"Unbelieving Chemists": Science, Religion and Politics in A Tale of Two Cities
(above: Sydney Carton at the guillotine, by Frederick Barnard. Source)
At its core, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities is a story of profound injustice, and how a handful of virtuous men and women fight back against it. Dickens' Tale begins nearly a decade before the outbreak of the French Revolution and continues through the Reign of Terror, the bloodiest period of the Revolution which saw over 16 000 people executed by guillotine. It's clear from the tone of Dickens' text that he was horrified by what he learned from his research into these deadly months in 1793 and 1794, around 65 years before he published the A Tale of Two Cities. The constant violence, corruption and misguided laws which characterizes the revolutionary period in Dickens' description nearly lead the heroes of the story to their deaths. Charles Darnay, who abandoned his noble French roots and emigrated to England, returns to France to save a former servant, quickly finds himself in a prison cell in Paris, almost certainly doomed to execution. His wife Lucie and her father Dr. Manette follow him to Paris and search for a way to free him, only to become the targets of a plot by zealous revolutionaries determined to wipe out anyone associated with Darnay's noble family, the Évrémondes. While the reader becomes deeply invested in the fate of these protagonists, Dickens also conveys how typical their experience is in the context of the Reign of Terror: there are thousands more victims of the brutality and injustice of the revolutionary regime.
On the other hand, Dickens seems to understand well the motivation behind the Revolution. He suggests that the people of France were compelled to lash out after decades of exploitation by the callous nobility, who built their fortunes on the labour of expendable peasants. This class is represented by Darnay's uncle whom we see run down a peasant boy in his carriage, then chastise the grieving parents for allowing the child to get in his way. The injustice of the ancien régime is matched by to the injustice of the Reign of Terror -- only the latter is in a concentrated form, as the Reign lasted for less than a year. When Darnay is sentenced to death by guillotine, the narrator laments:
Before that unjust Tribunal, there was little or no order of procedure, ensuring to any accused person any reasonable hearing. There could have been no such Revolution, if all laws, forms, and ceremonies, had not first been so monstrously abused, that the suicidal vengeance of the Revolution was to scatter them all to the winds. (p. 328)
In Dickens' interpretation of the Revolution, both the nobility and the revolutionaries are guilty of a failure to respect the value of human life. And both parties reach this point because they take their values to the point of excess. The nobility did so with their belief in their superiority over the third estate, and now the revolutionaries have done so with their fierce defense of the Republic: anyone who shows the slightest inclination of placing his or her own needs in front of those of the Republic is sent to the guillotine.
One of Dickens' great strengths is his ability to make readers feel like they're a part of the worlds he describes. In A Tale of Two Cities he does so in part by providing details about the heterogeneous mixture of citizens who compose Parisian society on the eve of the Revolution. Dickens lists the sorts of people who latched on to the nobility during the ancien régime hoping to climb the social ladder, and two inclusions in particular seem worth investigating:
Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words, and making card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals . . . (pp. 110-111)
What do chemists have to do with overconfident philosophers, and what makes them unbelievers? In some cases, Dickens' generation used the word "chemist" where we would use the word "pharmacist". But in the Victorian period the word "chemist" increasingly came to refer to those men of science who performed experiments on such substances as gases and metals. This seems to be the meaning that Dickens has in mind in his account of ancien régime France. His reference to the transmutation of metals recalls the alchemical tradition from which modern chemistry developed. Apparently, then, the unbelieving chemists are not simply pharmacists.
But what connection did Dickens identify between chemistry -- or philosophy, for that matter -- and unbelief? It's difficult to say how broadly Dickens defined unbelief, but if he was hinting at dangerous ideas and activities in broad terms then his view may have been informed by certain examples from the time of the Revolution. I recently attended a superb colloquium by Jan Golinski on the chemist, philosopher and poet Humphry Davy (1778-1829). Davy, as Golinski argues, was a public figure who developed several different personae. In different contexts, the public might view him as a philosopher, or a genius, or as an "enthusiast" -- that is, someone who takes their beliefs or behaviours to a dangerous extreme. The "enthusiast" persona reflects wariness about Davy's famous experiments with nitrous oxide which, when inhaled, produced in his experimental subjects a giddy euphoria so novel that they struggled to find words to describe it. Yet, even if he was seen as an enthusiast, Davy had no particular association with religious heterodoxy. He is presumably not quite the sort of figure that Dickens had in mind.
