Backstory: A Tale of A Tale of Two Cities

The problem with writing about Charles Dickens, the amazing mind behind A Tale of Two Cities, is that it always feels like you're back in high school, poring over pages of notes dictated by a tedious English teacher. This is a shame, given the juicy gossip and usable theater history surrounding the backstory of Tale, now a sweeping Broadway musical of appropriately epic proportions. With that in mind, we've eliminated the endless list of dates, the poorly illustrated timelines and the pages of character analysis to give you exactly the information you need to really appreciate and regale your friends with your astute understanding of A Tale of Two Cities, which opens on September 18.

Down and Out in London
Here's the first date you do need to know: 1812, the year future icon Charles Dickens was born into a lower-middle-class family in Portsmouth, England. The second of eight kids, Dickens had an unremarkable early childhood: his mother was a housewife, while his charismatic dad, John, earned an average living as a pay clerk. Unfortunately, his father was also a compulsive spender who blew his paychecks on lavish parties, bankrupting the whole family. By the time Charles was 10, the Dickens clan was deep in debt and living in a poverty-ridden corner in London.

Due to the family's debts, Charles had to drop out of school; his dad was sentenced to three months in Marshalsea Debtors' Prison, a penitentiary for small-time criminals. As the oldest son, reluctant ghetto-superstar Charles was sent to work in a shoe polish factory, labeling bottles and tip-toeing over rats while silently cursing his parents for his new sweatshop-chic lifestyle those experiences later made their way into the pages of books like David Copperfield, and allied the author with the plight of the poor for the rest of his life.

A teenaged Charles eventually left the factory and forgave his parents…mostly, finishing his education and teaching himself writing while working in a lawyer's office. The experience taught him to A hate lawyers and B knowledgeably write law into his novels the court scenes in Tale are just a few of numerous examples, and led to better work as a parliamentary reporter, where he recorded debates and developed a general disdain for the government and upper class in the process.

Great Expectations
During this time, Dickens caught the acting bug and was granted an audition at Covent Garden, where the city's Royal Opera House operated. He prepared intensely for his audition—so intensely that he caught a vicious head-cold and missed the damned audition. Like many failed actors before and after, Dickens turned to writing, publishing his first humorous story shortly thereafter under the penname "Boz." A better writer than auditionee, Dickens was soon a steadily published author, and scored a reporting gig on the side with The Morning Chronicle.

While working for the paper, Dickens made a ballsy move and began dating his editor's daughter, Catherine. The move paid off: the two were married a year later, the same year his first book, Sketches by Boz, hit the shelves. Happy and successful, the newlyweds nested and set to work making a family and that went well too—Catherine popped out 10 children, though not all at the same time.

While Dickens was busy honing his craft and relentlessly impregnating his bride, good friend and writer Thomas Carlyle was busy penning a seriously thick history of The French Revolution creatively titled The French Revolution. An emotionally lush retelling of the bloody uprising, it took two years to write it would have taken less had his mentor's maid not accidentally set the first draft on fire…true story, becoming a favorite of Dickens' once published. The French Revolution, comprised of three different "books" The Bastille, The Constitution and the Guillotine, ultimately became the basis for A Tale of Two Cities, inspiring its setting and the historical experiences of the characters, as well as its organization into sections. Dickens later claimed to have read it over a dozen times.

"It was the best of times…"
To briefly summarize the next 20 years: life was good. Dickens became a literary phenomenon, publishing books like The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and the story A Christmas Carol, all which helped catapult him into the literary stratosphere. Though a father with a brood of children, he still found time to travel to America he didn't like it, Switzerland he did like it and France which helped him write detailed descriptions of Paris in Tale. Now wealthy, he set up homes for the poor and enjoyed being a successful human being, going so far as to buy the famous mansion Gad's Hill Place—a place his father had once dreamed of buying.

Dickens also finally become an actor, performing shows for audiences as lofty as the Queen of England while raising money for charities, such as his Guild of Literature and Art, a group to support poor artists and writers there was no greater friend to the starving artist than Charles Dickens. His darker novels, Bleak House and Hard Times, which tackled social injustice and the plight of the poor, were also released, paving the way for A Tale of Two Cities. Which brings us to 1857, another date you should know.

A Tale of Two Ladies
Now 45 years old, Dickens launched right into a full-fledged mid-life crisis. Though his once happy marriage had been failing for years, Dickens began openly complaining that his family had become "too large" uh, Chaz? it takes two… and confiding that he and his wife "were not made for each other." He threw himself further into work as an escape, and began planning a benefit performance of pal Wilkie Collins' new play The Frozen Deep, set to show before sophisticated audiences in Manchester, England, with Dickens in the lead role. A proposal to hire professional actresses for the female roles was made, and the name Ellen Ternan quickly popped up.

Ellen Ternan, just 18, was a theatrical legacy, a striking young woman from a family of actors. She ended up starring in the romantic lead opposite Dickens, who instantly fell for her. Vivacious, intelligent and well-traveled, she was all the things that Catherine Dickens was not in Dickens' mind; a relationship began once the show ended.

