"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other"
About this Quote
Dickens slips a radical democratic tenderness into a sentence that sounds, at first blush, almost like a parlor-room platitude. Every person, he suggests, is not just complicated but fundamentally unreadable: a "profound secret and mystery" even to those closest to them. The clever move is the phrase "constituted to be". This isn’t romantic fog; it’s design. Human opacity is structural, baked into the species, not a temporary misunderstanding solvable by better manners or sharper perception.
The intent is double-edged. On one side, it’s an invitation to humility: stop acting like you can sum people up from their station, their face, their mistakes. That matters in Dickens’s England, where social categories were treated as moral verdicts and poverty was routinely misread as personal failure. On the other side, it’s a gentle defense of privacy and interior life in a culture that loved to judge and categorize. If everyone is a mystery, then the instinct to reduce someone to a type becomes not only cruel but absurd.
The subtext is also Dickensian in its emotional politics: compassion doesn’t require full access. You don’t need to "solve" a person to treat them decently; you need only accept that there’s more there than you can see. Coming from a novelist famous for big casts and vivid caricatures, the line plays like a wink at his own craft. Even the author who invents people for a living admits the final remainder: the part no narration can fully illuminate.
The intent is double-edged. On one side, it’s an invitation to humility: stop acting like you can sum people up from their station, their face, their mistakes. That matters in Dickens’s England, where social categories were treated as moral verdicts and poverty was routinely misread as personal failure. On the other side, it’s a gentle defense of privacy and interior life in a culture that loved to judge and categorize. If everyone is a mystery, then the instinct to reduce someone to a type becomes not only cruel but absurd.
The subtext is also Dickensian in its emotional politics: compassion doesn’t require full access. You don’t need to "solve" a person to treat them decently; you need only accept that there’s more there than you can see. Coming from a novelist famous for big casts and vivid caricatures, the line plays like a wink at his own craft. Even the author who invents people for a living admits the final remainder: the part no narration can fully illuminate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens, 1859 (novel). |
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