To clarify what Dickens means by "unbelieving chemists", it's helpful to turn to other moments in A Tale of Two Cities when Dickens introduces both scientific and religious in the same breath. During the part of the story set in London, Dickens describes the shady activities of Jerry Cruncher who works as an odd-jobs man for the protagonists' friend, Mr. Lorry. Jerry, we learn, supplements his income by robbing graves, but he seeks to keep this shameful fact from his family. When his curious son asks him what is meant by the colloquialism "Resurrection-Man", Jerry tries to deflect the question by replying that a Resurrection-Man is someone who deals in "Scientific goods." (p. 170) Here the reader is meant to chuckle at the uneducated Jerry's rather liberal use of the word "Scientific", but nevertheless Dickens uses this episode to create a dual association with scientific activities in the late eighteenth century: a purveyor of "Scientific goods" might take part in the shameful and illegal activity of grave-robbing, but he also might take part in some sort of resurrection.
When events shift to Paris toward the end of the novel, Dickens echoes this dual association of scientific goods with the shameful and the spiritual. With Charles Darnay imprisoned and destined for the guillotine, his friend and lookalike Sydney Carton arrives in Paris and visits a chemist; Dickens doesn't specify whether he's the unbelieving kind. Carton buys a certain volatile chemical (identified in the footnotes of the Penguin edition only as "some sort of ether"), assuring the chemist that he intends to use it only on himself. What's curious about this episode is that it's bookended by Carton's experience of what Dickens depicts as the two major problems with Paris during the Revolution. On his way to the chemist he encounters a citizen totally desensitized to the violence of the guillotine, who hopes that it will reach a hundred victims by the end of the day. After the chemist, Carton visits a part of the city populated with churches where, these days, "no prayers were said". With the revolutionaries having rejected the Christian religion, Carton finds himself the only one willing to pray, as he repeats to himself Jesus' words in John's Gospel (11:25):
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die. (p. 326)
Like the other protagonists in the Tale, Carton stands out as a man who resists the currents of violence and godlessness in revolutionary Paris. The revolutionaries, in contrast, only worship "Sainte Guillotine". (p. 387) They have taken the place of the violent and sinful nobility who used to oppress them.
By the end of the Tale, Sydney Carton becomes a fairly obvious Christ figure. He sacrifices himself by switching places with Charles Darnay in prison and being executed by the guillotine in his place. As he and dozens of other prisoners are carried by cart to the guillotine, Carton comforts a condemned seamstress who says to him just before her death, "I think you were sent to me by Heaven." In his last moments, Carton repeats his favourite passage from John's Gospel, and as he echoes Jesus' words he effectively applies them to himself: it's he who has resurrected Darney with his sacrifice. After Carton himself is executed, witnesses describe him in the final moments as "sublime and prophetic." Indeed, Dickens treats us to Carton's prophecy as the story concludes, revealing to us what he would have told his friends if he had seen them before his death: his prophecy includes the downfall of the revolutionaries responsible for condemning Darnay and threatening to kill Lucie and Dr. Manette; it also includes a peaceful and prosperous life for his surviving friends. In short, sacrifice, resurrection and prophecy -- the crucial elements of Jesus' life -- are mirrored in Sydney Carton. (pp. 388-390)
Dickens is not very subtle about this parallel, but one detail that's easy to overlook is that Carton's salvation of Darnay requires the help of the ether he purchases from the chemist. When he comes to take Darnay's place, Carton uses the ether to render Darnay unconscious so he won't object to Carton's sacrifice. The chemist might be an unbeliever, but Carton nevertheless uses his product to effect a sort of resurrection. Science, in the right hands, has the power to save the life of the few virtuous characters in Dickens' story.
Still, we have seen that Dickens associates chemistry or science with dangerous ideas and immoral activities. What is the source of this association? Dickens was no opponent of science. Indeed, he was the founder and editor of a journal called All the Year Round which, in addition to printing novels like A Tale of Two Cities in a serial format, featured considerable scientific content. For instance, the journal featured reviews of Darwin's Origin of Species. Nevertheless, A Tale of Two Cities seems to reflect Dickens' concern about how godless and immoral people might respond to scientific ideas.
