父子》很少涉及具體的商業活動，它其實是一部以家庭生活為題材的小說，通過家庭關係，表現了作為丈夫、作為父親的董貝，唯其如此，更加烘托了他的冷酷無情。
董貝父子-劇情
《董貝父子》有兩處描寫了董貝先生竟然流露了一種天然感情。第一次是在他太太生了男孩之後，他到臥室去看望，“對董貝太太居然也加上了一個親密的稱呼（雖然不是沒有一些猶豫，因為他畢竟是一個不慣於叫出那種稱呼的人），叫道：‘董貝太太，我的——我的親愛的’。”在他們夫妻之間這一稱呼是那樣生疏，以至“那位生病的太太擡起眼睛朝他望去的時候，頓時間臉上漲滿了微感驚訝的紅暈”。其實即使這一次難得的感情流露，也不是與公司無關的。董貝先生想到自己得了兒子，從此以後“咱們的公司，不但名義上，而且事實上，又該叫做‘董貝父子’啦，董——貝父子！”他是在品嚐這幾個字的甜美滋味時情不自禁地叫了一聲 “我的親愛的”！從他的內心感情來說，我們無從判斷這“親愛的”是指他的太太還是更多指他的公司。同樣，在《董貝父子》一書中我們始終無法判斷這“董貝父子”是指公司還是指這爺兒倆的關係。這種有意無意的含混自然是意味深長的。
董貝先生第二次感情流露是在看着剛出生的兒子時，他想到“他得成就一番命中註定的事業哪。命中註定的事業，小傢夥！”接着“把孩子的一隻手舉到自己的嘴唇上吻了一下，然後，好像深怕這種舉動有損他的尊嚴似的，他非常不自然地走開了”。總之，就是這兩次不可多得的感情流露，董貝先生也感到“猶豫”，“不習慣”，“有損尊嚴”，總之是“不自然”，即不合乎他那“資本化”了的本性。
在對董貝的描寫中，作者把他比作“雕像”、“木頭人”，“全身直挺挺的不會打彎”，或是“颳得光光、剪裁整齊的闊紳士，光溜利索，像剛印出來的鈔票”。作者用一係列冰、霜、雪之類的形象來渲染董貝的特點，他的住宅陰冷，他的辦公室凄涼。在保羅受洗禮的那一天，不僅教堂裏寒氣逼人，而且在董貝隨後舉行的宴會上擺着的食物都是冰冷的，與席上的整個氣氛一致，作者還說，坐在首席上的董貝本人猶如一個“冰凍紳士”的標本。總之，作者通過誇張的細節描寫，把董貝置於一層層冰霜的包裹之中，把他描寫成一位十足的沒有人性的冷血動物。
正如恩格斯所說的，資産階級“除了快快發財以外，不知道世界上還有別的快樂”一樣，繼承人意味着資本的延續，也就是資産階級理想中通嚮“永恆”與“不朽”的唯一道路，本質上還是發財的快樂。《董貝父子》一書的主綫和總的設計都是圍繞着董貝先生為自己，也是為公司，尋找繼承人的故事。如果按19世紀小說專傢史蒂芬·馬科斯的劃分，把作品劃分成四個部分，那麽可以看出，第一部分以繼承人小保羅的誕生開始，以他的死亡告終；第二部分描寫了董貝先生的悲痛以及他的第二次結婚，亦即再次要得到繼承人；第三部分表現了董貝先生婚後夫妻不睦，終於導致他的夫人私奔；第四部分描寫了董貝先生精神瓦解、企業倒閉，最後被他趕出傢門的女兒弗洛倫斯用自己的愛給他以安慰和力量，使老年的董貝在失去資本、失去繼承人之後恢復了自己的人性。而具有諷刺意味的是，“所謂董貝父子”，如書中一個人物說的“歸根結蒂是董貝父女”！但開始時，董貝先生哪裏能猜到等待他的命運！他把自己的感情全部傾註在公司的繼承人、剛剛誕生的兒子身上，至於女兒，既然不是繼承人，對董貝公司沒有意義，對他本人也就沒有意義，相當於“不能投資的一塊劣幣”。其實，就是對於他的兒子小保羅，董貝先生也衹能以自己的方式去愛。這是一種異化了的感情。他衹把保羅當作繼承人來對待，當作“董貝父子公司”中的“子”而不是作為一個有獨立生存權利的人、一個有權過快樂童年的兒童。董貝把保羅從降生到成人的時期都看作是難熬的過渡時期，“他急於進入未來，恨不得快點打發掉這中間的時光”。董貝對兒子的感情是那樣的獨占，他不信任奶娘波利·圖德爾，生怕兒子會對她有感情，從而受到“下等人”的沾染，後來董貝還是因為她擅自把保羅帶回傢而把這個好心的女人打發掉，致使嬰兒突然斷奶，從此體弱多病。董貝先生“望子成竜”心切，他把幼小的保羅送往布林伯博士學院。這是一座以填塞死知識著稱的住宿學校。在那裏，孩子們白天被逼得背誦天書一樣的古代典籍，晚上做夢都說希臘文！“那是一座大暖房，一架不停地移動的拔苗助長的機器，所有的孩子都提前‘開花’，但是不足三個禮拜就枯萎凋謝”。在那裏，可憐的小保羅的頭腦被塞滿了一大堆希臘羅馬的古董，他哭着說，“我要當兒童”，可那在董貝培養繼承人的計劃裏是不允許的。保羅在這些催化劑的作用下精神備受摧殘，不久以後便死去。具有諷刺意味的是，從解雇奶娘到提前送進學校的整個過程來看，不是別人，正是董貝先生自己一手促成了兒子的死亡。他完全按照自己性格的邏輯，按照他的“異化”了的感情行事，不可能有其他做法。這不能不說是董貝的悲劇。值得註意的還有，董貝不僅在兒子活着的時候對兒子的感情是“異化”的，而且在兒子死亡以後，他的反應也是“異化”的，那與其說是失去親骨肉的切膚之痛，倒更像是他的“自我”受到打擊、傲慢受到挫折而引起的痛苦。當老奶娘圖德爾的丈夫嚮董貝表示哀悼時，董貝不僅不為之感動，反而因為不相幹的人（與公司不相幹）妄想分擔他的痛苦而感到氣憤，好像自己受了污辱。這不是被資本“異化”了的感情又是什麽呢？
對董貝來說，更可悲的是，由於他的古板、冷漠、沒有人情味，他的兒子與他感情疏遠而衷心喜愛那些董貝所厭惡、鄙視的人——姐姐弗洛倫斯、奶娘波利·圖德爾，還有公司裏的小雇員沃爾特·蓋伊，在自己幼小生命的最後時刻對他們戀戀不捨而把自己的父親排除在外。在思想上父子二人更是格格不入；董貝是那樣急切盼望兒子成長為精明的生意人，而幼小的保羅卻問“錢能幹什麽？”，當父親說錢可以辦到一切，他並不信服，說“它不能救活我媽媽”。“它不是殘酷的嗎？”狄更斯通過兒童的眼光批判了董貝所代表的價值觀。
保羅雖然年紀幼小，卻總像是生活在一個彼岸世界，他“可以在糊墻紙上看出微型的老虎和獅子…… 看見一些人影衝着地板上的方塊和棱形圖案作怪臉，而別人卻什麽也看不見”。他像個老人似的長時間坐在海邊上，面對着一片天水茫茫沉思不語。他納悶“它沒結沒完地說些什麽呀？”——“我知道他們一直是在說些什麽的。說的總是同樣的事情。那兒是什麽地方呀？”他熱切地凝望那天水之際，在大海的喧騰中，聽到了時間老人的召喚，感到了死亡的預兆，最後在海濤聲中他安然與世長辭……。可以說，小保羅在任何意義上也不是董貝的繼承人。《董貝父子》的第一部分，也是最精采部分，便以董貝在培育繼承人方面的徹底失敗而告終。《董貝父子》最初連載發表時，保羅·羅貝夭亡的一章在當時讀者中引起強烈反響，“舉國上下，共同哀悼”，僅次於“自己傢裏辦喪事”。當時許多人，包括政界文化界著名人物都毫不隱諱自己為小保羅的死而痛哭流涕。這當然與當時盛行的感傷主義閱讀趣味分不開。小保羅的死，與《老古玩店》中小耐兒的死一樣，都是19世紀小說中公認的感傷主義的典範。但是，不可否認，保羅之死的著名篇章充滿了晶瑩的詩意—— “小船在波上的飄蕩已經引得他要去安眠了。河岸多麽蔥翠，長在河岸上的花草多麽明豔，那蘆葦又是多麽婷婷裊裊！這時小船已經駛到海裏，可是還在平靜地嚮前滑去”。小保羅去了，好像得到了他的天然歸宿。他不屬於公司，更遠離“貨幣、通貨、鈔票、外匯率”所構成的那個他命中要成就的“事業”。在那個孜孜名利的浮華世界上，保羅的死顯出了超塵拔俗的光彩，在默默無言之中對以“董貝父子公司”為代表的金錢利欲做出了最有力的批判。
經過第一個打擊，董貝並沒有總結教訓、達到自我認識。不久以後，他又處心積慮地為得到繼承人而設法。他跟年輕美貌的寡婦伊迪絲·格蘭傑結婚了。這純粹是一筆交易，董貝就像在騾馬市上相馬似地觀察伊迪絲的才華與教養，最後决定買下。伊迪絲憤然對她母親說“十年以來，奴隸市場上的奴隸和集市上的馬都沒有像我這樣被展覽出售，炫耀給看客。”在這第二次婚姻中，董貝又失敗了。在伊迪絲身上，他碰到了對手，跟他一樣傲慢，跟他一樣強硬。兩下裏衝突的結果，伊迪絲為報復丈夫而與公司的經理卡剋私奔，造成了倫敦上流社會的頭號醜聞。此外，董貝剛愎自用，在卡剋的縱恿下投資不當，在家庭危機的同時，他的商船“子嗣”號在海上遇難，他的公司倒閉，他本人宣告破産。昔日富麗堂皇的宅第被債僅人剝得一幹二淨，連老鼠都不願逗留，衹剩下一個董貝像個幽靈似地在空樓中遊蕩。在他舉刀自殺的那一剎那，女兒弗洛倫斯趕到他跟前，用自己的愛感化了他，使董貝終於認識到，自己是有罪的，“需要得到寬恕”。董貝那違背天理人性的傲慢被弗洛倫斯的愛剋服了。在老年，他終於開始過上一種合乎人性的生活。董貝的命運，並不取决於外部事態的發展；是董貝自己性格的內在邏輯導致他的全面崩潰。他是在自己懲罰自己，並在一重一重的懲罰中一層一層地暴露出資産階級本性中那些違反天理人情的因素。
若衹看故事情節，我們也不能否認《董貝父子》的結局是淺薄無力的。法國著名批評傢泰納說董貝的“轉變”毀了一本出色的小說。一位當代評論傢用不屑的口氣問道：難道要把董貝父子公司的世界貿易交給眼淚汪汪的弗洛倫斯去經營嗎？在這裏，我們又回到小說的時代特色問題。像弗洛倫斯那類的“安琪兒”是按照當時盛行的公式描寫的，本來就不現實，而董貝先生在鐵路四通八達國際貿易發達的時代是個真實的形象、一個階級的代表。弗洛倫斯怎麽可能用自己的眼淚去感化董貝的鐵石心腸呢？《董貝父子》一書的價值不在於作者虛構出怎麽樣的方案去解决矛盾，而在於他在四十年代資本主義經濟發達的歷史時期塑造了一個資産階級的典型形象，從而深刻地揭示了關於那個階級的真理。
也是在《董貝父子》一書中，狄更斯第一次采用了一個象徵來貫穿全書，以傳達出一個總的世界圖景、一種對時代、對社會的理解。他曾用過霧、濁流、垃圾等形象作為這種象徵，而在這裏是鐵路。鐵路——火車、鐵軌——的形象在書中出現多次，往往在關鍵時刻渲染氣氛，烘托主題。用鐵路的形象來概括四十年代工業化的英國，當然是最恰當不過的，在19世紀上半葉，鐵路的發展速度是驚人的。據統計，1825年還衹有25英裏的鐵路綫，到了1845年就發展成2200多公裏，即在不到二十年的時間裏便增加了一百倍。處在火車、電報時代的董貝比起乘驛車的匹剋威剋先生簡直屬於兩個完全不同的世界。鐵路的發展改變了人們的生活方式，改變了人們對空間和時間的概念，還産生了一支新的勞動隊伍：鐵路工人。鐵路意味着力量、運動和速度，意味着更快的生活節奏。這時，鐵路是社會變革的象徵，它給破爛不堪的舊址帶來了新的生命。書中寫到，由於鐵路的建設，波利·圖德爾一傢原來住的貧民區“斯塔格斯花園”已不復存在——“它從地面上消失了，原來一些朽爛的涼亭殘存的地方，現在聳立着高大的宮殿；大理石的圓柱兩邊開道，通嚮鐵路的新世界”。書中還寫到，原先堆放垃圾的空地已被吞沒，代之而起的是“一層層庫房，裏面裝滿了豐富的物資和貴重的商品”。而原是荒無人煙的地方現在修起了花園、別墅、教堂和令人心曠神怡的林蔭大道。過去以掘煤為生的圖德爾，現在也在新建設起來的鐵路上當上了一名司爐工。從這個角度可以說，狄更斯是站在贊賞的立場去看以鐵路為象徵的工業化對社會物質發展的積極意義。
但是，另一方面，鐵路、火車在狄更斯筆下又充滿了威脅，它力大無窮而又難以控製，它在急馳中似有自己的目的而把人的意願置於不顧。當保羅將要死去時，書中描寫了火車的運動：“日日夜夜，往返不停，翻騰的熱浪猶如生命的血流”。保羅在父親的培養下正在悄悄死去，而車聲隆隆正以雷霆萬鈞之勢駛來，顯得那樣冷酷無情。保羅死後，董貝乘火車旅行，火車的機械運動與董貝的沉重心情互相襯托，後來，董貝去追趕拐騙他妻子私奔的卡剋，他們一個在逃，一個緊追，這時火車像個可怕的怪獸，“混身冒火的魔鬼”，憤怒地奔騰咆哮，活像個復仇神，終於非常戲劇性地把卡剋碾死。
這裏，問題並不在於死在火車輪下的卡剋是罪有應得。重要的是，在這裏，火車的形象猙獰可怕；它的來臨“伴隨着大地的震響，在耳邊顫抖的聲浪，以及遙遠的尖叫聲；一片暗光由遠而近，剎那間變成兩支火紅的眼睛和一團烈火，一路上掉着燃燒的煤塊；接着，一個龐然大物咆哮着、擴展着，以不可抗拒的氣勢壓過來”。這個形象遠遠超脫了卡剋命運的區區小事，而提出了更大的問題：機械的物質運動所釋放出來的力量對於人類社會究竟意味着什麽？在這裏，狄更斯表現了一個真正大作傢的氣魄。他透過現象去捕捉本質，通過鐵路的象徵對資本主義物質文明的發展表示了深深的憂慮；這奔騰嚮前的力量將把人類社會帶往何處？這懷疑與憂慮是跟作者通過董貝的形象所提出的問題完全一致的，它們都匯為一個總的對時代的疑問：資本主義的工業——鐵路——改善了人們的生存條件，但它將引起什麽樣的社會變化？一個董貝先生是被女兒的淚水感化了，但以鐵路為標志的英國資本主義的發展不是會産生更多的董貝嗎？
《董貝父子》不是社會學論文。狄更斯的魔力就在於，他提出了當時社會最本質的問題，同時又寫出了人物衆多、情節復雜、情調多變的一部五光十色的小說巨著。在這裏，以董貝渴望子嗣的故事為中心，演出了那麽多扣人心弦的悲喜劇。社會地位有天壤之別的人物，命運卻那麽麯折地交織在一起：第二任董貝夫人伊迪絲跟被流放的娼妓愛麗絲不僅是同父異母的姐妹，而且也是被同一個男性——卡剋經理——欺辱的女性。這種情節性的背後不正是微妙地暗示着伊迪絲與董貝的婚姻的實質？《董貝父子》還充滿了陰謀和懸念。卡剋經理像個蜘蛛一樣坐在他編織的陰謀綱絡的中心，為董貝先生、伊迪絲，為弗洛倫斯和沃爾特，甚至為老實巴結的卡特爾船長都設下了圈套，派了釘哨。
可是到頭來，正是他這個心腹 ——不爭氣的少年羅伯——出賣了他，導致他粉身碎骨在車輪之下，可謂事件本身的嘲諷。在《董貝父子》中，與正劇的主綫平行，總有喜劇鬧劇的副綫，甚至形成一環扣一環的命運的鎖鏈。如在董貝先生物色第二位夫人的時候，溜須拍馬但又可憐可笑的托剋斯小姐覬覦董貝夫人的寶座，冷落了有意於她的白格斯托剋少校，而老姦巨猾的白格斯托剋為了挫敗托剋斯小姐的野心，把伊迪絲引見給董貝，導致了他的第二次災難性的婚姻。
在《董貝父子》一書中，狄更斯還描寫了許多小人物和他們的生活。破落小商人所羅門·吉爾斯、保羅的奶娘圖德爾一傢、弗洛倫斯的貼身女僕蘇珊等在各方面都與董貝形成對比。我們在書中看到，一方面是董貝的華貴府邸，另一方面是圖德爾一傢住的破爛不堪的貧民窟。儘管如此，前者冷若冰窖，後者熱氣騰騰，充滿友愛與歡樂。在那冷酷的資本主義社會，這些小人物身上體現了人情和人性中善良美好的本能。波利·圖德爾那興旺的傢族——她那豐富的乳汁和衆多的孩子都描寫的十分誇張、富於象徵意義，體現了生的歡樂和對未來的希望。有趣的是，在作者的巧妙安排之下，這些地位低賤的小人物又不斷跟董貝“遭遇”。如所羅門·吉爾斯的好友、落魄的船長內德·卡特爾竟跑去與董貝先生稱兄道弟，還以自己的糖俠子等可笑的“傳傢寶”來當抵押，要董貝藉款給他。這在董貝看來簡直是駭人聽聞。他擺出最威風凜凜的架勢，但最沒有現實感的卡特爾船長對此毫無察覺，弄得董貝反而手足無措。後來，女僕蘇珊又乘董貝臥病的當兒公然嚮他挑戰，指着他的鼻子數落他的不是，氣得董貝先生目瞪口呆。這些喜劇性場面烘托出了勞動人民生動活潑的形象；是他們戳破了董貝的傲慢，使他露出了底裏的空虛與軟弱。在四十年代描寫勞動人民形象的作品中，這種喜劇化的處理是別具一格的。
總之，穿插於故事中的衆多的陪襯人物都天真無邪，不是傻得可愛就是“狡猾”得可笑。他們不僅推動情節發展，而且為全書帶來了歡樂氣氛和幽默情趣，使《董貝父子》成為狄更斯小說中既有深度又饒有趣味的代表作。還在連載的時候，不識字的老百姓在一天的勞累之後就要聚在一起聽人朗讀《董貝父子》，直至今天，它還受到廣大讀者的喜愛。
Plot summary
The story concerns Paul Dombey, the wealthy owner of the shipping company of the book's title, whose dream is to have a son to continue his business. The book begins when his son is born, and Dombey's wife dies shortly after giving birth. Following the advice of Mrs Louisa Chick, his sister, Dombey employs a wet nurse named Mrs Richards (Toodle). Dombey already has a daughter, Florence, whom he neglects. One day, Mrs Richards, Florence and her maid, Susan Nipper, secretly pay a visit Mrs Richard's house in Stagg's Gardens in order that she can see her children. During this trip, Florence becomes separated and is kidnapped for a short time by Good Mrs Brown before being returned to the streets. She makes her way to Dombey and Son's offices in the City and is guided there by Walter Gay, an employee, who first introduces her to his uncle, the navigation instrument maker Solomon Gill, at his shop the Midshipman.
The child, also named Paul, is weak and often ill, and does not socialize normally with others; adults call him "old fashioned". He is intensely fond of his elder sister, Florence, who is deliberately neglected by her father as irrelevant and a distraction. He is sent away to Brighton, first for his health, where he and Florence lodge with the ancient and acidic Mrs Pipchin, and then for his education to Dr and Mrs Blimber's school, where he and the other boys undergo both an intense and arduous education under the tutelage of Mr Feeder, B.A. and Cornelia Blimber. It is here that Paul is befriended by a fellow pupil, the amiable Mr Toots.
Here, Paul's health declines even further in this 'great hothouse' and he finally dies, still only six years old. Dombey pushes his daughter away from him after the death of his son, while she futilely tries to earn his love. In the meantime, Walter, who works for Dombey and Son, is sent off to work in Barbados through the manipulations of the firm's manager, Mr James Carker, 'with his white teeth', who sees him as a potential rival through his association with Florence. His boat is reported lost and he is presumed drowned. Walter's uncle leaves to go in search of Walter, leaving his great friend Captain Edward Cuttle in charge of the Midshipman. Meanwhile, Florence is now left alone with few friends to keep her company.
Dombey goes to Leamington Spa with a new friend, Major Joseph B. Bagstock. The Major deliberately sets out to befriend Dombey in order to spite his neighbour in Princess's Place, Miss Tox, who has turned cold towards him owing to her hopes - through her close friendship with Mrs Chick - of marrying Mr Dombey. At the spa, Dombey is introduced via the Major to Mrs Skewton and her widowed daughter, Mrs Edith Granger. It is here that he develops an affection for Edith, encouraged by both the Major and the avaricious mother. After they return to London, Dombey remarries, effectively 'buying' the beautiful but haughty Edith as she and her mother are in a poor financial state. The marriage is loveless; his wife despises Dombey for his overbearing pride and herself for being shallow and worthless. Her love for Florence initially prevents her from leaving, but finally she conspires with Mr Carker to ruin Dombey's public image by running away together to Dijon. They do so after her last final argument with Dombey in which he once again attempts to subdue her to his will. When he discovers that she has left him, he blames Florence for siding with her step-mother, striking her on the breast in his anger, and she is forced to run away from home. Highly distraught, she finally makes her way to The Midshipman where she lodges with Captain Cuttle as he attempts to restore her back to health. They are visited frequently by Mr Toots and his boxing companion, the Chicken, since Mr Toots has been desperately in love with Florence since their time together in Brighton.
