The Dazed Survivor in Dickens and Hugo #

Several novels of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, who knew and respected each other, form intertextual sequences; much discussed, for instance, are their contrasting representations of the cityscape. The present paper deals with the implicit dialogue between Dickens’s and Hugo’s treatments of the topos of self-sacrifice for the sake of another person in the ambivalent representations of the French Revolution, in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Hugo’s Ninety-Three (1894). One of the features of this topos in the two novels is the figure of a dazed survivor, a person who, owing to the self-sacrifice of another, moves away from death, in a stunned condition, or in sleep or a swoon, and is left with a sense of guilt. This motif is prophetic; it would develop into a topos in its own right in twentieth-century literature.