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Page 21
Dickens had begun the novel, significantly, with the title "Nobody's Fault" in mind, but later entitled the work after its heroine, Amy Dorrit. Amy is the daughter of the "Father of the Marshalsea," who has been confined in debtors' prison for twenty five years. Arthur Clennam, whose gloomy childhood resembles what David Copperfield's would have been had he been raised by the Murdstones, is a middle-aged man looking for meaning in life. Clennam and Little Dorrit escape the imprisonment of this stultifying society by discovering their love for each other, a love that is difficult to discover since Arthur is so much older than Amy and she has the goodness, and physical resemblance, of a child. Importantly for Dickens, Arthur and Amy are willing to engage the fallen society of London and to attempt to change it. After their wedding Arthur and Amy "went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar." Unlike Esther Summerson and her husband, Arthur and Amy stay in London where they live "a modest life of usefulness and happiness."
On April 30, 1859, Dickens launched the weekly journal, All the Year Round . To get the journal off to a good start, the first installment of A Tale of Two Cities appeared in the inaugural issue and continued in weekly installments until November 26, 1859. Set in the time of the French Revolution, this novel once again looks at the potential for revolutionary violence Dickens had explored in Barnaby Rudge . If the ruling class in England does not take seriously the lesson of the French Revolution, Dickens appears to be saying, such a violent outburst is possible again. While Dickens deplores violence, his sympathies are clearly with the victims of oppression. Only the kind of sacrificial love represented by Sydney Carton's willing sacrifice of himself for his loved ones will be able to prevent such a revolution if society continues along its present course.
