1. Dickens's Democracy in America

A Tale represents the culmination of Dickens's two-decade-long rumination on democracy that was inspired by his 1842 American tour. The novel introduces an American subtext in its very first pages, which identifies the setting as the era of not one but two world-historical events: the American as well as the French revolutions. In the opening chapter, “The Period,” the narrator refers to the first Continental Congress of 1774, calling it an occurrence of great “importan[ce] to the human race,” and when Darnay is tried for treason for being a “foe of England and a friend of the United States,” evidence of his treachery includes his “here[tical]” admiration of George Washington, who, he claims, “might gain almost as great a name in history as George the Third.”Footnote ²⁰ Much like young Darnay, young Dickens admired America, but his 1842 tour was disillusioning. A letter written midway through his visit expresses his well-known assessment: “This is not the Republic of my imagination” (Letters, 3:156).Footnote ²¹ Although the reasons for Dickens's disappointment were various,Footnote ²² American Notes implies that virtually all of the nation's failings (from the uncouth manners of its people to the monotony of its landscape) are manifestations of the dangers of democracy that preoccupied Victorian political theorists. Dickens targets, first, the deindividualizing sameness of America's egalitarian society, which he describes using what I call a rhetoric of cloning, and, second, the isolating and brutalizing effects of American individualism, which are emblematized by the figurative and literal solitary confinement he witnesses at the Perkins Institution and at the Eastern State Penitentiary. Dickens's understanding of the relation of American slavery to democracy deserves special notice. Despite his deeply racist assumptions about Blacks, Dickens, like many Britons, explicitly denounced American slavery as antidemocratic.Footnote ²³ I would argue, however, that in American Notes Dickens ultimately represents slavery as a grotesque expression of the asociality produced by democracy. The concluding chapter, “Slavery,” which documents not only southern slaveholders’ torture of enslaved people but also whites’ frequent attacks on each other, aims to demonstrate the role of chattel slavery in the normalization of the social violence that is a hallmark for Dickens of life in America.

The rhetoric of cloning is a convention of mid-Victorian critique of democratic representative government, one of the modern inventions (such as money, the factory system, and statistical analysis) that depend on the “notion of functional equivalence.”Footnote ²⁴ Nathan Hensley explains that when Thomas Carlyle and other conservatives dismissed universal suffrage as a “‘count of Heads,’” they registered an objection to “a shift in the matrix of social relations toward the number”—to a “metaphysics of counting”—that was foundational for democratic liberalism's conception of citizens as “exchangeable units” whose votes are equal.Footnote ²⁵ Mid-Victorian political thinkers’ frequent denunciation of democracy as “government by numbers” signals a keen awareness of and hostility toward this theoretical shift, as does their recourse to a rhetoric that figures the democratic masses as a collection of identical units or clones. Although the rhetoric of cloning depends on conditions of modernity that only fully emerge in the nineteenth century, it builds on well-established iconographies that represented the masses as a single inarticulate body (a chaos or a sea) or as a many-headed monster (a Hydra). These iconographies, it is important to note, have been deployed by representatives of the state throughout modern European and American history to delegitimize the demands of oppressed groups (the lower classes, colonial subjects, and enslaved people) while authorizing their violent suppression.Footnote ²⁶ A passage from Mill's On Liberty illustrates the extent to which the rhetoric of cloning itself encodes intersecting fears of class and racial Others. In a chapter titled “Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being,” Mill contends that democratic political reforms have worked in tandem with improvements in “education,” “communication,” and “commerce” to diminish individual eccentricity and produce “a general similarity among mankind” (81). He rails against the uniformity of a British people whose class differences have been leveled, reducing everyone to functionally identical units: “[T]hey now read the same things, listen to the same things, see the same things, go to the same places, have their hopes and fears directed to the same objects, have the same rights and liberties, and the same means of asserting them” (81; emphasis mine). As Uday Singh Mehta explains in his account of the imperialist foundations of British liberalism, sameness and stasis challenge Mill's theory of civilization as ceaseless progress.Footnote ²⁷ For Mill, then, democratic improvements paradoxically threaten to turn Britain into a nation comparable to China, where, according to the philosopher's imperialist logic, the “ideal of making all people alike” has led the civilization to stall for “thousands of years” (81, 80). W. J. T. Mitchell contends that, in contemporary discourse, the clone is a sign of both “terror” and “the Other.”Footnote ²⁸ Mill's vision of a future Britain in which all people have become the same—threatening progress and, so, life—suggests that the figure of the clone begins to serve this function in the nineteenth century. In Dickens's writing on America, the clone, particularly the acephalic or headless clone, emerges as the central symbol of the power of modern democracy to create conditions of terror: assimilation and isolation.Footnote ²⁹