Dombey sets out to find his wife. He is helped in this by Mrs Brown and her daughter, Alice, who, it turns out, was a former lover of Mr Carker. After being transported as a convict after he involved her in some criminal activities, she is seeking her revenge against him now she is returned to England. Going to Mrs Brown's house, Dombey overhears the conversation between Rob the Grinder - who is in the employment of Mr Carker - and the old woman as to the couple's whereabouts and sets off in pursuit. In the meantime, in Dijon, Mrs Dombey informs Carker that she sees him in no better a light than she sees Dombey, that she will not stay with him and she flees their apartment. Distraught, with both his financial and personal hopes lost, Carker flees from his former employer's pursuit. He seeks refuge back in England but, being greatly overwrought, accidentally falls under a train and is killed.
After Carker's death, it is discovered that he had been running the firm far beyond its means. This information is gleaned by Carker's brother and sister, John and Harriet, from Mr Morfin, the assistant manager at Dombey and Son, who sets out to help John Carker. He often overheard the conversations between the two brothers in which James, the younger, often abused John, the older, who was just a lowly clerk and who is sacked by Dombey because of his filial relationship to the former manager. Meanwhile, back at the Midshipman, Walter reappears, having been saved by a passing ship after floating adrift with two other sailors on some wreckage. After some time, he and Florence are finally reunited - not as 'brother' and 'sister' but as lovers, and they marry prior to sailing for China on Walter's new ship. This is also the time when Sol Gills returns to the Midshipman. As he relates to his friends, he received news whilst in Barbados that a homeward-bound China trader had picked up Walter and so had returned to England immediately. He said he had sent letters whilst in the Caribbean to his friend Ned Cuttle c/o Mrs MacStinger at Cuttle's former lodgings, and the bemused Captain recounts how he fled the place, thus never receiving them.
Florence and Walter depart and Sol Gills is entrusted with a letter, written by Walter to her father, pleading for him to be reconciled towards them both. A year passes and Alice Brown has slowly been dying despite the tender care of Harriet Carker. One night Alice's mother reveals that Alice herself is the [illegitimate]] cousin of Edith Dombey (which accounts for their similarity in appearance when they both meet). In a chapter entitled 'Retribution', Dombey and Son goes bankrupt. Dombey retires to two rooms in his house and all its contents are put up for sale. Mrs Pipchin, for some time the housekeeper, dismisses all the servants and she herself returns to Brighton, to be replaced by Mrs Richards. Dombey spends his days sunk in gloom, seeing no-one and thinking only of his daughter:
“ He thought of her as she had been that night when he and his bride came home. He thought of her as she had been in all the home events of the abandoned house. He thought, now, that of all around him, she alone had never changed. His boy had faded into dust, his proud wife had sunk into a polluted creature, his flatterer and friend had been transformed into the worst of villains, his riches had melted away, the very walls that sheltered him looked on him as a stranger; she alone had turned the same, mild gentle look upon him always. Yes, to the latest and the last. She had never changed to him - nor had he ever changed to her - and she was lost. ”
However, one day Florence returns to the house with her son, Paul, and is lovingly reunited with her father.
Dombey accompanies his daughter to her and Walter's house where he slowly starts to decline, cared for by Florence and also Susan Nipper, now Mrs Toots. They receive a visit from Edth's Cousin Feenix who takes Florence to Edith for one final time - Feenix sought Edith out in France and she returned to England under his protection. Edith gives Florence a letter, asking Dombey to forgive her her crime before her departure to the South of Italy with her elderly relative. As she says to Florence, 'I will try, then to forgive him his share of the blame. Let him try to forgive me mine!'
The final chapter (LXII) sees Dombey now a white-haired old man, 'whose face bears heavy marks of care and suffering; but they are traces of a storm that has passed on for ever, and left a clear evening in its track'.. Sol Gills and Ned Cuttle are now partners at the Midshipman, a source of great pride to the latter, and Mr and Mrs Toots announce the birth of their third daughter. Walter is doing well in business, having been appointed to a position of great confidence and trust, and Dombey is the proud grandfather of both a grandson and grand-daughter of whom he dotes on, and the book ends with the highly moving lines:
“ 'Dear grandpapa, why do you cry when you kiss me?'
He only answers, 'Little Florence! Little Florence!' and smooths away the curls that shade her earnest eyes.
”
Source
Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens, Wordsworth Classics, 1995, ISBN 1 85326 257 9
Critical appreciation
Dombey and Son was conceived first and foremost as a continuous novel. A letter from Dickens to Forster on 26th July, 1846 shows the major details of the plot and theme already substantially worked out. According to the critic George Gissing, 'Dombey was begun at Lausanne, continued at Paris, completed in London, and at English seaside places; whilst the early parts were being written, a Christmas story, The Battle of Life, was also in hand, and Dickens found it troublesome to manage both together. That he overcame the difficulty -- that, soon after, we find him travelling about England as member of an amateur dramatic company -- that he undertook all sorts of public engagements and often devoted himself to private festivity -- Dombey going on the while, from month to month -- is matter enough for astonishment to those who know anything about artistic production. But such marvels become commonplaces in the life of Charles Dickens.'
As with most of Dickens' work, a number of socially significant themes are to be found in this book. In particular the book deals with the then-prevalent common practice of arranged marriages for financial gain. Other themes to be detected within this work include child cruelty (particularly in Dombey's treatment of Florence), familial relationships, and as ever in Dickens, betrayal and deceit and the consequences thereof. Another strong central theme, which the critic George Gissing elaborates on in detail in his 1925 work The Immortal Dickens, is that of pride and arrogance, of which Paul Dombey senior is the extreme exemplification in Dickens' work.
Gissing makes a number of points about certain key inadequacies in the novel, not the least that Dickens's central character is largely unsympathetic and an unsuitable vehicle and also that after the death of the young Paul Dombey the reader is somewhat estranged from the rest of what is to follow. He notes that 'the moral theme of this book was Pride -- pride of wealth, pride of place, personal arrogance. Dickens started with a clear conception of his central character and of the course of the story in so far as it depended upon that personage; he planned the action, the play of motive, with unusual definiteness, and adhered very closely in the working to this well-laid scheme'. However, he goes on to write that,'Dombey and Son is a novel which in its beginning promises more than its progress fulfils' and gives the following reasons why:
“ Impossible to avoid the reflection that the death of Dombey's son and heir marks the end of a complete story, that we feel a gap between Chapter XVI and what comes after (the author speaks of feeling it himself, of his striving to "transfer the interest to Florence") and that the narrative of the later part is ill-constructed, often wearisome, sometimes incredible. We miss Paul, we miss Walter Gay (shadowy young hero though he be); Florence is too colourless for deep interest, and the second Mrs. Dombey is rather forced upon us than accepted as a natural figure in the drama. Dickens's familiar shortcomings are abundantly exemplified. He is wholly incapable of devising a plausible intrigue, and shocks the reader with monstrous improbabilities such as all that portion of the denouement in which old Mrs. Brown and her daughter are concerned. A favourite device with him (often employed with picturesque effect) was to bring into contact persons representing widely severed social ranks; in this book the "effect" depends too often on "incidences of the boldest artificiality," as nearly always we end by neglecting the story as a story, and surrendering ourselves to the charm of certain parts, the fascination of certain characters.' ”
Characters in the novel
Karl Ashley Smith (the University of St Andrews) in his Introduction to Wordsworth Classics' Dombey and Son makes some reflections on the novel's characters. He believes that Dombey’s power to disturb comes from his belief that human relationships can be controlled by money, giving the following examples to support this viewpoint:
“ He tries to prevent Mrs Richards from developing an attachment to Paul by emphasising the wages he pays her. Mrs Pipchin’s small talk satisfies him as ‘the sort of think for which he paid her so much a quarter’ (p.132). Worst of all, he effectively buys his second wife and expects that his wealth and position in society will be enough to keep her in awed obedience to him. Paul’s questions about money are only the first indication of the naivety of his outlook'. ”
However, he also believes that the satire against this man is tempered with compassion.