The whole thing probably could have gone on quietly had it not been for the bracelet. Dickens, in full Romeo-mode, ordered a custom-made bracelet for his teenaged love. The bracelet was to be delivered directly to Ternan but somehow made its way to his home instead, where wife Catherine quickly discovered it. Enraged, Catherine confronted her husband with the trinket in hand, accusing him of an affair. Though Dickens claimed it to be a platonic gift for the star of his show, the bracelet was an irreparable blow to their union. Catherine and Charles split soon thereafter.

Ternan, whom Dickens cared for and partnered with until the end of his life, became the basis for Tale's Lucie Manette, the beautiful, passionate woman at the center of the novel's epic love triangle note that Dickens shares first and last initials with character Charles Darnay, who marries Lucie…just saying.

The Book Itself
A year later, Dickens freely acknowledged the split with his wife at a time when separation was still taboo and divorce an abomination. Laying the foundation for the celebrity trend of publicly denying private relationships, Dickens wrote a letter published in his journal Household Weekly, explaining that Ternan had nothing to do with the split. He took custody of his children, set Catherine up with alimony, continued courting Ternan, and finally got down to the business of writing A Tale of Two Cities.

SPOILER ALERT: If you never got around to reading A Tale of Two Cities or the ever-handy Cliff Notes and would like to be surprised by the plot, skip the next three paragraphs!

In addition to The French Revolution, Dickens drew inspiration from sources such as Collins' The Frozen Deep, the play that brought Ternan into his life. In it, the beautiful heroine Clara played by Ternan becomes engaged to a handsome suitor at a ball. When another pursuer proposes to Clara, she shoots him down out of love for her new fiancé in Tale, Lucie turns away from Sydney Carton after becoming engaged to Charles Darnay during a holiday party. Toward Deep's ending, Clara's rebuffed suitor dramatically sacrifices his life to save her fiancé, dying so that she may be happy. Dickens lifted that dramatic device and placed it squarely at the end of his own epic, with legendary effect.

Dickens also may have drawn from The Dead Heart by Irish playwright Watt Phillips. The drama, whose unpublished manuscript Dickens encountered several years before starting Tale, featured a climactic prisoner substitution during the executions of The Terror, where leading character Robert Landry overpowers the imprisoned protagonist and takes his place for execution. The scene plays out as the numbers of the soon-to-be-headless aristocrats are called out en route to the guillotine, with the curtain falling as Robert Landry ascends the dreaded stairs to his death.

Dickens can't really be accused of plagiarism. A real-life example of last-minute prisoner substitution was listed in Carlyle's The French Revolution and history is up for grabs. Unfortunately, two other stories published not long before Tale, Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni and Alexander Dumas' Le Chevalier de la Maison-Rouge, also drew on the same example, producing almost identical conclusions. Ultimately, Dickens experienced a little embarrassment in conjunction with the similar endings, but most of it dissipated without lingering effect—largely because Dickens wrote a last line of dialogue memorable enough to completely overshadow the other two stories.

And now the last of the important dates: 1859, when Tale was released in serialized format in the journal All the Year Round. Dickens hated serialization, a popular publishing gimmick that gave only excerpts of the story at a time. He complained to Carlyle that they were "teaspoons," saying: "Nothing in the way of mere money…could repay the time and trouble of incessant condensation." However, the "teaspoons" gave the novel a scenic quality, one that makes it more stage-friendly than, say, The French Revolution. And unlike Dickens' previous novels, the point wasn't to hammer home Victorian ideals but to create a world within a miniaturized revolution. The melodrama made the struggles of the characters more potent, and the book succeeded because of it. Dickens dedicated it to Thomas Carlyle.

The Way It Ought To Be
While A Tale of Two Cities is obviously not the first Dickens brain-child to grace the stage A Christmas Carol, The Life and Adventures and Nicholas Nickleby, The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Oliver! are just a few productions inspired by his pages, not including more obscure shows like Pickwick or Little Nell and the Marchioness, there will be fans of literature and theater who cannot for the life of them figure out what Tale is doing as a big-budget musical. "It's the most incredible story," director Warren Carlyle no relation to Dickens' pal explains. "The theme of people rising up and reclaiming a country? I think that is interesting right now in America."

He may be right—with its huddled masses, unsteady political landscape and pissed-off working-class heroes, Tale definitely hits the mark as a Bush-era social allegory.

But the backbone of the show is its impossibly famous story, a tale so ripe with love, redemption and richly shaded characters that it has literally been drawing in audiences for centuries. The novel was adapted for the large and small screens almost a dozen times in 1907, 1922, 1935, 1957 1958, 1965 1980, 1984 and 1989, to be exact…there will be a quiz on those dates later; the 1935 film, starring Ronald Colman, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. Tale has also graced the stage in play format New Jersey's McCarter Theatre did a production as recently as 1990. Even now, Tale hooks audiences with the lives of fantastic characters, then compels them to stay for the inevitable heartache because Sydney Carton, centuries after his creation, still deserves applause.

Given Dickens' penchant for drama, his rich characters and outright love of actors and the stage, there is almost no better place left for the story than Broadway—maybe Jill Santoriello's new adaptation making its debut as a Broadway musical is the way it ought to be. Charles Dickens would certainly approve.