Throughout American Notes, Dickens identifies sameness as one of America's most salient and disturbing defects, suggesting that the conditions of democratic equality undermine the individual distinctions that establish identity. In his “Concluding Remarks,” Dickens aims his criticism at the commercial men whom he encounters in small towns—men so similar that he reports having the uncanny feeling that he “meet[s] the very same people [he] had left behind [him].”Footnote ³⁰ But the fault of likeness or similarity is endemic to the nation as a whole. The miniature community Dickens joins on a steamboat to Cincinnati shows that America lacks “diversity of character”: “The people are all alike. . . . They travel about on the same errands, say and do the same things in exactly the same manner, and follow in the same dull cheerless round” (176–77). When Dickens and two policemen tour the impoverished Five Points district of New York City, he draws on a foundational racist trope to represent the free Black women he encounters as indistinguishable from each other. Invading a boarding house room at night, Dickens observes “heaps of [startled] negro women . . . their white teeth chattering, and their bright eyes glistening and winking on all sides with surprise and fear, like the countless repetition of one astonished African face in some strange mirror” (100). What accounts for the cloning that Dickens sees everywhere in America? While the nation's political institutions are a factor—Dickens complains of the “constant repetition” he experiences when visiting state legislatures (152)—American Notes suggests that the nation's political and social character is fundamentally shaped by the land. Features of the American West typically celebrated for their distinctiveness are instead described by Dickens as more of the same: the Mirror Prairie is “oppressive in its barren monotony” (202). The “hateful” Mississippi River emerges as a resonant symbol of America's terrifying ability to assimilate and homogenize. “[T]wo or three miles” of “running liquid mud,” the river poses a metaphysical threat as it transforms everything it absorbs into a mass of filth: its banks are littered with “rot[ted]” houses, “rank unwholesome vegetation,” and “bones” of dead settlers (190–91).

Although America's ability to enforce sameness troubles Dickens, he is more profoundly disturbed by the democratic nation's commitment to the theory and practice of sovereign individualism, which leads to the fragmentation of the nation's social body and the brutalization of its citizens. Here Dickens's critique sets him at odds with Mill, a Victorian defender of individual sovereignty, and aligns him with Tocqueville. Mill's On Liberty effectively defines liberty as individual sovereignty, maintaining that people's absolute authority over their “own bod[ies] and mind[s]” guards individual particularity against the leveling tendencies of modernity (14). But for Tocqueville, as for Dickens, the unwavering commitment to individual self-governance can itself undermine individual difference by eroding social feeling and thus the social basis of identity. In the concluding chapters of Democracy in America, where Tocqueville reassesses the threats facing the nation, he targets the dangers posed not by the tyrannous majority but by the radically independent individual. Looking toward America's political future, he “see[s] an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others. . . . [H]e exists only in himself and for himself alone” (663). America risks becoming a nation of “strangers” who, in a suggestive phrase, “revolve on themselves alone.” As Tocqueville's translators remark, for the philosopher, “the democratic state” is finally “an asocial state of sovereign individuals.”Footnote ³¹

In American Notes, Dickens offers countless examples of Americans’ asociality, each designed to demonstrate the pathological individualism that leads them to deny the existence of a social world comprising other people. The writer is exercised by tobacco spitting, a transgression of physical decorum that he reads as an expression of social aggression. An extended description of two men chewing on a boat imagines that they create a “magic circle [of tobacco juice], within whose limits no intruders dared to come” (126). For Dickens, as for Tocqueville, this characteristically American fixation on self is a byproduct of the politics of individual independence. A passage criticizing a steamboat captain who refuses to leave on time includes the following barb: “if the law were to bind down a free and independent citizen to keep his word with the public [and leave on time], what would become of the liberty of the subject?” (173). At moments in American Notes, Dickens seems amused by the national obsession with the “liberty of the subject.” In New York, he encounters an endearing “republican pig” who roams the streets of the city “mingling with the best society, on equal . . . footing” but remaining stubbornly “solitary” (97, 96). What captures the novelist's imagination, however, is the nightmarish possibility that America's preoccupation with self-governance will lead to the extinction of individual identity, a figurative death that Dickens associates with the total isolation of Laura Bridgman at the Perkins Institution and of prisoners at the Eastern State Penitentiary.