Smith also draws attention to the fact that certain characters in the novel 'develop a pattern from Dickens's earlier novels, whilst pointing the way to future works'. One such character is Little Paul who is a direct descendant of Little Nell. Another is James Carker, the ever-smiling manager of Dombey and Son. Smith notes there are strong similarities between him and the likes of Jaggers in Great Expectations and, even more so, the evil barrister, Mr Tulkinghorn, in Bleak House:
“ From Fagin (Oliver Twist) onwards, the terrifying figure exerting power over others by an infallible knowledge of their secrets becomes one of the author’s trademarks ... His gentlemanly businesslike respectability marks him out as the ancestor of Tulkinghorn in Bleak House and even of Jaggers in Great Expectations. And his involvements in the secrets of others leads him to as sticky an end as Tulkinghorn’s. The fifty-fifth chapter, where he is forced to flee his outraged employer, magnificently continues the theme of the guilt-hunted man from Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist and Jonas’s restless sense of pursuit in Martin Chuzzlewit. There is always a strong sense in Dickens of the narrative drive of discovery catching up with those who deal in darkness...' ”
Gissing looks at some of the minor characters in the novel and is particularly struck by that of Edward (Ned) Cuttle.
“ Captain Cuttle has a larger humanity than his roaring friend [Captain Bunsby], he is the creation of humour. That the Captain suffered dire things at the hands of Mrs. MacStinger is as credible as it is amusing, but he stood in no danger of Bunsby's fate; at times he can play his part in a situation purely farcical, but the man himself moves on a higher level. He is one of the most familiar to us among Dickens's characters, an instance of the novelist's supreme power, which (I like to repeat) proves itself in the bodying forth of a human personality henceforth accepted by the world. His sentences have become proverbs; the mention of his name brings before the mind's eye an image of flesh and blood -- rude, tending to the grotesque, but altogether lovable. Captain Cuttle belongs to the world of Uncle Toby, with, to be sure, a subordinate position. Analyse him as you will, make the most of those extravagances which pedants of to-day cannot away with, and in the end you will still be face to face with something vital -- explicable only as the product of genius. ”
The growth of the railways
A strong theme is the destruction and degradation (of people and places) caused by industrialisation, illustrated in particular by the building of the new railway through Camden Town (assumed to represent the London and Birmingham Railway constructed between 1833 and 1837). This reflects Dickens's apparent antipathy towards railways[citation needed], later reinforced by his involvement in a train crash in 1865. Soon after this incident he wrote two short stories (Mugby Junction and The Signal-Man) which projected a morbid view of the railways.
Final thoughts
Gissing refers to Dickens's instinctive genius for reflecting the thoughts and morals of the common man in his writing. He observes that the author was in constant communication with Forster,
“ ... as to the feeling of his readers about some proposed incident or episode; not that he feared, in any ignoble sense, to offend his public, but because his view of art involved compliance with ideals of ordinary simple folk. He held that view as a matter of course. Quite recently it has been put forth with prophetic fervour by Tolstoy, who cites Dickens among the few novelists whose work will bear this test. An instinctive sympathy with the moral (and therefore the artistic) prejudices of the everyday man guided Dickens throughout his career, teaching him when, and how far, he might strike at things he thought evil, yet never defeat his prime purpose of sending forth fiction acceptable to the multitude. Himself, in all but his genius, a representative Englishman of the middle-class, he was able to achieve this task with unfailing zeal and with entire sincerity. ”
Karl Smith, in his turn, gives his specific reasons for what makes Dombey and Son - and the works of Dickens as a whole - worth reading again and again. He observes that this is based in part on Dickens's 'recognition that solemn themes require humour and verbal vigour to accompany and complement them' and goes on to conclude:
“ Grim psychological realism, social commentary, comic absurdity and symbolic transcendence are here brought together more than in any previous novel with the possible exception of Oliver Twist. Dombey and Son not only prepares the ground for Dickens’s later masterpieces, but demands to be enjoyed for its own energy and richness. ”
Characters in "Dombey and Son"
The "Wooden Midshipman" of Uncle Sol's nautical instrument shop of the same name. Statue in the Charles Dickens Museum.
* Mr Paul Dombey – the wealthy owner of the shipping company
* Edith Granger – proud widowed daughter of Mrs Skewton, becomes second Mrs Dombey
* Mrs Fanny Dombey – Mr Dombey's first wife, mother of Florence and Paul, dies soon after Paul is born
* Master Paul Dombey (Little Dombey) – the son, is weak and often ill
* Miss Florence (Floy) Dombey – the elder daughter whom Mr Dombey neglects
* Mrs Louisa Chick – Mr Dombey's sister
* Mr Chick – husband of Mrs Chick
* Miss Lucretia Tox – friend of Mrs Chick, great admirer of Mr Dombey, and neighbour of Major Joseph Bagstock
* James Carker (Mr Carker the Manager) – devious manager in Mr Dombey's business
* John Carker (Mr Carker the Junior) – disgraced older brother of James, lower level employee in Dombey's business
* Miss Harriet Carker – sister of James and John
* Mr Morfin – assistant manager in Mr Dombey's business
* Mr Perch – messenger in Mr Dombey's business
* Solomon (Uncle Sol) Gills – ships' instrument maker and owner of the "Wooden Midshipman", a shop
* Walter Gay – nephew of Gills, friend to Florence, employee of Mr Dombey, sent away by Carker the Manager
* Captain Edward (Ned) Cuttle – retired sea captain, friend of Gills
* Major Joseph Bagstock (Josh, Joe, J.B., Old Joe) – conceited retired army major, admirer of Miss Tox, friend of Mr Dombey until his downfall
* Briggs – schoolmate of Paul's
* Tozer – schoolmate of Paul's
* Mr P. Toots – schoolmate of Paul's, later a dandy in love with Florence
* The Game Chicken – rowdy companion of Mr Toots
* Miss Susan Nipper – Florence's loyal nurse, later marries Mr. Toots
* Mrs Cleopatra Skewton – Edith Dombey's infirm mother and former lover of Bagstock
* Mr Toodle – a railway engineer
* Polly Toodle (Mrs Richards) – wife of Mr Toodle, engaged as nurse to Paul under the name Mrs Richards (by Mr Dombey's order)
* Robin Toodle (Rob the Grinder, Biler) – son of Mr Toodle and Polly, sent to Charitable Grinders school, later engaged in service to Captain Cuttle and Mr. Carker the Manager
* Good Mrs. Brown – an elderly rag dealer
* Alice – daughter of Brown, former lover of Carker's, recently returned from transportation
* Jack Bunsby – commander of a ship, and regarded as an oracle by Captain Cuttle. Eventually is wedded to Mrs MaacStinger.
* Mrs MacStinger – Captain Cuttle's landlady and nemesis
* Mrs Pipchin – stern widow who keeps an 'infantine Boarding-House of a very select description' in Brighton, where Paul is sent for his health
* Master Bitherstone – a fellow-boarder at Mrs. Pipchin's, much later a student at Doctor Blimber's
* Miss Pankey – a fellow-boarder at Mrs. Pipchin's
* Sir Barnet Skettles –
* Lady Skettles –
* Master Skettles – Brighton school pupil
* Doctor Blimber – runs a school in Brighton which Paul briefly attends
* Mrs Blimber – Doctor Blimber's wife
* Miss Cornelia Blimber – Doctor Blimber's daughter, teacher at the school
* Mr Feeder, B.A. – Doctor Blimber's assistant, teacher at the school
* Diogenes (Di) – A dog from the school, befriended by Paul and adopted by Florence after Paul's death
Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
The novel has been adapted for the screen at least three times:
* 1917 - a silent starring Norman McKinnel as Paul Dombey and Hayford Hobbs as Walter Gay
* 1969 - a television mini-series starring John Carson as Paul Dombey and Derek Seaton as Walter Gay
* 1983 - a television mini-series starring Julian Glover as Paul Dombey and Max Gold as Walter Gay
There have also been BBC radio adaptations.
In 2007, a two-part French miniseries, Dombais et Fils, was produced by France 3, directed by Laurent Jaoui and starring Christophe Malavoy as "Charles Dombais" (Paul Dombey).
It was announced in September 2009 that Andrew Davies would no longer be writing a proposed television adaptation for the BBC.
Original publication
Dombey and Son was originally published in 19 monthly instalments; each cost one shilling (except for the last, which cost two shillings, being a double issue) and contained 32 pages of text with two illustrations by Phiz:
* I - October 1846 (chapters 1-4);
* II - November 1846 (chapters 5-7);
* III - December 1846 (chapters 8-10);
* IV - January 1847 (chapters 11-13);
* V - February 1847 (chapters 14-16);
* VI - March 1847 (chapters 17-19);
* VII - April 1847 (chapters 20-22);
* VIII - May 1847 (chapters 23-25);
* IX - June 1847 (chapters 26-28);
* X - July 1847 (chapters 29-31);
* XI - August 1847 (chapters 32-34);
* XII - September 1847 (chapters 35-38);
* XIII - October 1847 (chapters 39-41);
* XIV - November 1847 (chapters 42-45);
* XV - December 1847 (chapters 46-48);
* XVI - January 1848 (chapters 49-51);
* XVII - February 1848 (chapters 52-54);
* XVIII - March 1848 (chapters 55-57);
* XIX-XX - April 1848 (chapters 58-62).
Trivia
* The motto of the publication Notes and Queries, "When found, make a note of", comes from the novel.
* In the illustrated plate, "Major Bagstock is delighted to have that opportunity," the lettering "HOTEL" on the central building in the background is written in mirror-writing. Phiz, the illustrator, evidently forgot to reverse the lettering so that it would read correctly when the plate was printed. (However, strangely, he got the other lettering in the same plate correct.)
* Sir Harry Johnston wrote a sequel to Dombey and Son in about 1920, titled The Gay-Dombeys.
* In the novel Velocity by Dean Koontz, the comatose wife of the main protagonist often makes incoherent references to the works of Dickens, the 'most mysterious' coming from Dombey and Son, "I want to know what it says, the sea. What it is that it keeps on saying."
《孤星血淚》（又名《遠大前程》）是狄更斯最成熟的代表作品之一。小說敘述了一個青年幻想破滅的故事。金錢使皮普從一個窮學徒變成闊少爺，也使他染上了上流社會的惡習，而背離了他原有的勞動人民的純樸天性。沒有了金錢，皮普兩手空空地回到家乡，則恢復了自己的人性。狄更斯以他獨特的方式，處理19世紀文學中具有普遍意義的青年人的生活道路的主題，突出了對金錢腐蝕作用的揭露。
英國著名作傢查理·狄更斯的長篇小說《孤星血淚》曾先後幾十次被搬上銀幕，但由大衛·裏恩導演，約翰·米爾斯、珍·西蒙絲、阿歷剋·金納斯等優秀演員主演的這部影片,一直被認為是最成功的一部。影片敘述19世紀初，年輕的英國鄉村鐵匠皮普(約翰·米爾斯飾)，由於年幼時無意中幫助過一位含冤被陷入獄的逃犯，而得到一個不知姓名的恩人慷慨大方的幫助。後來，他終於躋身於倫敦上流社會，並與美麗的少女埃絲苔娜(珍·西蒙絲飾)結下了深厚的情誼。大衛·裏恩導演的這部影片，不僅真實地再現了19世紀英國社會的風貌，而且成功地運用了一係列電影技巧，在電影化方面取得了傑出的成就。特別是影片開頭，小男孩皮普與逃犯在荒郊野外相遇的場面，在電影史上一直被奉為經典。
《孤星血淚》-幕後英雄
在奧斯卡奬的歷史上，這部影片是相當重要的，是與《黑水仙花》最早獲得奧斯卡攝影奬和美工奬的兩部英國影片。英國攝影師蓋伊·格林在攝製了《孤星血淚》、《霧都孤兒》等影片之後，改行從事導演工作，先後導演了《標志》、《憤怒的沉默》、《一次不夠》等二十八部影片。約翰·布雷恩(1911－1969)不僅是英國一位出色的美工師，也是一位製片人和導演。除本片外，他還擔任過《西班牙園丁》、《馬嘴》等影片的美工。
《孤星血淚》-內容簡介
故事講述一個小孤兒皮普，從小依靠姐姐與姐夫過活，卻在無意中幫助了一位含冤被陷的逃犯，後來受到一位不願透露身份的人士資助，使他能在上流社會求學生活，成為一名紳士。約瑟夫·哈迪執導的此片是狄更斯名著《孤星血淚》的重拍電視版。原本打算拍成歌舞片，後來音樂撤消，因此本片拍來較為平淡。邁剋爾·約剋、詹姆斯·梅森等在此片的表現一般，但故事本身內容豐富，仍具有一定的吸引力。
Great Expectations is written in the style of bildungsroman, which follows the story of a man or woman in their quest for maturity, usually starting from childhood and ending in the main character's eventual adulthood. Great Expectations is the story of the orphan Pip, writing about his life and attempting to become a gentleman along the way. The novel can also be considered semi-autobiographical of Dickens, like much of his work, drawing on his experiences of life and people.
The main plot of Great Expectations takes place between Christmas Eve 1812, when the protagonist is about seven years old (and which happens to be the year of Dickens' birth), and the winter of 1840.
