Dr. Manette in “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens: Does your high school teacher or college professor understand this novel’s key character?

In A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, the phrase “recalled to life” refers to the rebirth of Dr. Manette from the living death of his eighteen-year imprisonment in the Bastille. And since Dickens had originally wanted to call the entire novel “Recalled to Life” (1), it is fair to say that Dr. Manette is a key character.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities

July 19, 2016

Dickens’ (post 6) “Tale of Two Cities” (post 4): Eminent neurologist in British Medical Journal says Dr. Manette is accurate portrayal of multiple personality disorder.

From what I see in Wikipedia and online, many people may be reading and teaching A Tale of Two Cities without realizing that Dr. Manette has multiple personality (the mental illness, inadequately treated, not the normal version). So when I say that Dr. Manette has multiple personality, you might want a second opinion, which follows:

Dickensian Diagnoses

by Sir RUSSELL BRAIN, Bt., D.M., LL.D.

D.C.L., P.R.C.P.

Physician to the London Hospital and the Maida Vale

Hospital for Nervous Diseases

Br Med J. 1955 Dec 24; 2(4955): 1553–1556.

[The following is a direct quote from pages 1555-1556.]

Multiple Personality

Perhaps the most remarkable example of Dickens's psychiatric

insight is the case of Dr. Manette in A Tale of Two

Cities. It is remarkable for the accuracy of his account

of a case of multiple personality and loss of memory,

because it is the most comprehensive of his studies of

psychological abnormality, and because it includes an anticipation

of psychotherapy. Dr. Manette had been imprisoned

for many years without trial in the Bastille during the French

Revolution. As a prisoner he had been a shoemaker, and

after his release he lived in a garret in Paris and spent his

time working at a low bench making shoes. Subsequently

he went to London, but had lost his memory for a long

period of his life. He said: "My mind is a blank, from

some time-I cannot even say what time-when I employed

myself, in my captivity, in making shoes, to the time when

I found myself living in London with my dear daughter

here. She had become familiar to me, when a gracious God

restored my faculties; but, I am quite unable even to say

how she had become familiar. I have no remembrance of

the process." Dr. Manette had long given up his shoemaking

and was practising in London when his daughter's

marriage brought about a relapse. No sooner had she gone

away with her husband than the doctor was found back at

his shoemaking and unable to recognize his friends. He

remained in this state for ten days, and then he was found

one morning with the shoemaker's bench and tools put aside

in his usual morning dress. "He at first supposed that his

daughter's marriage had taken place yesterday. An incidental

allusion purposely thrown out, to the day of the

week, and the day of the month, set him thinking and counting,

and evidently made him uneasy.”

His friend Mr. Lorry now embarked upon the psychotherapy.

He thought it best to present Dr. Manette's case

to himself as though it was that of a patient. He described

to Dr. Manette someone who had had a great mental shock

and who had suffered from a relapse. He led him gradually

to the recognition that the case was his own and then asked

him " 'to what would you refer this attack?' 'You have

no idea,' said Dr. Manette, 'how such an apprehension

weighs on the sufferer's mind, and how difficult-how almost

impossible-it is, for him to force himself to utter a word

upon the topic that depresses him.' ' Would he,' asked

Mr. Lorry, ' be sensibly relieved if he could prevail upon

himself to impart that secret brooding to anyone, when it

is on him?' 'I think so. But it is, as I have told you,

next to impossible. I even believe it-in some cases-to be

quite impossible.'" But by degrees the resistance is overcome,

Dr. Manette's analysis proceeds, and he is led to

regard his shoemaker's bench as a symbol both of the past

and of his neurosis, and to agree to its destruction. "Very

strange," says Dickens, "to see what a struggle there was

within him." But although Dr. Manette was relieved he

was not cured, and he relapsed again when he failed to

rescue Darnay from the guillotine at the trial in Paris. He

disappeared, wandered about, and when he came back

demanded his shoemaker's bench. He was back in the past.

"Time presses: I must finish those shoes." This time the

relapse was permanent, and the last we see of Dr. Manette

is as a "helpless, inarticulately murmuring, wandering old

man.”

Comment: In my series of past posts on A Tale of Two Cities (search it), I criticized Dickens’s case history of Dr. Manette’s multiple personality disorder for its presumption that it could have had its original onset in adulthood. Multiple personality begins in childhood. However, as a practical matter, clinical multiple personality is usually not diagnosed by most psychiatrists until some major stress in an adult patient causes one or more alternate personalities to blow their cover.

One other thing wrong with Dickens's case presentation—and, in real life, one probable reason for therapeutic failure—was the assumption that Dr. Manette had only two personalities, which would be very unlikely. But in this novel, more than two personalities would have been unwieldy.