Translating the French Revolution into English in A Tale of Two Cities

International audienceIn his preface to A Tale of Two Cities, Andrew Sanders points out that the novel is ‘balanced between two cities and between two languages’, that Dickens introduces the reader with ‘bilingual characters (Manette, Darnay, Carton)’ and that he also experiments with ‘the device of literally translating the idioms of his monoglot francophones (the Defarges and the Jacques) into English’ (Dickens ix). This last strategy was described by James Fitzjames Stephen, who reviewed the novel for The Saturday Review in December 1859, as ‘misbegotten jargon’.1 This leads us to reflect on what Dickens was trying to achieve in adopting what Sylvère Monod called an ‘Anglo-French language’ (Monod 429–31) composed of English words but borrowing syntactic forms from the French, or translating French set phrases literally into English. In endeavouring to address this question, this article will argue that this new form of English sprinkled with Gallicisms was part and parcel of Dickens’s strategy to translate the French Revolution into English.As a matter of fact, the French Revolution remained rather a mystery for the English. They had followed it from the outside and even when, like Mary Wollstonecraft and other English Romantic artists, they had found themselves at the heart of revolutionary events, they still could not quite grasp its idiosyncrasies. The Revolution remained in many ways very French, but it was nonetheless also a key episode in the history of Britain and the history of Europe as a whole. For that very reason, it deserved further investigation. However, the difficulty lay in fathoming its singularity and rendering it understandable to British readers. Dickens’s Anglo-French language was a way of rising to the challenge. By creating this idiom, Dickens highlighted some of the metaphysical questions underlying the French Revolution. He also used this language as a way of conjuring up in words the conditions that led to the French Revolution. This implied translating specific revolutionary words into English