The motifs that Dickens introduces in his accounts of these institutions—live burial, hooding, and facelessness—anticipate the organizing motifs of A Tale and thereby illuminate the novel's political subtext. When Dickens meets the central figure of the chapter devoted to the institution, Bridgman, she is both fully capable of expressing her individuality and fully integrated into the institution's community. In explaining her history, however, Dickens turns the disabled girl into a metaphor of the risk of sovereign individualism pushed to the limit: loss of personal and social identity. Bridgman enters the asylum in a state of isolation, unable to see, hear, speak, or smell. Her doctor, Samuel Gridley Howe, whose case history is quoted at length by Dickens, resorts to gothic tropes to characterize her absolutely solitary condition after her first year of treatment: “her mind dwells in darkness and stillness, as profound as that of a closed tomb at midnight” (45). Bridgman's separation from self and from others is so profound that she exists in a “closed tomb,” a state of living death. Although the girl's radical isolation is the result of physical impairment rather than political philosophy, American Notes treats solitariness as a defining danger of democracy, most obviously in the chapter on Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, the prison that pioneered solitary confinement.Footnote ³² For Dickens and his Victorian readers, Philadelphia was the symbolic capital of America's political system: both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were debated and adopted in the city.

Dickens's account of solitary confinement treats it as an illustration of the way America's ethos of sovereign individualism produces a social isolation that undermines both collective and individual life. The prisoners are “buried alive” by the institution's claustrophobic architecture and its dehumanizing administrative procedures (113). During their incarceration, inmates are not allowed to leave their cells or communicate with friends or family, and their names and biographies are unknown within the prison walls. Despite efforts to express their individual interests and desires through creative activity—Dickens notes clock making, painting, and poetry writing—prisoners experience such a profound disorientation that, on their release, most are unable to “sign their names” (118). Although the novelist admits that the Eastern State Penitentiary was designed, based on Quaker principles, to encourage individual reflection and “reformation” (it was the first true penitentiary in America), he insists that the system of discipline strips prisoners of the markers of individual identity and assimilates them to one another (111). In a letter to John Forster, Dickens observed that men and women who were “unlike naturally, become alike, and strikingly alike, in this place” (Letters, 3:111). The oppressive anonymity and “alike[ness]” of the prisoners are evoked in haunting images of hooding and facelessness. Dickens repeatedly notes that inmates enter the penitentiary with hoods on their heads (113, 118). When he attempts to imagine the experience of a new inmate, he speculates that the man would be maddened by his inability to see the faces of the prisoners who occupy the cells beside him: “He has no idea of the face [of the inmate held in the adjacent cell]”; the other inmates’ “hidden [facial] features torment him to death” (119). Dickens's account of Philadelphia's penitentiary delivers what is arguably his most deeply felt critique of American democracy. America does not simply assimilate everything to itself; the nation, “a body without a head,” creates a people in its own image—a mass of faceless clones.

2. Dickens on Democracy in France (and England)

When A Tale is reread through the double lenses of American Notes and the reform debate of the late 1850s, the novel's engagement with the questions around democracy emerges in stark relief. Setting the novel in the late eighteenth century, Dickens attempts to discover the origins of the threats that he and others believed menaced mid-Victorian Britain. Although A Tale's equation of democracy with terror (i.e., with strategies of assimilation and isolation) is distinctive, the novel's history of modern democracy builds on narratives that were well established in nineteenth-century political history and theory. On one hand, Dickens identifies France as the nation that invented political democracy: revolutionary Paris offers a vivid illustration of the power of majority rule to turn people into headless clones, demonstrating the horrors of democracy as sameness. On the other, Dickens represents England as the European nation responsible for social democracy: the society of Georgian London is in the process of being leveled but also fragmented by class striving, exemplifying the dangers of democracy as difference.Footnote ³³

