SOURCE: “Shadow and Substance in A Tale of Two Cities,” in The Dickensian, Vol. 84, Part 2, No. 415, Summer, 1988, pp. 96-106.

In the following essay, Nelson argues that elements of The Substance and the Shadow, a romance by John Frederick Smith, influenced Dickens while writing A Tale of Two Cities.

A Tale of Two Cities took Dickens a long time to tell, if we count the year and a half which John Forster says passed between the first ‘vague fancy’, which struck him while he was acting in Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep in August 1857, and March 1859, when ‘he fairly buckle[d] himself to the task he had contemplated so long’.¹ On 30 January 1858 it was not clear that he had anything more in mind yet than to distract himself from his domestic unhappiness:

If I can discipline my thoughts into the channel of a story, I have made up my...