A Far Better Thing

Standard Disclaimer: Not mine but JKR's. Oh, and Dickens's stuff is his too. Just so you know, spoilers abound here not only for Deathly Hallows but A Tale of Two Cities.

I was, of course, not the only reader to trust Snape before his true allegiances were revealed, nor was I alone in guessing his feelings for Lily. Yet in addition to textual evidence pointing in these directions, I had another reason for my theories. Around the time book five came out I read that, while planning the Harry Potter books, Rowling was influenced by Dickens's representation of sacrificial love in A Tale of Two Cities. Obviously, Lily's death embodies this theme. But I was also seized by a conviction that Snape would turn out to be a version of Sydney Carton, both in his unrequited love for a woman and the redemption he would find for her sake. (I will try not to sound too smug about being right.) So here—inspired too by a reviewer of one of my stories who said she could imagine Snape as a closet Dickens fan—I savor the fantasy of the Potions Master encountering his literary precursor in the pages of A Tale of Two Cities. Doing so allows me to explore topics I think about a lot: how the books we love shape our identity, and how their relevance to our lives can change and deepen over time.

Italicized material in quotation marks comes directly either from Deathly Hallows or A Tale of Two Cities.

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."

-final lines of Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

It was time to pick it up again, the book that had been his companion for so many years. As the Easter holidays of his year as Headmaster drew to a close—and the impending showdown with the Dark Lord edged ever nearer—he placed the volume on the night table in his spartan quarters. Even in this sanctum, he prudently enchanted the cover to make it look like a text on poisons, reading material more in character for one of his training and supposed allegiances. Anyone curious enough to pry further would be on the receiving end of a nasty Finger-Stinging Hex and, thanks to a Page-Transforming Charm, would find the work nothing other than its title announced. No one would be allowed to discover that Severus Snape, Headmaster of Hogwarts and purportedly one of Voldemort's most trusted servants, was in fact reading a book by a Muggle author.

It was a novel, should one see what Snape saw when he opened it—a tale published in the middle of the nineteenth century. The child of a Muggle father, Snape had once read a story by the same author about a miser who reformed after being visited by ghosts. As the book featured cozy Christmases and a happy ending—neither realistic prospects in the Snape household—young Severus thought little of it at the time. No, he had only been introduced years later to this work with similar themes of redemption and spiritual rebirth by (who else?) Albus Dumbledore.

It was during his first year as a double agent, when the Potters were still in hiding and the strain of Snape's position was becoming unbearable. Hoodwinking Lord Voldemort, passing as a Death-Eater without truly acting like one—all without provoking the least suspicion—was telling on Snape. He could of course reveal nothing around the Dark Lord and his cronies, but when he delivered his reports to Dumbledore he let down his guard a bit, mainly by being even crankier than usual. One evening, when he made one of his signature sarcastic comments—a compound of contempt for others and underlying self-loathing—Dumbledore regarded him thoughtfully.

"You know, Severus," he said after a pause, "you remind me of a character in a book, someone who, like you, affects boundless cynicism, and yet is capable of heroic sacrifice."

Snape raised an eyebrow. "Does he come to a good end?"

Dumbledore smiled. "Not, perhaps, a `good end' as the world usually sees it, and yet for all that a very good end indeed."

Snape scowled. This was just the type of riddling answer in which Dumbledore delighted. Irked as he was to be compared to a fictional character—especially one who, from the sound of it, was doomed—he nonetheless was curious enough to ask "Which book?"

Turning to the well-stocked shelf beside his desk, Dumbledore extracted a scuffed volume. He handed it silently to Snape, who opened it to the title page.

"A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens," he read aloud. Dim childhood memories resurfaced. "A Muggle writer!"

"Yes, and I am sure you will not let the Death-Eaters discover you reading it," Dumbledore replied smoothly.

Snape only just refrained from rolling his eyes. How like Dumbledore to give him homework on top of everything else. "Which character reminds you of me?" he asked sulkily.

"Oh, I'll daresay you'll know when you meet him," said Dumbledore, smiling. Noting the disgruntled look on Snape's face, he added gently, "Try to enjoy the story, Severus. Truly, I think you will like it. I even think you will find it useful."