For an example of A Tale's insistence that the revolution enforces a politics of sameness, consider the description of the storming of the Bastille in “Echoing Footsteps.” The chapter works in part with commonplace representations of the masses as a singular natural force—a “living sea”—that absorbs the individual into an organic whole (223). However, this conventional iconography is also revised to underscore that this “sea” is not one entity but a collection of “human drops,” a social aggregate made up of functionally identical units. Indeed, the narrator emphasizes the way in which each and every revolutionary becomes alike in the moment of revolt: “Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever strain.  . . . Every living creature there, held life as of no account . . .” (223; emphasis mine). The term “Jacques,” adopted earlier in the novel by a handful of working-class insurrectionaries, becomes every person's name in this chapter, literalizing the idea of mass cloning. Representing revolution as work akin to industrial labor, the narrator describes the revolutionaries as a social aggregate made of identical and, it seems, endlessly reproducible numbers: “Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand, Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand” (224).

Dickens was, of course, not alone in depicting the French Revolution as a movement that expressed a fundamental hostility toward the individual. According to James Schmidt, G. W. F. Hegel interpreted the revolution as a frightening consequence of the tension, central to Enlightenment thinking, between the “particular, individual” will and the “general will”—a tension that the Terror attempted to resolve by “destroy[ing] everything that st[ood] in opposition to the general will.”Footnote ³⁴ George Henry Lewes, in an 1849 biography of Maximilien Robespierre, attributed this destructive impulse to a personal moral failing, arguing that the architect of the Terror “had faith in abstract ideas, . . . [but a] perfect heartlessness towards every individual.”Footnote ³⁵ What is important about A Tale is that the novel proposes that the French Revolution's subordination of the individual is a product of republican France's experiment with political democracy. Dickens, anticipating some modern assessments, represents the Terror as a period in which a tyrannical majority wielded the guillotine to enforce its will. When Ernest Defarge challenges the demand, expressed by his wife and her cohort, to “exterminat[e]” every branch of the Evrémonde line by guillotine, Dickens's narrator remarks that the man's objection represents “a weak minority” (353, 354). When Charles Darnay (né Evrémonde) reflects on his condition after being condemned to death for a second time, he likewise implies that the decision of the revolutionary tribunal reflects the will of the majority: he has been “virtually sentenced by the millions” (360). As a historian of the revolution, Dickens, much like Daniel Arasse, suggests that the revolutionary government used execution by guillotine not only to enact the “transfer of individuality to the collective” but also to demonstrate the political power of majority over minority.Footnote ³⁶ Arasse even speculates that the basket which held the severed heads might be compared to the democratic “ballot box”: it “collect[ed] one by one the minority of individual wills which have set themselves apart from the singular general will” (83). Dickens would appear to agree.

Arasse, noting that the executions proceeded “one by one,” emphasizes that the guillotine, like the ballot box, reduces individuals to functionally equivalent and countable numbers. In A Tale, Dickens likewise represents the revolution as radically democratic, not only because it empowers a tyrannical majority, but also, and more fundamentally, because it pursues a logic of absolute equality. John Bowen rightly observes that A Tale's preoccupation with numbers, specifically with “the conflict” of “very small” and “very large” numbers, is a sign of the novelist's interest in “[t]he central problem of modern liberty and democracy.”Footnote ³⁷ I would add that in locating this problem during the Terror, Dickens dramatizes the potential lethality of democracy's commitment to a numerical worldview. In an early passage focused on the knitting women who will celebrate the daily executions by guillotine, the narrator identifies the coming political violence with the action of “counting dropping heads” (194). Later, when the revolution is inaugurated by the freeing of prisoners from the Bastille, the novel underscores that revolutionary justice is based on a mathematical logic: “Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads on pikes” (230). The calculated equivalence of the two clauses—each is seven syllables long—implies that the revolutionaries are motivated less by the ancient retributive principle of “an eye for an eye” than by a modern logic of justice as (ac)counting. Although Madame Defarge and her followers are quickly dissatisfied with punishment based on simple equivalence (seven rights are no longer adequate compensation for seven wrongs), the call for ever more heads—even the head of the “poor little seamstress” who is executed alongside Carton (368)—is based on the egalitarian assumption that everyone counts equally. When the narrator, speaking for Dickens, summarizes the causes of the Terror, he concludes by making the point that, no matter the reason for the bloodshed, the violence follows the logic of democratic egalitarianism: “the frightful moral disorder, born of unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference, smote equally without distinction” (360; emphasis mine).