英國著名作傢查理·狄更斯的長篇小說《孤星血淚》曾先後幾十次被搬上銀幕，但由大衛·裏恩導演，約翰·米爾斯、珍·西蒙絲、阿歷剋·金納斯等優秀演員主演的這部影片,一直被認為是最成功的一部。影片敘述19世紀初，年輕的英國鄉村鐵匠皮普(約翰·米爾斯飾)，由於年幼時無意中幫助過一位含冤被陷入獄的逃犯，而得到一個不知姓名的恩人慷慨大方的幫助。後來，他終於躋身於倫敦上流社會，並與美麗的少女埃絲苔娜(珍·西蒙絲飾)結下了深厚的情誼。大衛·裏恩導演的這部影片，不僅真實地再現了19世紀英國社會的風貌，而且成功地運用了一係列電影技巧，在電影化方面取得了傑出的成就。特別是影片開頭，小男孩皮普與逃犯在荒郊野外相遇的場面，在電影史上一直被奉為經典。
《孤星血淚》-幕後英雄
在奧斯卡奬的歷史上，這部影片是相當重要的，是與《黑水仙花》最早獲得奧斯卡攝影奬和美工奬的兩部英國影片。英國攝影師蓋伊·格林在攝製了《孤星血淚》、《霧都孤兒》等影片之後，改行從事導演工作，先後導演了《標志》、《憤怒的沉默》、《一次不夠》等二十八部影片。約翰·布雷恩(1911－1969)不僅是英國一位出色的美工師，也是一位製片人和導演。除本片外，他還擔任過《西班牙園丁》、《馬嘴》等影片的美工。
《孤星血淚》-內容簡介
故事講述一個小孤兒皮普，從小依靠姐姐與姐夫過活，卻在無意中幫助了一位含冤被陷的逃犯，後來受到一位不願透露身份的人士資助，使他能在上流社會求學生活，成為一名紳士。約瑟夫·哈迪執導的此片是狄更斯名著《孤星血淚》的重拍電視版。原本打算拍成歌舞片，後來音樂撤消，因此本片拍來較為平淡。邁剋爾·約剋、詹姆斯·梅森等在此片的表現一般，但故事本身內容豐富，仍具有一定的吸引力。
Great Expectations is written in the style of bildungsroman, which follows the story of a man or woman in their quest for maturity, usually starting from childhood and ending in the main character's eventual adulthood. Great Expectations is the story of the orphan Pip, writing about his life and attempting to become a gentleman along the way. The novel can also be considered semi-autobiographical of Dickens, like much of his work, drawing on his experiences of life and people.
The main plot of Great Expectations takes place between Christmas Eve 1812, when the protagonist is about seven years old (and which happens to be the year of Dickens' birth), and the winter of 1840.
故事發生在十九世紀的英國。在一個寒冷的深夜，英國倫敦的平民區裏，一個嬰兒剛剛出世，他母親便離開了人世。誰也不知道那産婦是誰，她遺下的兒子便成了無名的孤兒。孤兒被本地教會收留，由女管事撫養，給他起了一個名字叫奧利弗。
奧利弗九歲的時候，不能像有錢人傢孩子那樣進學校念書，女管事還把他送進工廠，和其他童工一起，日夜幹力不胜任的苦活，並且不讓他吃飽。性格倔強的奧利弗被大傢推為代表，提出增加糧食的要求。工廠的職員大驚失色，便不願繼續收留奧利弗，怕他影響其他童工。
當時，殯儀館的老伴森亞比利正需要學徒，便花了五個金鎊把他領了出去。奧利弗換了個新環境，生活過得稍好了一些。他參加出殯行列，行動規矩，合乎禮儀。老伴很滿意，但遭到年長學徒的忌妒，故意譏笑、侮辱他人格。奧利弗忍無可忍，拔拳搏鬥。老闆夫婦將他毒打，他悲憤填胸，星夜出走。一連步行了七天，纔到達倫敦。
舉目無親，饑寒交迫，在絶望中他遇到了少年亞狄。亞狄帶他到一棟破敗的屋子裏，這裏原來是窩藏匪盜的窟。賊首弗根見奧利弗聰明伶俐，很是喜歡，便要他和亞狄一起上街去偷竊。不料亞狄失手被發現，奧利弗心虛，拔腿逃跑，結果被人抓進了警局。賊首弗根聽說奧利弗被抓，痛責亞狄無用，又擔心奧利弗在警局招認，便和另一賊首皮利商議，决定由皮利的妻子南珊出面，冒充奧利弗姐姐，具保將他領回。
但是，警局審批時，書店老闆證明，他看到當時扒竊的小賊並非奧利弗。被竊的主人是倫敦富翁羅勃特，因自己冤枉奧利弗很感歉疚，又見他可愛又可憐，便將他領回傢去。奧利弗到羅勃特傢後，受到老人的寵愛，既不愁吃穿，還能上學讀書。不料，羅勃特有個名叫孟斯的親戚，追究奧利弗的身世，發現原來他是羅勃特的外孫，那羅勃特的全部傢産便要由他承受。孟斯企圖某奪謀奪這筆財産，便將此事嚴守秘密，還和賊首皮利勾結，企圖謀害奧利弗。
某日，皮利和他妻子南珊在街上尋訪，遇見奧利弗，立即把他綁回賊窟。弗根將他毒打，幾乎喪命。南珊從孟斯處探聽到奧利弗的身世後，十分同情，為了救他出險，讓他祖孫團員，便暗暗去把消息告訴了羅勃特，答應下次帶奧利弗同來。不料事情被皮利發現，和弗根一起，將南珊活活打死。羅勃特在傢等候南珊，到了約定之期，不見南珊到來。忽然聽到街上傳說南珊慘死，便報告警局，隨同警察直搗賊窟。市民們也紛紛參加捉賊，聲勢浩大。弗根和皮利最終難逃法網。奧利弗死裏逃生，被羅勃特領回，祖孫團聚。
Background
Oliver Twist is notable for Dickens' unromantic portrayal of criminals and their sordid lives. The book also exposed the cruel treatment of many a waif-child in London, which increased international concern in what is sometimes known as "The Great London Waif Crisis". This was the astounding number of orphans in London in the Dickens era. The book's subtitle, The Parish Boy's Progress alludes to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and also to a pair of popular 18th-century caricature series by William Hogarth, "A Rake's Progress" and "A Harlot's Progress".
An early example of the social novel, the book calls the public's attention to various contemporary evils, including the Poor Law, child labour and the recruitment of children as criminals. Dickens mocks the hypocrisies of his time by surrounding the novel's serious themes with sarcasm and dark humour. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of hardships as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s. It is likely that Dickens's own early youth as a child labourer contributed to the story's development.
Oliver Twist has been the subject of numerous film and television adaptations, and is the basis for a highly successful musical play and the multiple Academy Award winning motion picture Oliver!.
Publications
Cover, first edition of serial, entitled "The Adventures of Oliver Twist" January 1846
Design by George Cruikshank
The book was originally published in Bentley's Miscellany as a serial, in monthly instalments that began appearing in the month of February 1837 and continued through April 1839. It was originally intended to form part of Dickens's serial The Mudfog Papers. It did not appear as its own monthly serial until 1846. George Cruikshank provided one steel etching per month to illustrate each installment. The first novelization appeared six months before the serialization was completed. It was published in three volumes by Richard Bentley, the owner of Bentley's Miscellany, under the author's pseudonym, "Boz" and included 24 steel-engraved plates by Cruikshank.
Plot summary
Workhouse and first jobs
Oliver Twist is born into a life of poverty and misfortune in a workhouse in an unnamed town (although when originally published in Bentley's Miscellany in 1837 the town was called Mudfog and said to be within 75 miles north of London). Orphaned almost from his first breath by his mother’s death in childbirth and his father’s unexplained absence, Oliver is meagerly provided for under the terms of the Poor Law, and spends the first eight years of his life at a baby farm in the 'care' of a woman named Mrs. Mann. Along with other juvenile offenders against the poor laws, Oliver is brought up with little food and few comforts. Around the time of the orphan’s ninth birthday, Mr. Bumble, a parish beadle, removes Oliver from the baby farm and puts him to work picking oakum at the main workhouse (the same one where his mother worked before she died). Oliver, who toils with very little food, remains in the workhouse for six months, until the desperately hungry boys decide to draw lots; the loser must ask for another portion of gruel. The task falls to Oliver, who at the next meal tremblingly comes forward, bowl in hand, and makes his famous request: "Please, sir, I want some more."
Oliver; "Please, sir, I want some more."
A great uproar ensues. The board of well-fed gentlemen who administer the workhouse, while eating a meal fit for a mighty king, offer five pounds to any person wishing to take on the boy as an apprentice. A brutal chimney sweep almost claims Oliver, but, when he begs despairingly not to be sent away with "that dreadful man" a kindly old magistrate refuses to sign the indentures. Later, Mr. Sowerberry, an undertaker employed by the parish, takes Oliver into his service. He treats Oliver better, and, because of the boy's sorrowful countenance, uses him as a mourner, at children's funerals. However, Mr. Sowerberry is in an unhappy marriage, and his wife takes an immediate dislike to Oliver—primarily because her husband seems to like him—and loses few opportunities to underfeed and mistreat him. He also suffers torment at the hands of Noah Claypole, an oafish but bullying fellow apprentice who is jealous of Oliver's promotion to mute, and Charlotte, the Sowerberry's maidservant, who is in love with Noah.
One day, in an attempt to bait Oliver, Noah insults the orphan’s late mother, calling her "a regular right-down bad 'un". Oliver flies into an unexpected passion, attacking and even beating the much bigger boy. Mrs. Sowerberry takes Noah's side, helps him subdue Oliver, punches and beats Oliver, and later compels her husband and Mr. Bumble, who has been sent for in the aftermath of the fight, into beating Oliver again. Once Oliver is sent to his room for the night, he does something that he hadn't done since babyhood—breaks down and weeps. Alone that night, Oliver finally decides to run away. He wanders aimlessly for a time, until a well-placed milestone sets his wandering feet towards London.
The Artful Dodger and Fagin
George Cruikshank original engraving of the Artful Dodger (centre), here introducing Oliver (right) to Fagin (left)
During his journey to London, Oliver encounters Jack Dawkins, more commonly known by the nickname the "Artful Dodger", although Oliver's innocent nature prevents him from recognising this hint that the boy may be dishonest. Dodger provides Oliver with a free meal and tells him of a gentleman in London who will "give him lodgings for nothing, and never ask for change". Grateful for the unexpected assistance, Oliver follows Dodger to the "old gentleman"'s residence. In this way, Oliver unwittingly falls in with an infamous Jewish criminal known as Fagin, the so-called gentleman of whom the Artful Dodger spoke. Ensnared, Oliver lives with Fagin and his gang of juvenile pickpockets in their lair at Saffron Hill for some time, naively unaware of their criminal occupations. He believes they make wallets and handkerchiefs.
Later, Oliver innocently goes out to "make handkerchiefs" because of no income coming in, with two of Fagin’s underlings: The Artful Dodger and a boy of a humorous nature named Charley Bates. Oliver realises too late that their real mission is to pick pockets. Dodger and Charley steal the handkerchief of an old gentleman named Mr. Brownlow, and promptly flee. When he finds his handkerchief missing, Mr. Brownlow turns round, sees Oliver, and pursues him. Others join the chase and Oliver is caught and taken before the magistrate. Curiously, Mr. Brownlow has second thoughts about the boy—he seems reluctant to believe he is a pickpocket. To the judge's evident disappointment, a bookstall holder who saw Dodger commit the crime clears Oliver, who, by now actually ill, faints in the courtroom. Mr. Brownlow takes Oliver home and, along with his housekeeper Mrs. Bedwin, cares for him.
Bill Sikes
Oliver stays with Mr. Brownlow, recovers rapidly, and blossoms from the unaccustomed kindness. His bliss, however, is interrupted when Fagin, fearing Oliver might "peach" on his criminal gang, decides that Oliver must be brought back to his hideout. When Mr. Brownlow sends Oliver out to pay for some books, one of the gang, a young girl named Nancy, whom Oliver had previously met at Fagin's, accosts him with help from her abusive lover, a brutal robber named Bill Sikes, and Oliver is quickly bundled back to Fagin's lair. The thieves take the five pound note Mr. Brownlow had entrusted to him, and strip him of his fine new clothes. Oliver, dismayed, flees and attempts to call for police assistance, but is ruthlessly dragged back by the Dodger, Charley and Fagin. Nancy, however, is sympathetic towards Oliver and saves him from beatings by Fagin and Sikes.
In a renewed attempt to draw Oliver into a life of crime, Fagin forces him to participate in a burglary. Nancy reluctantly assists in recruiting him, all the while assuring the boy that she will help him if she can. Sikes, after threatening to kill him if he does not cooperate, sends Oliver through a small window and orders him to unlock the front door. The robbery goes wrong, however, and Oliver is shot. After being abandoned by Sikes, the wounded Oliver ends up under the care of the people he was supposed to rob: Rose Maylie, her guardian Mrs. Maylie (unrelated to Rose and raising her as her own niece), and Harry Maylie (Mrs. Maylie's son who loves Rose). Convinced of Oliver’s innocence, Rose takes the boy in and nurses him back to health.
Mystery
Meanwhile, a mysterious man named Monks has found Fagin and is plotting with him to destroy Oliver's reputation. Monks denounces Fagin's failure to turn Oliver into a criminal and the two of them agree on a plan to make sure he does not find out about his past. Monks is apparently related to Oliver in some manner, although it's not mentioned until later.
Back In Oliver's hometown, Mr Bumble has married Ms Corney, the wealthy matron of the workhouse, only to find himself constantly arguing with his unhappy wife. After one such argument, Mr Bumble walks over to a pub, where he meets Monks, who informs him about a boy named Oliver Twist. Later the two of them arrange to take a locket and ring which had once belonged to Oliver's mother and toss it into a nearby river. Monks relates this to Fagin as part of the plot to destroy Oliver, unaware that Nancy has eavesdropped on their conversation and gone ahead to inform Oliver's benefactors.
Nancy, by this time ashamed of her role in Oliver's kidnapping, and fearful for the boy's safety, goes to Rose Maylie and Mr. Brownlow to warn them. She knows that Monks and Fagin are plotting to get their hands on the boy again and holds some secret meetings on the subject with Oliver's benefactors. One night Nancy tries to leave for one of the meetings but Sikes refuses permission when she doesn't state exactly where she's going. Fagin realizes that Nancy is up to something and resolves to find out what her secret is.
Meanwhile Noah Claypole has fallen out with the undertaker Mr. Sowerberry, stolen money from him and moved to London. Charlotte has accompanied him—they are now in a relationship. Using the name "Morris Bolter", he joins Fagin's gang for protection. During Noah's stay with Fagin, the Artful Dodger is caught with a stolen silver snuff box, convicted (in a very humorous courtroom scene) and transported to Australia. Later, Noah is sent by Fagin to "dodge" (spy on) Nancy, and discovers her secret: she has been meeting secretly with Rose and Mr. Brownlow to discuss how to save Oliver from Fagin and Monks. Fagin angrily passes the information on to Sikes, twisting the story just enough to make it sound as if Nancy had informed on him (in reality, she had shielded Sikes, whom she loves despite his brutal character). Believing her to be a traitor, Sikes beats Nancy to death in a fit of rage, and is himself killed when he accidentally hangs himself while fleeing across a rooftop from an angry mob.
Resolution
Fagin in his cell.
Monks is forced by Mr. Brownlow (an old friend of Oliver's father) to divulge his secrets: his real name is Edward Leeford, and he is Oliver's paternal half-brother and, although he is legitimate, he was born of a loveless marriage. Oliver's mother, Agnes, was their father's true love. Mr. Brownlow has a picture of her, and began making inquiries when he noticed a marked resemblance between her face, and the face of Oliver. Monks has spent many years searching for his father's child—not to befriend him, but to destroy him (see Henry Fielding's Tom Jones for similar circumstances). Brownlow asks Oliver to give half his inheritance (which proves to be meagre) to Monks because he wants to give him a second chance; and Oliver, being prone to giving second chances, is more than happy to comply. Monks then moves to America, where he squanders his money, reverts to crime, and ultimately dies in prison. Fagin is arrested and condemned to the gallows; in an emotional scene, Oliver goes to Newgate Gaol to visit the old reprobate on the eve of his hanging, (where Fagin's terror at being hanged has caused him to come down with fever).