Dickens may have had in mind any number of troublesome scientific ideas from his own time or the period of the French Revolution, but what springs to my mind is the example of the chemist, Unitarian preacher and political philosopher Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). Though never formally educated in science, Priestley was a prolific experimenter and is generally credited as a co-discoverer of oxygen, which he isolated in a gaseous form. He determined the role of oxygen, or "dephlogisticated air" as he called it, in photosynthesis, animal respiration, and combustion. Priestley fostered his interests in chemistry in physics as an active participant in the Lunar Society, an informal network centred in Birmingham which joined together such leading figures in eighteenth-century English science as the poet and natural historian Erasmus Darwin, and the steam power pioneer James Watt. Yet, although Priestley may be best known as a member of this milieu, this is only one aspect of his complex identity: his religious and political views are at least as important. Priestley preached as a Dissenter, which meant that he diverged from the philosophy of the Anglican Church and campaigned for religious toleration in England. In part due to his theological commitments and in part due to his political philosophy more generally, Priestley was widely suspect of sympathy for the French Revolution. His enemies perceived his views as so inflammatory that they called him "Gunpowder Priestley" and "Gunpowder Joe", nicknames that reflected the explosiveness of both his politics and the chemicals of his experiments.
(This political cartoon from 1790 links Priestley's ideas to "fanaticism" and radical religious ideas. Source)
Priestley played no active role in the events in Paris, but during the Revolution he became embroiled in civil unrest about 120 miles from the other of Dickens two cities. The Birmingham Riots of 1791 are also known as the Priestley riots, since he became the main target of a mob reacting against his perceived support for the revolutionary cause.
(The Birmingham Riots may have been on Dickens mind since the city continued to be the site of frequent riots throughout the nineteenth century over various political and social issues. See Vivian Bird, The Priestley Riots, 1791, and the Lunar Society [Birmingham: Birmingham and Midland Institute, 1994], 11-15.)
The exact causes of the Priestley Riots remain somewhat unclear, but Bird suggests that the rioters targeted the Lunar Society as a group since they were considered a club of Jacobins, or supporters of the French Revolution. In any case, the riots broke out when Priestley organized a dinner on the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille which launched the Revolution. Bird argues that the "anti-Jacobin" mob harassed the dinner guests and proceeded to destroy any buildings associated with revolutionary sympathizers -- as well as Unitarians. Evidently, conservatives in England came to associate the cause of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité with Unitarians and Dissenters, and Priestley was among the their most well-known spokesmen. Thus the rioters proceeded to raze Priestley's house to the ground, including his laboratory and library. Over the next three days, the riot damage estimated to exceed £100 000 pounds of damage in total, which is equivalent to over £5 000 000 today. The rioters only relented when compelled by troops sent by King George III. As for Priestley, he fled Birmingham and ended up in London before leaving England in 1793 for the United States.
If Dickens considered these events when writing the Tale, it's doubtful that he would have approved of the rioters' destructive actions. In an 1869 issue of All the Year Round -- which didn't identify the authors of its articles, but which always had Dickens editorial fingerprints on it -- an article on the history of Birmingham comments on the riots of 1791. The author writes:
Dr. Priestley, Free Thought, the French Revolution, and Unitarianism, were the windmills which the mob attacked with fire and sword, the exciting cause being the simple fact that a number of gentlemen chose to dine together on the fourteenth of July, to commemorate the French Revolution . . . (p. 464)
On the other hand, even if this article reflects Dickens' concern about the needless violence of this event, he may still have been concerned about Priestley's religious views. Dickens took religious matters very seriously, and his commitment to Christianity was well-known; Tolstoy and Dostoevsky called him "the great Christian writer". Emma Mason suggests that the social concerns so evident in his novels are motivated by Dickens' strong religious belief. She also notes that Dickens was not particularly dogmatic, and as a young man he showed some interest in Unitarianism, so he probably wouldn't have been troubled by Priestley's rejection of the Trinity. Yet Priestley was not merely a Unitarian; he was also a materialist. Priestley denied the existence of immaterial substances, including a soul that exists without a body, a philosophical position which critics in England had associated with atheism since the early modern period. Priestley was no atheist, but he certainly fit broader definitions of unbelief.