And so Snape bore the book back to Spinner's End, intending not to read it. That would serve the old man right.

But the tattered volume beckoned him. Was it charmed, that it exerted such a hold? Whatever the reason, Snape could not resist opening it. And, once he did, he fell into it as into a well.

It was not that it was immediately clear why Dumbledore wanted him to read it. Not only did he not find any character who remotely resembled him in the first few chapters, but the story featured a period in Muggle history about which he knew virtually nothing. Having attended a Muggle school before Hogwarts, he had at least heard of the French Revolution. But the sole fact he seemed to have absorbed was that French Muggles seized the occasion to invent a machine for efficiently slicing off people's heads.

As Snape read Dickens's harrowing account of the period preceding the revolution, he wondered if this depiction was accurate. Not that it mattered; he was swept up in the plot and the emotions it evoked. He also played an absorbing guessing game: which character reminded Dumbledore of himself? He wondered briefly if it was the former Bastille prisoner, the man released after seventeen years' confinement who seemed to have forgotten his own identity. In his way Snape had been imprisoned too, first by his wretched childhood, then by his disastrous allegiance to the Death Eaters. But the old man did not, finally, seem to be the right one. Nor did the bachelor banker, nor the banker's comic servant, nor the young Frenchman on trial for his life in London . . .

But there he was, Snape's literary doppelgänger, sitting in the Old Bailey courtroom, his lawyer's wig askew, a member of the Frenchman's defense team. "[S]lovenly" in dress and indolent in manner, Sydney Carton was nonetheless the one who saved Charles Darnay's life by noticing the striking facial resemblance between them and using it to cast doubt on eyewitness testimony. Snape could not help but feel an affinity for someone who combined so unprepossessing a demeanour with such a first-rate mind. So observant was Carton that, even with his eyes apparently directed at the ceiling, he was first to notice that the beautiful Lucie Manette had fainted and to call for help. But when, in succeeding chapters, Darnay won Lucie's heart instead of Carton—who obviously adored her—Snape's cheeks grew hot at the obvious parallels with his own life. What was Dumbledore suggesting, that Snape was like Carton, James Potter like Darnay, and Lily like Lucie? If so, Snape thought spitefully, the headmaster had gotten a few things wrong. The rambunctious Potter scarcely resembled the staid Darnay, and Lily was much feistier than the impossibly angelic Lucie. And Snape, for all that he was an outcast like Carton, was not, like Dickens's character, a drunk. That had been Snape's father's vice. Fuming, Snape threw down the book—before succumbing to ungovernable curiosity and snatching it up again.

Once his indignation abated, though, Snape could see that Carton was, if not exactly his mirror-image, a kindred spirit. Not only was the lawyer caustic and unsociable enough to resemble Snape, he was equally miserable. "Self-flung away, wasted": so Carton described himself to Lucie Manette on one of his visits to her house. And it was this scene, in which Carton allowed Lucie to see the despair and self-loathing he normally concealed, that Snape read with particular care. He was struck by what Carton said in parting, when he begged Lucie to believe that, whatever his faults, "For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything." "Anything"—Snape recalled his own anguished words to Dumbledore, the night he told him the Dark Lord was after the Potters.

"Hide them all, then . . . Keep her—them—safe."

"And what will you give me in return, Severus?"

"Anything."

This, then, must have been why Dumbledore wanted him to read the book: for courage and inspiration. Just as Snape had declared himself willing to do "anything" to keep Lily and her family safe, so Carton declared to Lucie: "there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!'" If "self-flung away, wasted" Carton could do it, why not Snape? For Snape felt certain that Carton would, eventually, make the ultimate sacrifice. Staying up all night so he could finish the book, Snape found he was right. After the Darnays ended up in Paris during the Terror—after Charles had been condemned to death and Lucie and her child were in danger of the same fate—Carton took Darnay's place on the guillotine, enabling the family to escape to England. "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done": certainly, if Snape could keep Lily and her husband and child safe, it would be by far the best thing he had ever accomplished.