On a happier note, Rose Maylie turns out to be the long-lost sister of Oliver's mother Agnes; she is therefore Oliver's aunt. She marries her long-time sweetheart Harry, and Oliver lives happily with his saviour, Mr. Brownlow. Noah becomes a paid, semi-professional informer to the police (a "stoolie", or "stoolpigeon" in American terminology). The Bumbles lose their jobs (under circumstances that cause him to utter the well-known line "The law is a ass") and are reduced to great poverty, eventually ending up in the same workhouse where they once lorded it over Oliver and the other boys; and Charley Bates, horrified by Sikes's murder of Nancy, becomes an honest citizen, moves to the country, and works his way up to prosperity.
Major themes and symbols
Introduction
In Oliver Twist, Dickens mixes grim realism, and merciless satire as a way to describe the effects of industrialism on 19th-century England and to criticise the harsh new Poor Laws. Oliver, an innocent child, is trapped in a world where his only options seem to be the workhouse, Fagin's thieves, a prison or an early grave. From this unpromising industrial/institutional setting, however, a fairy tale also emerges: In the midst of corruption and degradation, the essentially passive Oliver remains pure-hearted; he steers away from evil when those around him give in to it; and, in proper fairy-tale fashion, he eventually receives his reward—leaving for a peaceful life in the country, surrounded by kind friends. On the way to this happy ending, Dickens explores the kind of life an orphan, outcast boy could expect to lead in 1830s London.
Poverty and social class
Poverty is a prominent concern in Oliver Twist. Throughout the novel, Dickens enlarges on this theme, describing slums so decrepit that whole rows of houses are on the point of ruin. In an early chapter, Oliver attends a pauper's funeral with Mr. Sowerberry and sees a whole family crowded together in one miserable room.
This ubiquitous misery makes Oliver's few encounters with charity and love more poignant. Oliver owes his life several times over to kindness both large and small. The apparent plague of poverty that Dickens describes also conveyed to his middle-class readers how much of the London population was stricken with poverty and disease. Nonetheless, in Oliver Twist he delivers a somewhat mixed message about social caste and social injustice. Oliver's illegitimate workhouse origins place him at the nadir of society; as an orphan without friends, he is routinely despised. His "sturdy spirit" keeps him alive despite the torment he must endure. Most of his associates, however, deserve their place among society's dregs and seem very much at home in the depths. Noah Claypole, a charity boy like Oliver, is idle, stupid, and cowardly; Sikes is a thug; Fagin lives by corrupting children; and the Artful Dodger seems born for a life of crime. Many of the middle-class people Oliver encounters—Mrs. Sowerberry, Mr. Bumble, and the savagely hypocritical "gentlemen" of the workhouse board, for example; are, if anything, worse.
Oliver, on the other hand, who has an air of refinement remarkable for a workhouse boy, proves to be of gentle birth. Although he has been abused and neglected all his life, he recoils, aghast, at the idea of victimizing anyone else. This apparently hereditary gentlemanliness makes Oliver Twist something of a changeling tale, not just an indictment of social injustice. Oliver, born for better things, struggles to survive in the savage world of the underclass before finally being rescued by his family and returned to his proper place—a commodious country house.
In a recent film adaptation of the novel, Roman Polanski dispenses with the problem of Oliver's genteel origins by making him an anonymous orphan, like the rest of Fagin's gang.
Oliver is wounded in a burglary.
Symbolism
Dickens makes considerable use of symbolism. The many symbols Oliver faces are primarily good versus evil, with evil continually trying to corrupt and exploit good, but good winning out in the end. The "merry old gentleman" Fagin, for example, has satanic characteristics: he is a veteran corrupter of young boys who presides over his own corner of the criminal world; he makes his first appearance standing over a fire holding a toasting-fork; and he refuses to pray on the night before his execution. The London slums, too, have a suffocating, infernal aspect; the dark deeds and dark passions are concretely characterised by dim rooms, and pitch-black nights, while the governing mood of terror and brutality may be identified with uncommonly cold weather. In contrast, the countryside where the Maylies take Oliver is a pastoral heaven.
Food is another important symbol; Oliver's odyssey begins with a simple request for more gruel, and Mr. Bumble's shocked exclamation, represents he may be after more than just gruel. Chapter 8—which contains the last mention of food in the form of Fagin's dinner—marks the first time Oliver eats his share and represents the transformation in his life that occurs after he joins Fagin's gang.
The novel is also shot through with a related motif, obesity, which calls attention to the stark injustice of Oliver's world. When the half-starved child dares to ask for more, the men who punish him are fat. It is interesting to observe the large number of characters who are overweight.
Toward the end of the novel, the gaze of knowing eyes becomes a potent symbol. For years, Fagin avoids daylight, crowds, and open spaces, concealing himself in a dark lair most of the time: when his luck runs out at last, he squirms in the "living light" of too many eyes as he stands in the dock, awaiting sentence. After Sikes kills Nancy, he flees into the countryside but is unable to escape the memory of her dead eyes. Charley Bates turns his back on crime when he sees the murderous cruelty of the man who has been held up to him as a model.
Nancy’s decision to meet Brownlow and Rose on London Bridge reveals the symbolic aspect of this bridge in Oliver Twist. Bridges exist to link two places that would otherwise be separated by an uncrossable void. The meeting on London Bridge represents the collision of two worlds unlikely ever to come into contact—the idyllic world of Brownlow and Rose, and the atmosphere of degradation in which Nancy lives. On the bridge, Nancy is given the chance to cross over to the better way of life that the others represent, but she rejects that opportunity, and by the time the three have all left the bridge, that possibility has vanished forever.
When Rose gives Nancy her handkerchief, and when Nancy holds it up as she dies, Nancy has gone over to the "good" side against the thieves. Her position on the ground is as if she is in prayer, this showing her godly or good position.
Characters
The Last Chance.
In the tradition of Restoration Comedy and Henry Fielding, Dickens fits his characters with appropriate names. Oliver himself, though "badged and ticketed" as a lowly orphan and named according to an alphabetical system, is, in fact, "all of a twist." Mr. Grimwig is so called because his seemingly "grim", pessimistic outlook is actually a protective cover for his kind, sentimental soul. Other character names mark their bearers as semi-monstrous caricatures. Mrs. Mann, who has charge of the infant Oliver, is not the most motherly of women; Mr. Bumble, despite his impressive sense of his own dignity, continually mangles the king's English he tries to use; and the Sowerberries are, of course, "sour berries", a reference to Mrs. Sowerberry's perpetual scowl, to Mr. Sowerberry's profession as an undertaker, and to the poor provender Oliver receives from them. Rose Maylie’s name echoes her association with flowers and springtime, youth and beauty, while Toby Crackit’s is a reference to his chosen profession–housebreaking.
Bill Sikes’s dog, Bull’s-eye, has “faults of temper in common with his owner” and is an emblem of his owner’s character. The dog’s viciousness represents Sikes’s animal-like brutality, while Sikes's self-destructiveness is evident in the dog's many scars. The dog, with its willingness to harm anyone on Sikes's whim, shows the mindless brutality of the master. Sikes himself senses that the dog is a reflection of himself and that is why he tries to drown the dog. He is really trying to run away from who he is.[citation needed] This is also illustrated when Sikes dies and the dog does immediately also. After Sikes murders Nancy, Bull’s-eye also comes to represent Sikes’s guilt. The dog leaves bloody footprints on the floor of the room where the murder is committed. Not long after, Sikes becomes desperate to get rid of the dog, convinced that the dog’s presence will give him away. Yet, just as Sikes cannot shake off his guilt, he cannot shake off Bull’s-eye, who arrives at the house of Sikes’s demise before Sikes himself does. Bull’s-eye’s name also conjures up the image of Nancy’s eyes, which haunts Sikes until the bitter end and eventually causes him to hang himself accidentally.
Dickens employs polarised sets of characters to explore various dual themes throughout the novel;[citation needed] Mr. Brownlow and Fagin, for example, personify 'Good vs. Evil'. Dickens also juxtaposes honest, law-abiding characters such as Oliver himself with those who, like the Artful Dodger, seem more comfortable on the wrong side of the law. 'Crime and Punishment' is another important pair of themes, as is 'Sin and Redemption': Dickens describes criminal acts ranging from picking pockets to murder (suggesting that this sort of thing went on continually in 1830's London) only to hand out punishments with a liberal hand at the end. Most obviously, he shows Bill Sikes hounded to death by a mob for his brutal acts, and sends Fagin to cower in the condemned cell, sentenced to death by due process. Neither character achieves redemption; Sikes dies trying to run away from his guilt, and on his last night alive, the terrified Fagin refuses to see a rabbi or to pray, instead asking Oliver to help him escape. Nancy, by contrast, redeems herself at the cost of her own life, and dies in a prayerful pose.
Nancy is also one of the few characters in Oliver Twist to display much ambivalence. Although she is a full-fledged criminal, indoctrinated and trained by Fagin since childhood, she retains enough empathy to repent her role in Oliver's kidnapping, and to take steps to try to atone. As one of Fagin's victims, corrupted but not yet morally dead, she gives eloquent voice to the horrors of the old man's little criminal empire. She wants to save Oliver from a similar fate; at the same time, she recoils from the idea of turning traitor, especially to Bill Sikes, whom she loves. When he was later criticised for giving a "thieving, whoring slut of the streets" such an unaccountable reversal of character, Dickens ascribed her change of heart to "the last fair drop of water at the bottom of a dried-up, weed-choked well".
奧利弗九歲的時候，不能像有錢人傢孩子那樣進學校念書，女管事還把他送進工廠，和其他童工一起，日夜幹力不胜任的苦活，並且不讓他吃飽。性格倔強的奧利弗被大傢推為代表，提出增加糧食的要求。工廠的職員大驚失色，便不願繼續收留奧利弗，怕他影響其他童工。
當時，殯儀館的老伴森亞比利正需要學徒，便花了五個金鎊把他領了出去。奧利弗換了個新環境，生活過得稍好了一些。他參加出殯行列，行動規矩，合乎禮儀。老伴很滿意，但遭到年長學徒的忌妒，故意譏笑、侮辱他人格。奧利弗忍無可忍，拔拳搏鬥。老闆夫婦將他毒打，他悲憤填胸，星夜出走。一連步行了七天，纔到達倫敦。
舉目無親，饑寒交迫，在絶望中他遇到了少年亞狄。亞狄帶他到一棟破敗的屋子裏，這裏原來是窩藏匪盜的窟。賊首弗根見奧利弗聰明伶俐，很是喜歡，便要他和亞狄一起上街去偷竊。不料亞狄失手被發現，奧利弗心虛，拔腿逃跑，結果被人抓進了警局。賊首弗根聽說奧利弗被抓，痛責亞狄無用，又擔心奧利弗在警局招認，便和另一賊首皮利商議，决定由皮利的妻子南珊出面，冒充奧利弗姐姐，具保將他領回。
但是，警局審批時，書店老闆證明，他看到當時扒竊的小賊並非奧利弗。被竊的主人是倫敦富翁羅勃特，因自己冤枉奧利弗很感歉疚，又見他可愛又可憐，便將他領回傢去。奧利弗到羅勃特傢後，受到老人的寵愛，既不愁吃穿，還能上學讀書。不料，羅勃特有個名叫孟斯的親戚，追究奧利弗的身世，發現原來他是羅勃特的外孫，那羅勃特的全部傢産便要由他承受。孟斯企圖某奪謀奪這筆財産，便將此事嚴守秘密，還和賊首皮利勾結，企圖謀害奧利弗。
某日，皮利和他妻子南珊在街上尋訪，遇見奧利弗，立即把他綁回賊窟。弗根將他毒打，幾乎喪命。南珊從孟斯處探聽到奧利弗的身世後，十分同情，為了救他出險，讓他祖孫團員，便暗暗去把消息告訴了羅勃特，答應下次帶奧利弗同來。不料事情被皮利發現，和弗根一起，將南珊活活打死。羅勃特在傢等候南珊，到了約定之期，不見南珊到來。忽然聽到街上傳說南珊慘死，便報告警局，隨同警察直搗賊窟。市民們也紛紛參加捉賊，聲勢浩大。弗根和皮利最終難逃法網。奧利弗死裏逃生，被羅勃特領回，祖孫團聚。
Background
Oliver Twist is notable for Dickens' unromantic portrayal of criminals and their sordid lives. The book also exposed the cruel treatment of many a waif-child in London, which increased international concern in what is sometimes known as "The Great London Waif Crisis". This was the astounding number of orphans in London in the Dickens era. The book's subtitle, The Parish Boy's Progress alludes to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and also to a pair of popular 18th-century caricature series by William Hogarth, "A Rake's Progress" and "A Harlot's Progress".
An early example of the social novel, the book calls the public's attention to various contemporary evils, including the Poor Law, child labour and the recruitment of children as criminals. Dickens mocks the hypocrisies of his time by surrounding the novel's serious themes with sarcasm and dark humour. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of hardships as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s. It is likely that Dickens's own early youth as a child labourer contributed to the story's development.
Oliver Twist has been the subject of numerous film and television adaptations, and is the basis for a highly successful musical play and the multiple Academy Award winning motion picture Oliver!.
Publications
Cover, first edition of serial, entitled "The Adventures of Oliver Twist" January 1846
Design by George Cruikshank
The book was originally published in Bentley's Miscellany as a serial, in monthly instalments that began appearing in the month of February 1837 and continued through April 1839. It was originally intended to form part of Dickens's serial The Mudfog Papers. It did not appear as its own monthly serial until 1846. George Cruikshank provided one steel etching per month to illustrate each installment. The first novelization appeared six months before the serialization was completed. It was published in three volumes by Richard Bentley, the owner of Bentley's Miscellany, under the author's pseudonym, "Boz" and included 24 steel-engraved plates by Cruikshank.
Plot summary
Workhouse and first jobs
Oliver Twist is born into a life of poverty and misfortune in a workhouse in an unnamed town (although when originally published in Bentley's Miscellany in 1837 the town was called Mudfog and said to be within 75 miles north of London). Orphaned almost from his first breath by his mother’s death in childbirth and his father’s unexplained absence, Oliver is meagerly provided for under the terms of the Poor Law, and spends the first eight years of his life at a baby farm in the 'care' of a woman named Mrs. Mann. Along with other juvenile offenders against the poor laws, Oliver is brought up with little food and few comforts. Around the time of the orphan’s ninth birthday, Mr. Bumble, a parish beadle, removes Oliver from the baby farm and puts him to work picking oakum at the main workhouse (the same one where his mother worked before she died). Oliver, who toils with very little food, remains in the workhouse for six months, until the desperately hungry boys decide to draw lots; the loser must ask for another portion of gruel. The task falls to Oliver, who at the next meal tremblingly comes forward, bowl in hand, and makes his famous request: "Please, sir, I want some more."