Dickens's identification of the French Revolution with the terrors of democracy is readily apparent; less obvious is his association of democratic difference with late eighteenth-century England. The association is established, however, in two of the book's opening chapters, “The Mail” and “Night Shadows,” both of which portray the social terrain of newly urbanized London as peculiarly democratic: all Londoners are equal in their isolation one from another. “The Mail,” in particular, serves as a riposte to Thomas De Quincey's “The English Mail Coach” (1849). Whereas De Quincey's autobiographical essay celebrates the mail coach as a vehicle of national unity during the Napoleonic Wars, Dickens associates it with a distinctively English feeling of disconnection. The passengers of the coach are “mysteries to one another, as complete as if each had been in his own coach and six, . . . with the breadth of a county between him and the next” (15). In this early chapter of A Tale, as in American Notes, social isolation is figured as facelessness. Trudging alongside the vehicle as it struggles uphill in winter weather, the passengers are “wrapped to the cheek-bones and over the ears” and, as the narrator adds, “hidden . . . from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body” (9). The narrator's strange locution—“hidden . . . from the eyes of the mind”—evokes the passengers’ nonexistence to one another. They, much like Tocqueville's future Americans, seem “withdrawn and apart,” “stranger[s] to the destiny of all the others” (Tocqueville, Democracy, 663).

“Night Shadows” presents this isolating individualism as the great democratic leveler of late eighteenth-century English society. Although the experience of isolation is initially treated as an essential feature of the human condition—“every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other”—the feeling gains specific historical resonance when the narrator imagines that he is a modern urban flâneur who “enter[s] a great city by night” (14). In the narrator's reverie, he is overwhelmed by a sense of his physical and psychic distance from the inhabitants in the buildings that surround him: “every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; . . . every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; . . . every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts is . . . a secret to the heart nearest it” (14–15). Paradoxically, however, the narrator proposes that the consequence of this universal secrecy is a perverse form of social equality. Consider the narrator's description of the working-class Jerry Cruncher: “As to . . . his natural and not to be alienated inheritance [i.e., ‘secrecy’], the messenger on horseback had exactly the same possessions as the King, the first Minster of State, or the richest merchant in London” (15). As a “natural and not to be alienated inheritance,” secrecy is comparable to a natural right in liberal political theory, and its effect is to level democratically the social hierarchy. The working-class Cruncher is equal to the king.

The social danger of the democratic individualism that A Tale locates in England is embodied by Stryver, a class climber whose ambition to rise leads him to treat all others not simply as “strangers” but as rivals. For Dickens, as for Mill, class climbing is one of the strategies by which the social hierarchy is leveled. In On Liberty, Mill stipulates that democratic change requires either “lower[ing] the high” or “rais[ing] the low” (81). In A Tale, Dickens divides these leveling forces between France and England: France's political revolutionaries work collectively to lower those on high, while England's ambitious strivers claw their way up individually from the bottom to the top (or at least the middle) of the social ladder. Although the novel appeared in the same year as Samuel Smiles's paean to social striving, Self-Help, it shares none of Smiles's sunny optimism about the personal and public virtues of social mobility. Dickens instead voices a traditional suspicion of class climbing as quasirevolutionary social practice in which ambitious lower-middle-class men aggressively pursue the property and position of their social betters.Footnote ³⁸ His class climber, Stryver, is an upstart whose relation to the world is defined by aggression: “stout, loud, red, bluff, free from any drawback of delicacy, [Stryver] had a pushing way of shouldering himself (morally and physically) into companies and conversations, that augured well for his shouldering his way up in life” (83; emphasis mine). And Dickens leaves no doubt as to the political charge of this violence. “Shouldering” is the action that Dickens's narrator will later attribute to the French revolutionaries who hone their weapons at the grindstone outside of Tellson's Parisian offices in preparation for the September Massacres; the men “should[er] one another to get next at the sharpening stone” (272). Most tellingly, the language of the novel associates Stryver with Madame Defarge and her first act of violence: a beheading that points to her status as an agent of democracy. Just as she “hew[s] off [the] head” of the governor of the Bastille, so does Stryver “hew away the lower staves of the ladder on which he mounted” (229, 90; emphasis mine). Dickens's alignment of Stryver and the revolutionary suggests that Dickens would have concurred with Marx and Engels when they claimed that, “historically,” the emergent middle classes “have played a most revolutionary part.”Footnote ³⁹ For Dickens, however, the revolutionary political and social transformations that took place in late eighteenth-century France and England are responsible for producing not capitalism but democracy.

