Inequality In A Tale Of Two Cities

Dickens was deeply interested in examining the class struggle of the Victorian era. The polarisation of the income gap is captured by the often-quoted beginning of his novel A Tale of Two Cities; ‘it was the best of times, it was the worst of times’. Hewitt explains that

‘For lower-income people, increasing deflation, made it harder for them to pay back loans; the values of loans were less at the time when they took them out’.

It was hardly a Victorian phenomenon that money was a dividing factor between classes, but the growing industrialisation and the emergence of the modern profiteering corporation, heightened the tension between the “haves” and “have nots”. Dickens experienced poverty first-hand when his father was imprisoned for …show more content…
When you review, over several of his novels, his characters and their destinies, what is remarkable is how well they survive their ordeals. Oliver Twist is adopted and educated by Mr Brownlow; in The Old Curiosity Shop Kit marries Barbara and tells the story of Little Nell to his adoring children. David Copperfield marries Agnes. Esther weds Woodcourt. Pip ends up, in the published ending of Great Expectations, with Estella. All these happy characters have passed through dreadful misadventures but they have triumphed, and the reader need not worry about them from now on – their place in middle-class society is secure, and their happiness is guaranteed. This is not an implausible conclusion, the human spirit is remarkable in its resilience. People can undergo terrible deprivation and suffering, and still survive with their spirit and personality intact. Yet the reaction of a different great writer, like Dostoevsky, is that ‘when this happens it is not very interesting’. Of course, this partly comes down to personal taste and subjectivity, but Dickens continuously perpetrates the idea, as Orwell puts it, that ‘doing nothing [living off dividends] constitutes a genuinely happy picture’. The struggle to end the English Victorian novel is not unique to Dickens, and brilliant storyteller though he is, we might be left wondering if he has not left the story in a kind of stasis, different but not entirely distinct from the one that we found Miss Havisham, Miss Flite and the Lord Chancellor in. If poverty, for Dickens, is too gruesome, the blacking factory too starkly remembered to represent happiness, and the gentility of the upper-class is too rooted in the oppression of the lower, then only the emerging Victorian middle-class, the ultimate moderation, can be where we leave the typical Dickensian hero and