Oliver; "Please, sir, I want some more."
A great uproar ensues. The board of well-fed gentlemen who administer the workhouse, while eating a meal fit for a mighty king, offer five pounds to any person wishing to take on the boy as an apprentice. A brutal chimney sweep almost claims Oliver, but, when he begs despairingly not to be sent away with "that dreadful man" a kindly old magistrate refuses to sign the indentures. Later, Mr. Sowerberry, an undertaker employed by the parish, takes Oliver into his service. He treats Oliver better, and, because of the boy's sorrowful countenance, uses him as a mourner, at children's funerals. However, Mr. Sowerberry is in an unhappy marriage, and his wife takes an immediate dislike to Oliver—primarily because her husband seems to like him—and loses few opportunities to underfeed and mistreat him. He also suffers torment at the hands of Noah Claypole, an oafish but bullying fellow apprentice who is jealous of Oliver's promotion to mute, and Charlotte, the Sowerberry's maidservant, who is in love with Noah.
One day, in an attempt to bait Oliver, Noah insults the orphan’s late mother, calling her "a regular right-down bad 'un". Oliver flies into an unexpected passion, attacking and even beating the much bigger boy. Mrs. Sowerberry takes Noah's side, helps him subdue Oliver, punches and beats Oliver, and later compels her husband and Mr. Bumble, who has been sent for in the aftermath of the fight, into beating Oliver again. Once Oliver is sent to his room for the night, he does something that he hadn't done since babyhood—breaks down and weeps. Alone that night, Oliver finally decides to run away. He wanders aimlessly for a time, until a well-placed milestone sets his wandering feet towards London.
The Artful Dodger and Fagin
George Cruikshank original engraving of the Artful Dodger (centre), here introducing Oliver (right) to Fagin (left)
During his journey to London, Oliver encounters Jack Dawkins, more commonly known by the nickname the "Artful Dodger", although Oliver's innocent nature prevents him from recognising this hint that the boy may be dishonest. Dodger provides Oliver with a free meal and tells him of a gentleman in London who will "give him lodgings for nothing, and never ask for change". Grateful for the unexpected assistance, Oliver follows Dodger to the "old gentleman"'s residence. In this way, Oliver unwittingly falls in with an infamous Jewish criminal known as Fagin, the so-called gentleman of whom the Artful Dodger spoke. Ensnared, Oliver lives with Fagin and his gang of juvenile pickpockets in their lair at Saffron Hill for some time, naively unaware of their criminal occupations. He believes they make wallets and handkerchiefs.
Later, Oliver innocently goes out to "make handkerchiefs" because of no income coming in, with two of Fagin’s underlings: The Artful Dodger and a boy of a humorous nature named Charley Bates. Oliver realises too late that their real mission is to pick pockets. Dodger and Charley steal the handkerchief of an old gentleman named Mr. Brownlow, and promptly flee. When he finds his handkerchief missing, Mr. Brownlow turns round, sees Oliver, and pursues him. Others join the chase and Oliver is caught and taken before the magistrate. Curiously, Mr. Brownlow has second thoughts about the boy—he seems reluctant to believe he is a pickpocket. To the judge's evident disappointment, a bookstall holder who saw Dodger commit the crime clears Oliver, who, by now actually ill, faints in the courtroom. Mr. Brownlow takes Oliver home and, along with his housekeeper Mrs. Bedwin, cares for him.
Bill Sikes
Oliver stays with Mr. Brownlow, recovers rapidly, and blossoms from the unaccustomed kindness. His bliss, however, is interrupted when Fagin, fearing Oliver might "peach" on his criminal gang, decides that Oliver must be brought back to his hideout. When Mr. Brownlow sends Oliver out to pay for some books, one of the gang, a young girl named Nancy, whom Oliver had previously met at Fagin's, accosts him with help from her abusive lover, a brutal robber named Bill Sikes, and Oliver is quickly bundled back to Fagin's lair. The thieves take the five pound note Mr. Brownlow had entrusted to him, and strip him of his fine new clothes. Oliver, dismayed, flees and attempts to call for police assistance, but is ruthlessly dragged back by the Dodger, Charley and Fagin. Nancy, however, is sympathetic towards Oliver and saves him from beatings by Fagin and Sikes.
In a renewed attempt to draw Oliver into a life of crime, Fagin forces him to participate in a burglary. Nancy reluctantly assists in recruiting him, all the while assuring the boy that she will help him if she can. Sikes, after threatening to kill him if he does not cooperate, sends Oliver through a small window and orders him to unlock the front door. The robbery goes wrong, however, and Oliver is shot. After being abandoned by Sikes, the wounded Oliver ends up under the care of the people he was supposed to rob: Rose Maylie, her guardian Mrs. Maylie (unrelated to Rose and raising her as her own niece), and Harry Maylie (Mrs. Maylie's son who loves Rose). Convinced of Oliver’s innocence, Rose takes the boy in and nurses him back to health.
Mystery
Meanwhile, a mysterious man named Monks has found Fagin and is plotting with him to destroy Oliver's reputation. Monks denounces Fagin's failure to turn Oliver into a criminal and the two of them agree on a plan to make sure he does not find out about his past. Monks is apparently related to Oliver in some manner, although it's not mentioned until later.
Back In Oliver's hometown, Mr Bumble has married Ms Corney, the wealthy matron of the workhouse, only to find himself constantly arguing with his unhappy wife. After one such argument, Mr Bumble walks over to a pub, where he meets Monks, who informs him about a boy named Oliver Twist. Later the two of them arrange to take a locket and ring which had once belonged to Oliver's mother and toss it into a nearby river. Monks relates this to Fagin as part of the plot to destroy Oliver, unaware that Nancy has eavesdropped on their conversation and gone ahead to inform Oliver's benefactors.
Nancy, by this time ashamed of her role in Oliver's kidnapping, and fearful for the boy's safety, goes to Rose Maylie and Mr. Brownlow to warn them. She knows that Monks and Fagin are plotting to get their hands on the boy again and holds some secret meetings on the subject with Oliver's benefactors. One night Nancy tries to leave for one of the meetings but Sikes refuses permission when she doesn't state exactly where she's going. Fagin realizes that Nancy is up to something and resolves to find out what her secret is.
Meanwhile Noah Claypole has fallen out with the undertaker Mr. Sowerberry, stolen money from him and moved to London. Charlotte has accompanied him—they are now in a relationship. Using the name "Morris Bolter", he joins Fagin's gang for protection. During Noah's stay with Fagin, the Artful Dodger is caught with a stolen silver snuff box, convicted (in a very humorous courtroom scene) and transported to Australia. Later, Noah is sent by Fagin to "dodge" (spy on) Nancy, and discovers her secret: she has been meeting secretly with Rose and Mr. Brownlow to discuss how to save Oliver from Fagin and Monks. Fagin angrily passes the information on to Sikes, twisting the story just enough to make it sound as if Nancy had informed on him (in reality, she had shielded Sikes, whom she loves despite his brutal character). Believing her to be a traitor, Sikes beats Nancy to death in a fit of rage, and is himself killed when he accidentally hangs himself while fleeing across a rooftop from an angry mob.
Resolution
Fagin in his cell.
Monks is forced by Mr. Brownlow (an old friend of Oliver's father) to divulge his secrets: his real name is Edward Leeford, and he is Oliver's paternal half-brother and, although he is legitimate, he was born of a loveless marriage. Oliver's mother, Agnes, was their father's true love. Mr. Brownlow has a picture of her, and began making inquiries when he noticed a marked resemblance between her face, and the face of Oliver. Monks has spent many years searching for his father's child—not to befriend him, but to destroy him (see Henry Fielding's Tom Jones for similar circumstances). Brownlow asks Oliver to give half his inheritance (which proves to be meagre) to Monks because he wants to give him a second chance; and Oliver, being prone to giving second chances, is more than happy to comply. Monks then moves to America, where he squanders his money, reverts to crime, and ultimately dies in prison. Fagin is arrested and condemned to the gallows; in an emotional scene, Oliver goes to Newgate Gaol to visit the old reprobate on the eve of his hanging, (where Fagin's terror at being hanged has caused him to come down with fever).
On a happier note, Rose Maylie turns out to be the long-lost sister of Oliver's mother Agnes; she is therefore Oliver's aunt. She marries her long-time sweetheart Harry, and Oliver lives happily with his saviour, Mr. Brownlow. Noah becomes a paid, semi-professional informer to the police (a "stoolie", or "stoolpigeon" in American terminology). The Bumbles lose their jobs (under circumstances that cause him to utter the well-known line "The law is a ass") and are reduced to great poverty, eventually ending up in the same workhouse where they once lorded it over Oliver and the other boys; and Charley Bates, horrified by Sikes's murder of Nancy, becomes an honest citizen, moves to the country, and works his way up to prosperity.
Major themes and symbols
Introduction
In Oliver Twist, Dickens mixes grim realism, and merciless satire as a way to describe the effects of industrialism on 19th-century England and to criticise the harsh new Poor Laws. Oliver, an innocent child, is trapped in a world where his only options seem to be the workhouse, Fagin's thieves, a prison or an early grave. From this unpromising industrial/institutional setting, however, a fairy tale also emerges: In the midst of corruption and degradation, the essentially passive Oliver remains pure-hearted; he steers away from evil when those around him give in to it; and, in proper fairy-tale fashion, he eventually receives his reward—leaving for a peaceful life in the country, surrounded by kind friends. On the way to this happy ending, Dickens explores the kind of life an orphan, outcast boy could expect to lead in 1830s London.
Poverty and social class
Poverty is a prominent concern in Oliver Twist. Throughout the novel, Dickens enlarges on this theme, describing slums so decrepit that whole rows of houses are on the point of ruin. In an early chapter, Oliver attends a pauper's funeral with Mr. Sowerberry and sees a whole family crowded together in one miserable room.
This ubiquitous misery makes Oliver's few encounters with charity and love more poignant. Oliver owes his life several times over to kindness both large and small. The apparent plague of poverty that Dickens describes also conveyed to his middle-class readers how much of the London population was stricken with poverty and disease. Nonetheless, in Oliver Twist he delivers a somewhat mixed message about social caste and social injustice. Oliver's illegitimate workhouse origins place him at the nadir of society; as an orphan without friends, he is routinely despised. His "sturdy spirit" keeps him alive despite the torment he must endure. Most of his associates, however, deserve their place among society's dregs and seem very much at home in the depths. Noah Claypole, a charity boy like Oliver, is idle, stupid, and cowardly; Sikes is a thug; Fagin lives by corrupting children; and the Artful Dodger seems born for a life of crime. Many of the middle-class people Oliver encounters—Mrs. Sowerberry, Mr. Bumble, and the savagely hypocritical "gentlemen" of the workhouse board, for example; are, if anything, worse.
Oliver, on the other hand, who has an air of refinement remarkable for a workhouse boy, proves to be of gentle birth. Although he has been abused and neglected all his life, he recoils, aghast, at the idea of victimizing anyone else. This apparently hereditary gentlemanliness makes Oliver Twist something of a changeling tale, not just an indictment of social injustice. Oliver, born for better things, struggles to survive in the savage world of the underclass before finally being rescued by his family and returned to his proper place—a commodious country house.
In a recent film adaptation of the novel, Roman Polanski dispenses with the problem of Oliver's genteel origins by making him an anonymous orphan, like the rest of Fagin's gang.
Oliver is wounded in a burglary.
Symbolism
Dickens makes considerable use of symbolism. The many symbols Oliver faces are primarily good versus evil, with evil continually trying to corrupt and exploit good, but good winning out in the end. The "merry old gentleman" Fagin, for example, has satanic characteristics: he is a veteran corrupter of young boys who presides over his own corner of the criminal world; he makes his first appearance standing over a fire holding a toasting-fork; and he refuses to pray on the night before his execution. The London slums, too, have a suffocating, infernal aspect; the dark deeds and dark passions are concretely characterised by dim rooms, and pitch-black nights, while the governing mood of terror and brutality may be identified with uncommonly cold weather. In contrast, the countryside where the Maylies take Oliver is a pastoral heaven.
Food is another important symbol; Oliver's odyssey begins with a simple request for more gruel, and Mr. Bumble's shocked exclamation, represents he may be after more than just gruel. Chapter 8—which contains the last mention of food in the form of Fagin's dinner—marks the first time Oliver eats his share and represents the transformation in his life that occurs after he joins Fagin's gang.
The novel is also shot through with a related motif, obesity, which calls attention to the stark injustice of Oliver's world. When the half-starved child dares to ask for more, the men who punish him are fat. It is interesting to observe the large number of characters who are overweight.
Toward the end of the novel, the gaze of knowing eyes becomes a potent symbol. For years, Fagin avoids daylight, crowds, and open spaces, concealing himself in a dark lair most of the time: when his luck runs out at last, he squirms in the "living light" of too many eyes as he stands in the dock, awaiting sentence. After Sikes kills Nancy, he flees into the countryside but is unable to escape the memory of her dead eyes. Charley Bates turns his back on crime when he sees the murderous cruelty of the man who has been held up to him as a model.
Nancy’s decision to meet Brownlow and Rose on London Bridge reveals the symbolic aspect of this bridge in Oliver Twist. Bridges exist to link two places that would otherwise be separated by an uncrossable void. The meeting on London Bridge represents the collision of two worlds unlikely ever to come into contact—the idyllic world of Brownlow and Rose, and the atmosphere of degradation in which Nancy lives. On the bridge, Nancy is given the chance to cross over to the better way of life that the others represent, but she rejects that opportunity, and by the time the three have all left the bridge, that possibility has vanished forever.
When Rose gives Nancy her handkerchief, and when Nancy holds it up as she dies, Nancy has gone over to the "good" side against the thieves. Her position on the ground is as if she is in prayer, this showing her godly or good position.
Characters
The Last Chance.
In the tradition of Restoration Comedy and Henry Fielding, Dickens fits his characters with appropriate names. Oliver himself, though "badged and ticketed" as a lowly orphan and named according to an alphabetical system, is, in fact, "all of a twist." Mr. Grimwig is so called because his seemingly "grim", pessimistic outlook is actually a protective cover for his kind, sentimental soul. Other character names mark their bearers as semi-monstrous caricatures. Mrs. Mann, who has charge of the infant Oliver, is not the most motherly of women; Mr. Bumble, despite his impressive sense of his own dignity, continually mangles the king's English he tries to use; and the Sowerberries are, of course, "sour berries", a reference to Mrs. Sowerberry's perpetual scowl, to Mr. Sowerberry's profession as an undertaker, and to the poor provender Oliver receives from them. Rose Maylie’s name echoes her association with flowers and springtime, youth and beauty, while Toby Crackit’s is a reference to his chosen profession–housebreaking.