3. Dickens's Democratic Utopianism

Thus far, I have emphasized that A Tale transforms the fears of democracy that haunted the mid-Victorian political imagination into a nightmare of democracy as terror. But the novel moves well beyond the articulation of these anxieties. Dickens treats the fictional social space of the novel as a laboratory in which to experiment with strategies for representing the democratic individual and masses, strategies that avoid the pitfalls of assimilating sameness, on one hand, and fragmenting asociality, on the other. A number of recent critics have argued that, in his late-career writing, Dickens makes deliberate efforts to develop anti-individualist conceptions of character that respond to challenges that modernity poses for traditional notions of the subject.Footnote ⁴⁰ The experiments that I identify in A Tale involve characterization, and they illustrate the extent to which Dickens regards democratic social and political change as a catalyst for new forms of fictional practice. Although the novel's exploration of unconventional modes of characterization is wide-ranging, two experiments illustrate his efforts to resolve the political risks of sameness or difference: first, Carton, a character who seems both to transcend individual identity and to maintain his individual particularity; and second, moments of utopian democratic fantasy in which Dickens theorizes the existence of a political realm in which every person's voice and thoughts are heard without the loss of individual particularity.

Carton is less a character from the realist tradition than a fictional construct deliberately designed to address the various problematics that the novel describes. Even a cursory survey of the scholarly debate around his final, melodramatic act—his replacement of Darnay on the scaffold—demonstrates how Carton both embodies and resolves the risks of democratic representation that preoccupy A Tale. According to Frances Ferguson, Carton's Christ-like act of self-sacrifice serves as evidence of the markedly “unindividual” nature of the character's action.Footnote ⁴¹ For other scholars, however, this act of martyrdom illustrates not his transcendence of individualism but his indulgence of “narcissistic fantasy.”Footnote ⁴² As John Kucich has argued, the vision of Lucie and Darnay's future life that is attributed to Carton in the final hypothetical speech—Carton “pictures Darnay's own son named after him, along with a grandson also named after him”—enacts the logic of rivalrous individualism that his sacrifice should disavow.Footnote ⁴³ These contradictory readings are, I suggest, produced by the pressure of Dickens's strenuous and self-conscious effort to create a figure who bridges sameness and difference, modeling a mode of identity that is simultaneously selfless and selfish, nonindividual and narrowly individualist. Long before his death, Carton is capable, at once, of totally abandoning the personal desires that mark individual identity (he treats himself with utter “indifference” [86]) and, at the same time, of cultivating intensely private longings (most obviously, his secret love for Lucie). To some extent, Carton resembles what Elaine Hadley calls the “abstracted individua[l]” postulated by nineteenth-century liberal theory: an individual capable both of a public perspective that rises above the “fractious[ness]” of personal or class interest and of a private perspective that resists the “unthinking majoritarian will.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Indeed, the final image of Carton responds directly to the image of the democratic body politic that I discussed at the beginning of this essay. As Richard Maxwell explains, the narrator's account of Carton's hypothetical speech is “given to us after the narration of the execution” and “thus appears to be posthumous.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Dickens seems to imagine that the speech takes place in the moment “when [Carton's] severed head—as was the custom—was held up for the crowd to view’” (Maxwell, “Introduction,” xxvii). If American democracy was a “quarrelling” body without a head for Dickens, Carton in this final scene is presented as the impossible ideal of the composed democratic citizen: a speaking head without a body.

A Tale's most radical experiment with character, however, resides in its attempts to imagine a strategy for representing the masses that would encompass everyone and preserve rather than assimilate their irreducible particularity. In these moments of utopian fantasy, Dickens builds on Charles Babbage's idiosyncratic theory, explained in The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837), that the “globe” contains an eternal record of every person's “words and actions” (109).Footnote ⁴⁶ As previous critics have noted, Dickens evinces an interest in Babbage in particular, and in “contemporary theories of sound and sound technology” more generally, throughout his career.Footnote ⁴⁷ The novelist owned a first edition of the Treatise and referred directly to Babbage's sonic theory in Dombey and Son (1846–48) and in an 1869 speech.Footnote ⁴⁸ Babbage's claims about the persistence of sound are certainly among his most memorable. He describes the air as “one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or even whispered” (113), and he further speculates that a being with “unbounded [mathematical] knowledge” would be able not only to decipher this historical record but also to predict “future history” based on the inevitable motion of the atoms activated by past sounds (111, 112). Although A Tale alludes to this theory of sound, Dickens is equally invested in Babbage's general thesis that all of the elements of the globe—“earth, air, and ocean”—act as recording media and that they retain impressions even of acts or “human agency” (113, 114). The novel in fact extends the reach of Babbage's thesis to propose that light is capable of recording all human expression, including intangible thoughts. Most crucially for this analysis, Dickens moves beyond Babbage's contention that the globe-as-recording-device serves a moral function—for Babbage, it acts as an “eternal witnes[s]” to human misdeeds—and explores the theory's political implications (113).

