Tale wagging the dog: Dickens and historical fiction

At least Dickens didn't name Sydney Carton something like James Carton (initials JC), but other than that his allegorical symbolism couldn't be more heavy-handed, as Carton, atoning for the sins of mankind, substitutes himself for the unjustly imprisoned Darnay, his lookalike, and takes the Guillotine (while consoling a young girl condemned to death) as Darnay escapes with his family back to England. Hey, we like Dickens because of this: he's way over the top, a completely uninhibited writer, unafraid of overstatement, undaunted by shmaltz. I agree with friend AF who encouraged me to re-read A Tale of Two Cities that it's the ultimate best-seller, full of sturm and drang, of Dickensian sentiment in which the bad guys (as long as they're English) turn out to be good at heart, tremendous scenes of rioting in the streets, weirdly evocative depictions of life in Paris during the Reign of Terror, with crowds silently watching dozens carted along the street toward their death. There's no doubt that Tale is a great reading experience - though hardly a great novel. For all its entertainment value and its preying on our emotions and stirring our sentiments, it's also a simplistic and bombastic piece of writing. Though Dickens can go so far as to depict the French nobility as despicable and hopelessly cruel, he has absolutely no sense of why the citizens of France would rise up against this tyranny and oppression, no sense of the great forces and movements of history. Every one of the "citizens" he portrays as cold and heartless and relentlessly bloodthirsty and evil (though perhaps Defarge wavers a bit at the end). True, in the last chapter - the one imbued with overt and covert Christian allegorical symbolism, Dickens does throw a bone across the channel - noting that the Reign of Terror ended and that maybe it was necessary to make France a somewhat civilized country after all - but the overall tone of the book seems to be: If you're an Englishman (or woman), don't go there. It's not that Dickens couldn't write well about the issues of his day - debtors' prison, child labor, education, for example - but he thought primarily in terms of individuals, not of movements and grand forces of history - and his sense of the individual is what makes him a great exemplar of the 19th-century novel. Historical fiction was not his forte; his greatest works are chronicles of the world he lived in and knew, and no other writer has had a more profound effect than Dickens on what we think of when we think of London in the Victorian age. Few writers of any century can write well about movements and individuals: Tolstoy is one, perhaps there are others. Dickens stepped off base in Tale of Two Cities, so to speak, and the novel is for today's reader viscerally exhilarating but morally disconcerting.