ANOTHER MAN 119the pair is never seen together again until Sydney Carton changes clothes
with prisoner Evrémonde and dies by guillotine in his place. As in Wardour’s
death, the act proclaims his self-sacrificial nobility while advertising for time
and eternity his superiority to the living rival.
Dickens turned from melodrama to realism when he dramatized scenes
between Carton and the successful attorney Stryver, which allowed him to
play further variations on the themes of work and idleness. Stryver, “already
shouldering his way to a large and lucrative practice,” employs Carton, “idlest
and most unpromising of men,” to boil down his cases to their “pith and
marrow.” The men drink steadily through the night, while Carton wraps
cold towels around his head (shades of Collins nursing his sprained ankle)
and does Stryver’s work for him. When Stryver attempts to lecture Carton
on his failure of “energy and purpose,” Carton tells him, “You were always
driving and riving and shouldering and pressing, to that restless degree that
I had no chance for my life but in rust and repose” (TTC 2.5). Sympathy goes
to the Collins figure in these scenes: he does the real work, while Stryver gets
the credit and the big name; Carton understands Lucy’s nature, while Stryver
pompously decides that he will condescend to propose to her.
Once again the doubling of men turns into a triad, with Darnay, Carton,
and Stryver (not to mention most of the older men) clustered in desire around
the female figure Carton aptly—if disingenuously—calls “a golden-haired
doll” (TTC 2.5). Among the male characters Dickens mixes and matches
aspects of himself, Forster, and Collins. Carton, whose restless, depressive
wanderings and sacrificial death mark him as a Wardour-Dickens figure,
is explicitly stripped of the fanatical energy that characterizes Mr. Francis
Goodchild in “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices,” but his role as
a brilliant behind-the-scenes professional combines aspects of both Forster
and Collins. It is as if Dickens were, like Sydney Carton, yearning to change
places and become another man—perhaps a man less like his “striving” self
and more like Wilkie Collins. When, some years later, Dickens came to write
Our Mutual Friend, he explored such pairings and exchanges of male energy
in a more detailed and satisfying way.
“It is questionable whether any man quite relishes being mistaken for any
other man,” the narrator remarks early in Our Mutual Friend, but the novel
is all about men who are and men who arrange to be mistaken for others
(OMF 1.2). John Harmon and his look-alike double George Radfoot meet
because each has been mistaken for the other. The “horrible old Lady Tip-
pins” carries her title only because her late husband was “knighted in mistake
for somebody else by His Majesty George the Third” (OMF 1.10). In fact,
claims the narrator, the wrong ideas of the present time are “generally some