A Tale builds incrementally toward its proposal that the natural elements might contain a total democratic record of human speech, acts, and thoughts. Dickens begins with a pair of passages that suggest that light serves as a recording medium or, more specifically, that mirrors, as reflectors of light, contain indelible visual traces of the individuals exposed to them. Early in the novel, when Lorry meets Lucie en route to Paris, the sight of the young woman triggers in him a memory of holding the infant Lucie in his arms. The narrator compares this fleeting memory to a fleeting trace of “breath along the surface of the gaunt pier glass behind him”; he then offers a revealing description of the “negro cupids, several headless and all cripples” that decorate the mirror's elaborately carved frame (23). In this passage, the mirror is linked both to the act of remembering (of recording and reproducing the past) and to democracy and its abuses: the “headless” and “negro” figures explicitly recall the descriptions of injured runaway slaves that conclude American Notes as well as Dickens's image of American democracy as a “body without a head” (23). The set of associations in the passage—mirror / memory / democracy / violence—reappears only a few chapters later in the description of the mirror that hangs above Darnay's head during his trial for allegedly passing information to America during the Revolutionary War: “Crowds of the wicked and wretched had been reflected in it, and had passed from its surface and this earth's together. Haunted in a most ghastly manner that abominable place would have been, if the glass could ever have rendered back its reflexions, as the ocean is one day to give up its dead” (66). Here, the mirror emerges as a potential technology for storing and reproducing visual memory, for “render[ing] back its reflexions.” Although the value of this record of “wicked[ness]” seems uncertain—could it be harnessed for the purposes of moral judgment at the end of time (when “the ocean . . . give[s] up its dead”) or would reproducing this record only “haunt” the present?—Dickens soon contemplates an alternative possibility. A record of human activity might function as a form of political representation.

Dickens exploits the political implications of Babbage's theory through the motif of “echoing footsteps” that anticipate the coming revolution. In “Hundreds of People,” the chapter that introduces the motif, the narrator observes that although the Manette home is remote from “the raging streets,” it is “a wonderful place for echoes” (96). Its corner location has turned the structure into a device for detecting and transmitting sound: “It was such a curious corner in its acoustical properties, such a peculiar Ear of a place” (102). A reader might initially assume that the “acoustical properties” of this “peculiar Ear” are comparable to those of St. Paul's Whispering Gallery, a space whose concave architecture allows sound waves to travel around it, so that even a faint sound produced on one side can be heard clearly on the other. Lorry and Miss Pross suggest an interpretation of this sort when they conclude that the echoes of footsteps are sounds of “hundreds of people” approaching the house from a distance—in other words, that the acoustical properties of the corner amplify sound so that distant noises seem close (102). It is Lucie who recognizes the sounds as echoes not of present action but, as Babbage's theory allows, of future history: they are “echoes of all the footsteps that are coming by-and-by into our lives” (107). Jay Clayton has argued that, in the Christmas story The Chimes (1844), Dickens explores Babbage's suggestion that sound has a “collective character”: the novelist represents the chimes central to the narrative as capable of “reproduc[ing] the inchoate thoughts and words of a people as a whole” (“Dickens Tapes,” 36, 34). In A Tale, Dickens likewise develops Babbage's notion that sound—or, more precisely, the impressions of sounds contained in the atmosphere—has the potential to represent “the people.” Carton, the character granted a privileged historical perspective in the novel, announces this interpretation when he describes the echoes as the noise of “a great crowd bearing down upon us” (107). Later in the novel, when the distant “echoes” heard at the Manette home manifest themselves as the “[h]eadlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps” of the people storming the Bastille, Dickens has provocatively reframed Babbage's theory in political terms (222). The atmosphere is a living record of the violent political agency of the people, their “footsteps” standing in metonymically for their action and voice.

