118 KNOWING DICKENS
new state of mind). Idle goes on a long rant about Goodchild’s wrong idea
of play: “Here is a man goes systematically tearing himself to pieces, and
putting himself through an incessant course of training, as if he were always
under articles to fight a match for the champion’s belt, and he calls it Play!”
Goodchild smiles amiably—and why shouldn’t he? Idle is advertising his
strong suit. Idle talks on, calling Goodchild “an absolutely terrible fellow,” a
“fearful man” who can “do nothing like another man. Where another fellow
would fall into a footbath of action or emotion, you fall into a mine. Where
any other fellow would be a painted butterfly, you are a fiery dragon” (Dent
3.448). Goodchild remains unfazed and unrepentant, while Dickens pleases
himself by imagining himself seen by another man as an extremity of man-
hood. Imagining himself from another’s point of view was not so bad, after
all. Still, the fact that the erstwhile champion of earnest work plays with such
matters is important. All the effort that had kept his career and his family life
going had come to look like a great deal of trouble that had failed to set him
at ease. He knew, now, that death was the only way out of the turbulence of
being Dickens.
Doubles and Triples
The new association of male pairs and trios with issues of work, idleness, and
death shaped both A Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend. The idea for
A Tale seems to have come to Dickens as he lay onstage as Richard Wardour,
pretending to die while the tears of Maria Ternan fell on his face and beard.
Its plot, in which Sydney Carton sacrifices his life so that Charles Darnay/
Evrémonde can enjoy his happiness with the woman they both love, puts
some novelistic meat on the bare bones of the play. The relation between the
look-alike doubles is minimally fleshed out, however. They meet at Darnay’s
English trial, during which Carton watches Lucy Manette’s eyes on Darnay,
and invents a strategy—based on his own resemblance to Darnay—that helps
win Darnay’s acquittal. After the trial the two meet face to face over din-
ner at a tavern, where Carton forces Darnay to toast Lucy, and announces
drunkenly that he doesn’t like his double. Once Darnay has left, Carton
looks at his own face in a mirror and addresses himself with scorn: “A good
reason for taking to a man, that he shows you what you have fallen away
from and what you might have been! Change places with him, and would
you have been looked at by those blue eyes as he was, and commiserated by
that agitated face as he was? Come on, have it out in plain words! You hate
the fellow” (TTC 4). With that shift to alienation and rivalry accomplished,