When we consider the specific objections raised by Priestley's contemporary critics, we can get a sense of why Dickens paired unbelieving chemists with unbelieving philosophers in his retrospective look at the late eighteenth century. Dan Eshet's article on Priestley discusses the close relationship between the chemist's scientific, philosophical and theological views. In his scientific texts Priestley developed an ontology that left no room for immaterial substances. For Priestley, phenomena could be explained entirely through the interaction of particles. He claimed that God had caused matter to act according to certain physical laws, and then no longer needed to intervene in the natural world. This system could even accommodate mental activity. Drawing on John Locke, Priestley argued that ideas are based on experience of the world, and he gave this process a material foundation: the sensory organs come into contact with vibrations generated by objects in the world, and these vibrations are ultimately transmitted through the brain. There is no need in this system for an immaterial soul interacting with the human body. Furthermore, Eshet explains, not only does Priestley's materialism support a theology devoid of immaterial substances, it also supports his liberal political position. According to Priestley's Lockean philosophy, all minds are created equally ignorant, and humanity needs to consider matters from a wide range of viewpoints to overcome this collective ignorance. This makes Dissenters like Priestley an indispensable element of society.
It wasn't only in Priestley's broader philosophical views that his opponents found ammunition. For commentators like Edmund Burke, who's famous for his harsh criticism of the French Revolution, Priestley's chemistry in particular had dangerous implications. Maurice Crosland explains that Burke blamed science in general for playing a key role in the French Revolution; the philosophes promoting the rights of man praised science for its rationality, and they arrogantly assumed that they could apply the same rationality to the ordering of society. As for Priestley, as a Unitarian he was not even a true Christian in Burke's assessment, and his research had no practical utility. The only consequence of Priestley's works was the wide dissemination of scientific knowledge which, Burke feared, might inspire the same sort of radical reforms which characterize the French Revolution.
What's particularly interesting for our purposes is that Burke strategy for discrediting Priestley included playing up the association between chemistry and alchemy. As Crosland explains, Burke argued that the revolutionaries in France were distorting the natural order of society, just as alchemists distort natural substances when they try to achieve the transmutation of metals.
We should recall here that the association between pernicious ideology and arcane transmutation experiments is echoed in A Tale of Two Cities; Dickens' unbelieving chemists "had an eye on the transmutation of metals". Like Burke, it seems, Dickens considered that those who sought to transform natural substances might intend to extend their transformative power to the ordering of society. As much as the Tale reflects Dickens' lifelong concern with the needs of the people, it also suggests a concern about the possibility that any ideology, when taken to an extreme, can lead to violence, injustice, and godlessness. Science, in the wrong hands, can become a factor in this bloody process.
In the right hands, though, science can serve the needs of the righteous. In his effort to resurrect the doomed Charles Darney, Sydney Carton relies on an ether that he buys from a man who seems to be one of Dickens' unbelieving chemists. And it's this ether that he uses to emulate Christ. In the article on the history of Birmingham in All the Year Round, the account of the city's numerous riots is followed by a list of some of the greatest achievements of Birmingham's citizens, quoted from the antiquarian John Alfred Langford. Langford writes of the city, "Her share in the development of the great instruments of prosperity and progress is surpassed by few cities in the empire." (p. 464) These great instruments include those produced by prominent members of the Lunar Society:
It was here that Mr. Priestley made those discoveries which earned for him 'the title of the founder of pneumatic chemistry.' Here James Watt perfected the steam engine, which is . . . 'without exception, the greatest invention of modern times . . .' (p. 465)
Dickens' journal chastises the city of Birmingham for attacking its own citizens,then praises the city for driving scientific progress. The city held the potential both for the needless violence that Dickens so regretted and the service to humanity that he so encouraged. For Dickens, it seems, the products of unbelieving chemists could be put to virtuous purposes -- especially in the hands of a believer like Sydney Carton.
Thanks to Kristen Schranz for her advice on researching this topic.
"Birmingham a Century Ago," All the Year Round 1 (1868-1869): 462-465.
Maurice Crosland, "The Image of Science as a Threat: Burke versus Priestley and the 'Philosophic Revolution," The British Journal for the History of Science 20 (1987): 277-307.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (London: Penguin Books, 2003).
Dan Eshet, "Rereading Priestley: Science at the Intersection of Theology and Politics," History of Science 39 (2001), 127-159.
Emma Mason, "Religion" in Charles Dickens in Context, eds. Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 318-325.
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