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TELEVISION; PBS Storms the Barricades

Schama, Simon, Simon Schama is a professor of history at Harvard University and the author of "Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution."

1989

Overview

For there are not only two cities, London and Paris, there are two Evremondes: the evil Marquis and his enlightened nephew, Charles Darnay. There are, in effect, also two Darnays - Charles himself and the London barrister Sydney Carton, so like him physically but, until the end, utterly unlike him morally. The book begins with the ''recalling to life'' of the Marquis's victim, Dr. Alexandre Manette; at the end, there are two further resurrections: that of Darnay, rescued from the guillotine, and of Carton, given moral life through self-sacrifice. There may even be two Charles Dickenses in the novel: the noble figure of self-denial whom [DICKENS], an enthusiastic amateur actor, had recently portrayed in Wilkie Collins's play ''The Frozen Deep,'' and the self-accusing Dickens, possessed by inner demons, who had just sepa-ratd from his wife. The pattern of two's that traces its way throughout the book is the measure of its distance from real history. For the French Revolution was actively hostile to the number two - to divisibility and to the reconciliation of opposites. Its obsessions were with one's and with three's, both, by definition, indivisible. The motto of the Republic was Une et Indivisible; its sacred revolutionary trinity, Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. Its proudest claim was to have fused the three feudal orders, or estates - clergy, nobles and bourgeoisie - into one nation. At the root of Dickens's ultimate horror of the French Revolution (as for Thomas Carlyle, whose epic history was the novelist's major source) was its merciless hostility to distinctions: between innocent and guilty, the private and the public life. Though ostensibly at liberty, Sydney Carton is also a prisoner - of his own purposeless and self-hating nature. In Dickens's seraphic climax he finds, not death, but a kind of new life, signaled not only by the ''far, far better rest'' that he goes to but also by the quotation that immediately precedes his end: '' 'I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.' '' This is among the most powerfully spiritual passages in all of Dickens, and it follows a novel that is not just dramatized history or melodramatized family romance, but a record of great journeys through darkness and light that touch readers to the quick, reminding us of our own sense of opportunity or insecurity in the face of great public events. Quite rightly, [Arthur Hopcraft] gives Dickens's most intensely dramatic moments their full due, avoiding the shrouded subtleties that marked his superlative television versions of the same author's ''Bleak House,'' shown here in 1985, and John le Carre's ''Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,'' in 1980. When a cask of wine breaks before the Defarge wine shop, one of the key haunts of the sans-culotte militants, men, women and children greedily lap it from the cobbles. Evremonde's carriage and horses tear through the streets - people scatter in front of them like scurrying animals -before crushing the body of a small child under a wheel. The Hopcraft version is also unapologetic about the intensity of the romance of Dr. Manette's daughter, Lucie, and the saintly aura that it projects on the Manette household in London, where the former victim of aristocratic oppression is, in effect, resurrected. One of the gambles of the bold Anglo-French casting was to have Jean-Pierre Aumont (a veteran of Claude Chabrol thrillers) play Dr. Manette in a way that, against the odds, is straightforward and unsentimental.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: Darnay, Charles / Hopcraft, Arthur / Manette, Alexandre / SCHAMA, SIMON / TELEVISION