The violence and anonymity of the people in the “echoing footsteps” motif might suggest that this moment more closely resembles a dystopian nightmare than a utopian fantasy. But the novel offers readers at least one full-blown vision of the utopian possibility opened up by Babbage's theory: a democratic record of all human speech, action, and thought in which each individual can be distinguished. The relevant passage, which is both easy to miss and jaw-dropping, appears in a chapter that describes the aftermath of the murder of Monsieur the Marquis, one of the events that precipitates the revolution. In this way, the mode of representation that the passage describes is positioned as an alternative to the dangerous forms of political representation that the revolution will establish. The narrator looks out from the dead marquis's chateau at the village, his range of vision expanding to encompass the province and, finally, the whole nation of France:

The phrase “concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line” modifies “France,” the whole of which—evoked by the collection of nouns that serve as the subject of the sentence—is perceived by the narrator as a sliver that forms the horizon of his range of vision. The image is one of multum in parvo, a multitude in a small space, and it is developed in the next sentence, as the narrator's gaze pivots upward to see a “twinkling star,” a small point of light that likewise represents a “whole world.” In the final sentence, the narrator, who abruptly adopts a cosmic perspective and looks back at the earth, proposes that the light emanating from the planet records not only each individual's virtuous and vicious “acts” but their “thoughts,” the immaterial bases of a “responsible creature['s]” moral decisions. Pushing past Babbage's proposition that physical elements record human speech and acts, Dickens posits that light contains data of every consciousness ever in existence. Although the reference to “sublime” intelligence implies that only an omniscient being (God? the narrator?) will be able to decipher this record of democratic expression, in comparing this act of decoding to the scientific analysis of light rays—a subject of popular interest in the period and of an article in All the Year Round—Dickens leaves open the possibility that a future technology might perform this political function.Footnote ⁴⁹

In the introduction to this essay, I describe A Tale as a historical novel of the future. Many aspects of Dickens's deeply ambivalent exploration of democracy feel uncannily prescient. Dickens's insistence that democracy is contradictory—that it depends on principles of both similarity and difference, each of which poses dangers—echoes Chantal Mouffe's claim that modern liberal democracy involves a paradox: it is the product of “two logics,” the logics of democratic “equality” and of individual “liberty,” which are “incompatible” and can never be “perfectly reconciled.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Dickens's fantasy of an arena in which each person counts equally and individually is an attempt to evade what Mouffe calls democracy's “constitutive tension” (Paradox, 5). What I find especially interesting about Dickens's evasion is that it seems to prefigure the recent fraught efforts of such technological utopians as Mark Zuckerberg to represent the internet as a “democratizing force” that “giv[es] everyone a voice.”Footnote ⁵¹ Fred Turner, a media historian whose work seeks to explain the American left's embrace of technology, has traced the belief that democracy requires the “freeing of individual voices” from the post–World War II era, when “collective individualism” was seen as the antidote to fascist “self-erasure,” to the contemporary moment, when the internet is championed as a tool for creating “more egalitarian societies” (“Machine Politics,” 30).Footnote ⁵² Although technological utopianism has been challenged from various perspectives—Shoshana Zuboff's recent claim that the networking of daily life ultimately supports “surveillance capitalism” is especially noteworthyFootnote ⁵³—Turner emphasizes that the idea of “individualized, expressive democracy” is itself a foundational problem (“Machine Politics,” 30). The idea of “expressive democracy” leads citizens to undervalue the “laws and institutions” (such as voting, representative legislatures, constitutions) that establish rules by which individual voices count as political expression—and once these “laws and institutions” are treated as secondary to democratic life, they are at risk of being undermined (“Machine Politics,” 32). The question of how modern democracies die has become urgent in recent years, and the utopian conception of democracy as an institution that allows everyone to speak and be heard is arguably part of the answer.Footnote ⁵⁴ My reading of Dickens's A Tale suggests that a full accounting of this utopian political ideal might well extend backward into the long nineteenth century. Dickens's fears of democratic, rather than fascist, “self-erasure” generated a compensatory dream of a panvocal political realm. Did other Victorian thinkers share this dream? How might such Victorian efforts to reimagine democracy help us to explain, and perhaps avoid, the perils of our own political moment?