Bill Sikes’s dog, Bull’s-eye, has “faults of temper in common with his owner” and is an emblem of his owner’s character. The dog’s viciousness represents Sikes’s animal-like brutality, while Sikes's self-destructiveness is evident in the dog's many scars. The dog, with its willingness to harm anyone on Sikes's whim, shows the mindless brutality of the master. Sikes himself senses that the dog is a reflection of himself and that is why he tries to drown the dog. He is really trying to run away from who he is.[citation needed] This is also illustrated when Sikes dies and the dog does immediately also. After Sikes murders Nancy, Bull’s-eye also comes to represent Sikes’s guilt. The dog leaves bloody footprints on the floor of the room where the murder is committed. Not long after, Sikes becomes desperate to get rid of the dog, convinced that the dog’s presence will give him away. Yet, just as Sikes cannot shake off his guilt, he cannot shake off Bull’s-eye, who arrives at the house of Sikes’s demise before Sikes himself does. Bull’s-eye’s name also conjures up the image of Nancy’s eyes, which haunts Sikes until the bitter end and eventually causes him to hang himself accidentally.
Dickens employs polarised sets of characters to explore various dual themes throughout the novel;[citation needed] Mr. Brownlow and Fagin, for example, personify 'Good vs. Evil'. Dickens also juxtaposes honest, law-abiding characters such as Oliver himself with those who, like the Artful Dodger, seem more comfortable on the wrong side of the law. 'Crime and Punishment' is another important pair of themes, as is 'Sin and Redemption': Dickens describes criminal acts ranging from picking pockets to murder (suggesting that this sort of thing went on continually in 1830's London) only to hand out punishments with a liberal hand at the end. Most obviously, he shows Bill Sikes hounded to death by a mob for his brutal acts, and sends Fagin to cower in the condemned cell, sentenced to death by due process. Neither character achieves redemption; Sikes dies trying to run away from his guilt, and on his last night alive, the terrified Fagin refuses to see a rabbi or to pray, instead asking Oliver to help him escape. Nancy, by contrast, redeems herself at the cost of her own life, and dies in a prayerful pose.
Nancy is also one of the few characters in Oliver Twist to display much ambivalence. Although she is a full-fledged criminal, indoctrinated and trained by Fagin since childhood, she retains enough empathy to repent her role in Oliver's kidnapping, and to take steps to try to atone. As one of Fagin's victims, corrupted but not yet morally dead, she gives eloquent voice to the horrors of the old man's little criminal empire. She wants to save Oliver from a similar fate; at the same time, she recoils from the idea of turning traitor, especially to Bill Sikes, whom she loves. When he was later criticised for giving a "thieving, whoring slut of the streets" such an unaccountable reversal of character, Dickens ascribed her change of heart to "the last fair drop of water at the bottom of a dried-up, weed-choked well".
1677和1678兩年，我在皇傢軍隊任中尉，參加了幾場海外戰役；後來我就退
役回國了，住在倫敦東郊幾公裏外的一座小莊園裏，那地方是我依仗妻子的名義
弄到的。
今天是我活命的最後一個夜晚，我要把真實情況毫不隱瞞地和盤托出。我壓
根兒就不是個勇敢的男子漢，自幼生性乖僻多疑。我眼下在談論自己，仿佛已經
離開人世似的，因為我在寫這些的時候，別人正在給我挖墳坑，我的名字將會遺
臭萬年。
我回到英國不久，我那惟一的親兄長就患了不治之癥。這事倒沒給我帶來多
少悲傷，因為我們倆長大後就很少來往。他心地善良，慷慨大度，相貌長得比我
好，也比我更有才華，深受人們的愛戴。我在國內外結交的朋友，一旦跟他相識
就疏遠我了。一經初次交談，他們就都會驚訝地發現我們兄弟倆在容貌和舉止方
面竟會那麽不同。我慣於引導他們做出這樣公開的承認，因為我早就明白他們必
定會對我們兄弟倆做出什麽樣的評比；我心裏很嫉妒，想方設法為自己做些辯解。
我們哥兒倆娶了一對姐妹。這種關係對別人來說肯定會使兩傢更加親密，它
卻使我們兄弟倆越發疏遠了。我的嫂子對我的處世為人十分瞭解。當着她的面，
我從不敢露出自己暗中的嫉妒或不滿情緒。在那種時刻，她總是瞪起兩眼盯着我，
使我從不敢正視她一眼。我並沒低頭瞧着地或者掉過頭去，可我覺得她總是在監
視我。後來我們兩傢鬧翻了，從此斷絶了來往，這倒使我鬆了口氣。我在國外又
聽說她去世的消息，心情更加舒暢了。可是現在我仍然覺得當初兩傢不和的陰影
好象還在古怪而可怕地籠罩着我們。我怕她；她就像鬼魂那樣睏擾着我，她那盯
視的目光眼下又出現了；我一回想起她，就像做噩夢一樣，渾身的血都凝結起來。
她生下一個小男孩之後不久就死了。我哥哥後來也患了重病，自知不久於人
世，便把我妻子叫到床邊，把那四歲的孩子托付給她照應。他把財産全都遺留給
孩子，並立下一份遺囑，聲明萬一孩子先去世，那份遺産就轉歸我妻子所有，以
此作為對她撫養侄兒那份情意的報答。他對我也說了幾句表示手足情意的話，然
後就睡着了，再也沒醒過來。
我們夫妻倆膝下無兒無女。我妻子由於姐妹情誼深篤，幾乎把一個做母親的
愛心都給了那個孩子。孩子也愛她，就像是她的親兒子似的，跟她有深摯的感情，
可他長得酷似他的母親，也總不信任我。
鬧不清從什麽時候起，那孩子一出現在我面前就叫我感到不自在。我發現他
註視着我，眼神不僅帶着稚氣的睏惑，還藴含着他母親當年對我的那種猜疑。這
並非是由於面貌表情的相似而使我産生的幻覺。他怕我，仿佛出自某種直覺似的。
我們倆單獨在一起時，我一望着他，他就會倒退到門口去，與此同時又用他那雙
亮晶晶的眼睛緊盯着我。
最初我也許自欺地隱瞞了真實的想法，可我並沒想要傷害他。興許想到他繼
承的那份遺産要是屬於我們，那該多好哇；興許巴望他要是死掉，那該多好哇。
但是我自信决沒想到要把他置於死地。這種邪念並非一下子就來到的，而是慢慢
形成的，隨後我就對幹壞事的畏懼淡化了。我每天都在琢磨那個念頭，最終就衹
想怎樣幹才最為保險，不再回避那種惡行了。
這檔子事總在我腦子裏盤旋。孩子發現我老是盯牢他而露出的那種納悶神情
真叫我受不了，可我又是着了迷地把那事當作一件正經事來考慮。我心想把他這
麽一個脆弱的小不點兒幹掉該會是件多麽輕而易舉的事。我有時會上樓偷看他的
睡相，平時常躲在花園裏靠近窗戶的一棵樹後面觀望他坐在我妻子身旁的矮凳上
埋頭學習知識。我就像個心懷鬼胎的賊那樣一連幾小時地偷覷，一片樹葉的瑟瑟
聲都會叫我心驚肉跳，可我還是忍不住要在那兒張望。
離我們那座小屋不遠的地方有個不大為人所知的小池塘，不颳風的時候，誰
也聽不到那邊的水聲。我花費好幾天工夫用小刀刻了一隻小木船，把它放在孩子
可以見到的地方。隨後我便躲藏在一處等待；孩子要是想獨自去池塘漂浮那個玩
藝兒，必定會打那裏經過。可是那一天也好，次日也好，他都沒去，我卻從清晨
一直等待到日落。我堅信他早晚會落入我的羅網，因為我聽見他在玩耍那個玩藝
兒，也看到他歡愉地把它放在枕邊。我既不厭煩，也不疲纍，衹是耐心等待。第
三天，他果然興高采烈地從我面前跑過去，那頭金絲黃發飄蕩着，嘴裏哼着——
上帝饒恕我！——一首歡快的民歌，而他幾乎還咬不準字眼吶！
我暗自跟隨在他身後，在那些矮樹叢後面匍匐而行，一個魁梧的大漢懷着天
曉得什麽樣邪惡的心情跟蹤那個小不點兒，一直來到那個池塘邊上。我靠近他，
彎下身子，正要伸起兩臂把他推下水，他從水面上見到了我的身影，連忙轉過頭
來。他那目光顯露出他去世的母親那種猜疑的神情。陽光驀地從雲層後面冒出來，
照亮天空，照亮大地，照亮那一潭清水和樹葉上的露珠。處處都有眼睛，整個宇
宙都在目睹這一謀殺的全過程。我鬧不清孩子起先說了什麽；他是個具有男子漢
血統的後裔，他雖是個小孩，卻沒有畏縮或乞求。他衹喊叫着說他會盡量想法愛
我——可他過去並沒做到這一點——接着我就看見他往傢裏跑。隨後，我呆視着
自己手中那把劍，而他已經倒在我的腳前。除了身上有斑班血跡外，他幾乎跟我
以前看到他睡熟了的時候一樣——連姿勢都相同，腦袋枕在他那小胳臂上。
我用雙手把他抱起來——他已經咽氣了——輕輕把他的屍體藏在草叢裏。我
妻子那天不在傢，要在次日纔返回。我們臥室的那扇窗戶離地面僅幾英尺高，而
且房捨這一面衹有那扇窗戶。我决定深夜從窗戶爬出來，把孩子埋在花園裏。我
沒想到我的計謀會失敗，心想一切都不會被人發現。暫且不去動那筆錢，因為我
要盡量讓人相信孩子要麽是走丟了，要麽是讓人拐走了。我整個兒想法都集中在
怎樣妥善地隱瞞自己的罪行這一點上。
僕人來告訴我孩子不見了，我就吩咐他們四下裏去尋找；一有人挨近我，我
就渾身發抖，喘不過氣來，那種心驚膽戰的滋味兒真叫人沒法兒形容。那天夜裏，
我去埋葬孩子；我撥開樹枝，朝草叢望去，衹見那個孩子的屍體上有個閃亮的蠕
蟲，就像個小精靈伏在那個被謀殺了的孩子身上閃閃發光。我把他放進坑裏時，
還見到那個蟲子在他胸前閃亮；那是一隻仰望蒼天的眼睛，在祈求星鬥註意我所
幹的壞事。
我得面對我的妻子，跟她說孩子失蹤了，讓她抱有很快就會找到孩子的希望。
我裝出一副十分誠懇的樣子這樣做了，因為沒人懷疑我。此後，我就整天坐在臥
室窗戶前，呆望着那個可怕的秘密地點。
那是一塊新近翻過、重鋪草皮的土地，我挑選那裏埋葬屍體，是因為這樣就
使我的鐵鏟留下的痕跡不大可能被人發現。那些鋪草皮的工人想必認為我瘋了，
我一直不斷催促他們加快幹活兒，還跑出來跟他們一塊兒幹，用腳踩實那塊地。
傍晚前，他們鋪完了那片草地，我纔覺得自己比較安全了。
我躺下睡覺，可睡醒後並不像一般人那樣精神振作，心情愉快；不過我也睡
了，總是在做噩夢，夢見那塊墓地當中一會兒冒出一隻手，一會兒冒出一隻腳，
一會兒又冒出一個腦袋。我被驚醒，從床上爬起來，偷偷走到窗前望一望，弄清
並無此事纔放心。然後我又躺下，就這樣通宵忽睡忽醒，起來躺下足有20多次，
沒完沒了地做那個同樣的夢。這真比睜着兩眼躺在床上還要糟糕，因為噩夢把我
折磨得徹夜不能眼。有一次我竟以為那個孩子又活了，我壓根兒就沒想殺害他。
從那個夢境醒過來，真叫人痛苦不堪，難以忍受。
次日，我坐在窗前，目光從不離開那個地點，儘管上面已經覆蓋了草皮，可
對我來說，那個坑的大小深度好像還敞着，暴露在光天化日之下似的。有時一個
傭人從那裏走過，我真擔心他會陷進那個坑裏。等他走過去之後，我就會看看他
有沒有把那個坑的邊緣踩壞。一隻小鳥落在那上面棲息，也嚇得我膽戰心驚，惟
恐它會啄來啄去，把下面的秘密暴露出來。一陣微風從那邊吹來，我耳中便似乎
聽見風聲喃喃道出“謀殺”這個字眼。一點兒聲響都叫我驚恐不安。我就這樣看
守，苦苦熬過了3 天。
第四天，一個當年跟我一起在海外服役的朋友來看望我，還帶來一位我從未
見過面的軍官。可我的目光一直沒法離開那個地點。那是一個初夏的傍晚，我就
叫傭人在花園裏擺張桌子，拿瓶酒來款待他倆。我把自己那把椅子安置在那個墓
坑上面，然後坐下來，心裏纔覺得踏實多了，確信不會有人攪擾那裏。我們一邊
閑聊，一邊喝酒。
他們問候我太太，希望這樣冒昧來訪沒有驚擾她，沒有把她嚇跑。我衹好支
支吾吾地把孩子丟失的事跟他倆講了。那位我從未謀面的軍官是個喜愛兩眼盯視
地面的傢夥，他的目光一直沒擡起來。這一神態真把我嚇壞了。我沒法認為他沒
看出什麽破綻，沒起什麽疑心。我連忙問他是否認為——可又住口了。他溫和地
望着我說：“您的意思是說那個孩子給害死了嗎？哦，不會的！一個人殺死一個
可憐的小孩兒，又會得到什麽好處呢？”我其實可以告訴他那人能獲得再好不過
的好處哩，可我沒吭聲，嚇得渾身直打哆嗦。
他倆誤解了我那陣激動，安慰我那個孩子遲早會給找到的。可這是什麽撫慰
啊！這當兒，我們忽然聽到一陣犬吠聲，兩條大獵狗闖進了花園，一聲接一聲地
狂吠不止。
“大獵狗！”兩位來客異口同聲驚呼道。
這無須乎告訴我！我儘管一輩子沒見過如此兇猛的獵狗，心裏卻一下子就明
白它們是幹什麽來的。我緊緊按着椅子扶手，既說不出話來。也動彈不了啦。
“是純種獵狗咧，”我原來那位同事又添說道，“大概是給帶出來訓練的，
掙脫了主人！”
他倆轉身望着那兩條狗，它們朝地面嗅來嗅去，煩躁不安，竄前竄後，瘋狂
地打轉轉，絲毫不理會我們，可一次又一次地吠叫，然後又朝地面嗅個不停，一
心在尋找什麽。衹見它們比剛纔更仔細地嗅聞起來，儘管還很煩躁，卻不再亂竄
亂轉了，而是越來越近集中在我坐的那塊地方聞來聞去。最後那兩條獵狗終於聞
到我坐着的那把椅子的地點，擡起頭來嚎叫。力圖扯碎那把擋住它們嗅聞下面地
面的椅子。我從兩位來客的神態中覺出自己暴露了驚慌失措的表情。
“它們嗅到了要找的獵物。”兩人同時說。
“它們什麽也沒嗅到！”我喊道。
“看在上帝份上，快讓開！”我那位朋友挺認真地說，“否則你就會讓它們
撕扯成碎片啦！”
“那就讓它們把我扯裂吧。我决不離開這塊地方！”我喊道，“難道讓狗把
人轟趕到丟臉的死亡那條路上去嗎？轟開它們，打死它們！”
“這下面必定隱藏着什麽不可告人的秘密！”那位陌生的軍官一邊說，一邊
抽出寶劍。“以查理王的名義，幫我把這人拿下！”
儘管我像個瘋子那樣掙紮，又啃又咬，他們倆還是很快就把我製服了。接着，
我的老天！我看到那兩條獵犬像淘水那樣把那塊土地刨開。
我還能再說什麽呢？我跪倒在地，渾身發顫，懺悔地交代了我的全部罪行，
乞求饒恕。我曾經試圖抵賴，現在終於低頭認罪。我為此受到審判，並被處以極
刑。我失魂落魄，沒有勇氣像個男子漢那樣面對我的末日，面對我的滅亡。我得
不到任何人的憐惜安慰，我既無赦免的希望，也無朋友。我妻子幸虧暫時失去了
知覺，並不知曉我的悲慘結局。我現在獨自一人連帶我的罪惡，給關在這個地牢
裏，明天就要嗚呼哀哉下地獄啦。
役回國了，住在倫敦東郊幾公裏外的一座小莊園裏，那地方是我依仗妻子的名義
弄到的。
今天是我活命的最後一個夜晚，我要把真實情況毫不隱瞞地和盤托出。我壓
根兒就不是個勇敢的男子漢，自幼生性乖僻多疑。我眼下在談論自己，仿佛已經
離開人世似的，因為我在寫這些的時候，別人正在給我挖墳坑，我的名字將會遺
臭萬年。
我回到英國不久，我那惟一的親兄長就患了不治之癥。這事倒沒給我帶來多
少悲傷，因為我們倆長大後就很少來往。他心地善良，慷慨大度，相貌長得比我
好，也比我更有才華，深受人們的愛戴。我在國內外結交的朋友，一旦跟他相識
就疏遠我了。一經初次交談，他們就都會驚訝地發現我們兄弟倆在容貌和舉止方
面竟會那麽不同。我慣於引導他們做出這樣公開的承認，因為我早就明白他們必
定會對我們兄弟倆做出什麽樣的評比；我心裏很嫉妒，想方設法為自己做些辯解。
我們哥兒倆娶了一對姐妹。這種關係對別人來說肯定會使兩傢更加親密，它
卻使我們兄弟倆越發疏遠了。我的嫂子對我的處世為人十分瞭解。當着她的面，
我從不敢露出自己暗中的嫉妒或不滿情緒。在那種時刻，她總是瞪起兩眼盯着我，
使我從不敢正視她一眼。我並沒低頭瞧着地或者掉過頭去，可我覺得她總是在監
視我。後來我們兩傢鬧翻了，從此斷絶了來往，這倒使我鬆了口氣。我在國外又
聽說她去世的消息，心情更加舒暢了。可是現在我仍然覺得當初兩傢不和的陰影
好象還在古怪而可怕地籠罩着我們。我怕她；她就像鬼魂那樣睏擾着我，她那盯
視的目光眼下又出現了；我一回想起她，就像做噩夢一樣，渾身的血都凝結起來。
她生下一個小男孩之後不久就死了。我哥哥後來也患了重病，自知不久於人
世，便把我妻子叫到床邊，把那四歲的孩子托付給她照應。他把財産全都遺留給
孩子，並立下一份遺囑，聲明萬一孩子先去世，那份遺産就轉歸我妻子所有，以
此作為對她撫養侄兒那份情意的報答。他對我也說了幾句表示手足情意的話，然
後就睡着了，再也沒醒過來。
我們夫妻倆膝下無兒無女。我妻子由於姐妹情誼深篤，幾乎把一個做母親的
愛心都給了那個孩子。孩子也愛她，就像是她的親兒子似的，跟她有深摯的感情，
可他長得酷似他的母親，也總不信任我。
鬧不清從什麽時候起，那孩子一出現在我面前就叫我感到不自在。我發現他
註視着我，眼神不僅帶着稚氣的睏惑，還藴含着他母親當年對我的那種猜疑。這
並非是由於面貌表情的相似而使我産生的幻覺。他怕我，仿佛出自某種直覺似的。
我們倆單獨在一起時，我一望着他，他就會倒退到門口去，與此同時又用他那雙
亮晶晶的眼睛緊盯着我。
最初我也許自欺地隱瞞了真實的想法，可我並沒想要傷害他。興許想到他繼
承的那份遺産要是屬於我們，那該多好哇；興許巴望他要是死掉，那該多好哇。
但是我自信决沒想到要把他置於死地。這種邪念並非一下子就來到的，而是慢慢
形成的，隨後我就對幹壞事的畏懼淡化了。我每天都在琢磨那個念頭，最終就衹
想怎樣幹才最為保險，不再回避那種惡行了。
這檔子事總在我腦子裏盤旋。孩子發現我老是盯牢他而露出的那種納悶神情
真叫我受不了，可我又是着了迷地把那事當作一件正經事來考慮。我心想把他這
麽一個脆弱的小不點兒幹掉該會是件多麽輕而易舉的事。我有時會上樓偷看他的
睡相，平時常躲在花園裏靠近窗戶的一棵樹後面觀望他坐在我妻子身旁的矮凳上
埋頭學習知識。我就像個心懷鬼胎的賊那樣一連幾小時地偷覷，一片樹葉的瑟瑟
聲都會叫我心驚肉跳，可我還是忍不住要在那兒張望。
離我們那座小屋不遠的地方有個不大為人所知的小池塘，不颳風的時候，誰
也聽不到那邊的水聲。我花費好幾天工夫用小刀刻了一隻小木船，把它放在孩子
可以見到的地方。隨後我便躲藏在一處等待；孩子要是想獨自去池塘漂浮那個玩
藝兒，必定會打那裏經過。可是那一天也好，次日也好，他都沒去，我卻從清晨
一直等待到日落。我堅信他早晚會落入我的羅網，因為我聽見他在玩耍那個玩藝
兒，也看到他歡愉地把它放在枕邊。我既不厭煩，也不疲纍，衹是耐心等待。第
三天，他果然興高采烈地從我面前跑過去，那頭金絲黃發飄蕩着，嘴裏哼着——
上帝饒恕我！——一首歡快的民歌，而他幾乎還咬不準字眼吶！
我暗自跟隨在他身後，在那些矮樹叢後面匍匐而行，一個魁梧的大漢懷着天
曉得什麽樣邪惡的心情跟蹤那個小不點兒，一直來到那個池塘邊上。我靠近他，
彎下身子，正要伸起兩臂把他推下水，他從水面上見到了我的身影，連忙轉過頭
來。他那目光顯露出他去世的母親那種猜疑的神情。陽光驀地從雲層後面冒出來，
照亮天空，照亮大地，照亮那一潭清水和樹葉上的露珠。處處都有眼睛，整個宇
宙都在目睹這一謀殺的全過程。我鬧不清孩子起先說了什麽；他是個具有男子漢
血統的後裔，他雖是個小孩，卻沒有畏縮或乞求。他衹喊叫着說他會盡量想法愛
我——可他過去並沒做到這一點——接着我就看見他往傢裏跑。隨後，我呆視着
自己手中那把劍，而他已經倒在我的腳前。除了身上有斑班血跡外，他幾乎跟我
以前看到他睡熟了的時候一樣——連姿勢都相同，腦袋枕在他那小胳臂上。
我用雙手把他抱起來——他已經咽氣了——輕輕把他的屍體藏在草叢裏。我
妻子那天不在傢，要在次日纔返回。我們臥室的那扇窗戶離地面僅幾英尺高，而
且房捨這一面衹有那扇窗戶。我决定深夜從窗戶爬出來，把孩子埋在花園裏。我
沒想到我的計謀會失敗，心想一切都不會被人發現。暫且不去動那筆錢，因為我
要盡量讓人相信孩子要麽是走丟了，要麽是讓人拐走了。我整個兒想法都集中在
怎樣妥善地隱瞞自己的罪行這一點上。
僕人來告訴我孩子不見了，我就吩咐他們四下裏去尋找；一有人挨近我，我
就渾身發抖，喘不過氣來，那種心驚膽戰的滋味兒真叫人沒法兒形容。那天夜裏，
我去埋葬孩子；我撥開樹枝，朝草叢望去，衹見那個孩子的屍體上有個閃亮的蠕
蟲，就像個小精靈伏在那個被謀殺了的孩子身上閃閃發光。我把他放進坑裏時，
還見到那個蟲子在他胸前閃亮；那是一隻仰望蒼天的眼睛，在祈求星鬥註意我所
幹的壞事。
我得面對我的妻子，跟她說孩子失蹤了，讓她抱有很快就會找到孩子的希望。
我裝出一副十分誠懇的樣子這樣做了，因為沒人懷疑我。此後，我就整天坐在臥
室窗戶前，呆望着那個可怕的秘密地點。
那是一塊新近翻過、重鋪草皮的土地，我挑選那裏埋葬屍體，是因為這樣就
使我的鐵鏟留下的痕跡不大可能被人發現。那些鋪草皮的工人想必認為我瘋了，
我一直不斷催促他們加快幹活兒，還跑出來跟他們一塊兒幹，用腳踩實那塊地。
傍晚前，他們鋪完了那片草地，我纔覺得自己比較安全了。
我躺下睡覺，可睡醒後並不像一般人那樣精神振作，心情愉快；不過我也睡
了，總是在做噩夢，夢見那塊墓地當中一會兒冒出一隻手，一會兒冒出一隻腳，
一會兒又冒出一個腦袋。我被驚醒，從床上爬起來，偷偷走到窗前望一望，弄清
並無此事纔放心。然後我又躺下，就這樣通宵忽睡忽醒，起來躺下足有20多次，
沒完沒了地做那個同樣的夢。這真比睜着兩眼躺在床上還要糟糕，因為噩夢把我
折磨得徹夜不能眼。有一次我竟以為那個孩子又活了，我壓根兒就沒想殺害他。
從那個夢境醒過來，真叫人痛苦不堪，難以忍受。
次日，我坐在窗前，目光從不離開那個地點，儘管上面已經覆蓋了草皮，可
對我來說，那個坑的大小深度好像還敞着，暴露在光天化日之下似的。有時一個
傭人從那裏走過，我真擔心他會陷進那個坑裏。等他走過去之後，我就會看看他
有沒有把那個坑的邊緣踩壞。一隻小鳥落在那上面棲息，也嚇得我膽戰心驚，惟
恐它會啄來啄去，把下面的秘密暴露出來。一陣微風從那邊吹來，我耳中便似乎
聽見風聲喃喃道出“謀殺”這個字眼。一點兒聲響都叫我驚恐不安。我就這樣看
守，苦苦熬過了3 天。
第四天，一個當年跟我一起在海外服役的朋友來看望我，還帶來一位我從未
見過面的軍官。可我的目光一直沒法離開那個地點。那是一個初夏的傍晚，我就
叫傭人在花園裏擺張桌子，拿瓶酒來款待他倆。我把自己那把椅子安置在那個墓
坑上面，然後坐下來，心裏纔覺得踏實多了，確信不會有人攪擾那裏。我們一邊
閑聊，一邊喝酒。
他們問候我太太，希望這樣冒昧來訪沒有驚擾她，沒有把她嚇跑。我衹好支
支吾吾地把孩子丟失的事跟他倆講了。那位我從未謀面的軍官是個喜愛兩眼盯視
地面的傢夥，他的目光一直沒擡起來。這一神態真把我嚇壞了。我沒法認為他沒
看出什麽破綻，沒起什麽疑心。我連忙問他是否認為——可又住口了。他溫和地
望着我說：“您的意思是說那個孩子給害死了嗎？哦，不會的！一個人殺死一個
可憐的小孩兒，又會得到什麽好處呢？”我其實可以告訴他那人能獲得再好不過
的好處哩，可我沒吭聲，嚇得渾身直打哆嗦。
他倆誤解了我那陣激動，安慰我那個孩子遲早會給找到的。可這是什麽撫慰
啊！這當兒，我們忽然聽到一陣犬吠聲，兩條大獵狗闖進了花園，一聲接一聲地
狂吠不止。
“大獵狗！”兩位來客異口同聲驚呼道。
這無須乎告訴我！我儘管一輩子沒見過如此兇猛的獵狗，心裏卻一下子就明
白它們是幹什麽來的。我緊緊按着椅子扶手，既說不出話來。也動彈不了啦。
“是純種獵狗咧，”我原來那位同事又添說道，“大概是給帶出來訓練的，
掙脫了主人！”
他倆轉身望着那兩條狗，它們朝地面嗅來嗅去，煩躁不安，竄前竄後，瘋狂
地打轉轉，絲毫不理會我們，可一次又一次地吠叫，然後又朝地面嗅個不停，一
心在尋找什麽。衹見它們比剛纔更仔細地嗅聞起來，儘管還很煩躁，卻不再亂竄
亂轉了，而是越來越近集中在我坐的那塊地方聞來聞去。最後那兩條獵狗終於聞
到我坐着的那把椅子的地點，擡起頭來嚎叫。力圖扯碎那把擋住它們嗅聞下面地
面的椅子。我從兩位來客的神態中覺出自己暴露了驚慌失措的表情。
“它們嗅到了要找的獵物。”兩人同時說。
“它們什麽也沒嗅到！”我喊道。
“看在上帝份上，快讓開！”我那位朋友挺認真地說，“否則你就會讓它們
撕扯成碎片啦！”
“那就讓它們把我扯裂吧。我决不離開這塊地方！”我喊道，“難道讓狗把
人轟趕到丟臉的死亡那條路上去嗎？轟開它們，打死它們！”
“這下面必定隱藏着什麽不可告人的秘密！”那位陌生的軍官一邊說，一邊
抽出寶劍。“以查理王的名義，幫我把這人拿下！”
儘管我像個瘋子那樣掙紮，又啃又咬，他們倆還是很快就把我製服了。接着，
我的老天！我看到那兩條獵犬像淘水那樣把那塊土地刨開。
我還能再說什麽呢？我跪倒在地，渾身發顫，懺悔地交代了我的全部罪行，
乞求饒恕。我曾經試圖抵賴，現在終於低頭認罪。我為此受到審判，並被處以極
刑。我失魂落魄，沒有勇氣像個男子漢那樣面對我的末日，面對我的滅亡。我得
不到任何人的憐惜安慰，我既無赦免的希望，也無朋友。我妻子幸虧暫時失去了
知覺，並不知曉我的悲慘結局。我現在獨自一人連帶我的罪惡，給關在這個地牢
裏，明天就要嗚呼哀哉下地獄啦。