And so the book became a friend, and Carton Snape's favorite literary character. He admired the lawyer all the more for his unsentimental view of Lucie's husband. Whenever, in fact, he reread the scene early on where Carton informs Darnay that he doesn't like him, Snape—James Potter in mind—laughed out loud. Even though Carton later apologized for these remarks, Snape suspected the lawyer never had much patience with the man for whom he would lay down his life. When the seamstress who would ride to the guillotine with him, and who penetrated his disguise, asked "`Are you dying for him?'" Carton seemed suspiciously quick to add "And his wife and child. Hush!" Snape knew just how the man felt. Were it up to him to die for James Potter alone, Snape was not sure he could do it. Only for Lily's sake, and for the sake of those she loved, could he put himself in mortal danger.

And it would be worth it, even his own death, as long as Lily and the others survived. So Snape repeated to himself, all through that horrifically stressful year:. "there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!"

Then came October 31, 1981.

Snape would never read A Tale of Two Cities the same way again.

Oh, he still read it. At least once a year, he reached for the battered copy (Dumbledore had made the loan permanent), and devoured it from cover to cover. But his response to the ending was necessarily different. Whereas before that tragic Halloween, he had closed the book feeling exaltation, a renewed willingness to endure martyrdom for Lily's sake, now he had only one response to Carton's sacrifice:

Lucky bastard.

It was not that he no longer liked Carton: quite the contrary. Now, however, he envied him with the hopelessness of one whose envy could never lead to emulation. In saving the life of the woman he loved, Carton succeeded where Snape failed. Not that Snape could begrudge Carton this victory. Carton, after all, had not called his best friend a Mudblood. Carton had not joined a gang of murderous, bigoted thugs. Carton had not placed Lucie in danger the way Snape had done to Lily by relaying the prophecy to Voldemort. No, Carton's sole failing was to be severely depressed, if one could even call that his fault. Snape's errors and sins were far worse.

And so, for nearly ten years, reading A Tale of Two Cities was for Snape not so much an inspiration as a penance.

But this changed too. Picking up the book in December 1991, his leg still sore from where Hagrid's damn dog had tried to rip it off, Snape realized as never before the significance of Dumbledore's charge to him after Lily's death. By protecting her son, as the headmaster asked him to, Snape could achieve at least one thing Carton had done: save the child of the woman he loved. Not that he cared for the boy as Carton had for little Lucie Darnay. In fact, Dickens's explanation of why the girl was so fond of Carton—"no man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with a blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a mother, but her children had a strange sympathy with him"—made Snape snort with derisive laughter. As if young Potter—the reincarnation, in Snape's opinion, of his arrogant father—could possibly intuit Snape's feelings for Lily. It was only in the dark, insomniac stretches of the night that a small voice at the back of Snape's mind, a voice he usually stifled, reminded him that he gave Lily's son little reason to suspect that his nasty Potions professor had once been his mother's friend.

Still, if he could no longer do for Lily exactly what Carton had done for Lucie—"keep a life you love beside you!'"—he could give his life to keep the boy alive. If it came to that.

And it probably would. Once the Dark Lord returned, indeed, Snape thought that only a miracle could ensure his own long-term survival. But if the boy made it—it would be Snape's version of Carton's far better thing.

Then even this hope was taken from him. Dumbledore told him that, if the Dark Lord was to perish, the boy must die too.

What was the point? Snape thought wretchedly in the weeks that followed. What had Dumbledore meant when he told Snape that he would find Dickens's novel "useful"? Or did he only think that before Lily died?

By June 1997 Dumbledore could no longer answer these questions: he was dead, killed at his request by Snape himself. Though Dumbledore intended this act to reassure the Dark Lord of Snape's allegiance—thus better enabling Snape to work against Voldemort from within his circle—it was not the sort of action that earned the love of those it was designed to protect. Again, the difference between Snape and Carton could not have been more stark. Whereas Carton, obviously a hero, would always have "a sanctuary" in the hearts of those he saved, "and in the hearts of their descendents, generations hence," Snape would be eternally hated for his apparent betrayal of the trusting Headmaster. Lucie and Darnay named a baby after the dead Carton, but no one would name a child after the arch-traitor Snape.

No, thought Snape, even if Potter were to live, he would never do that. The very idea made Snape laugh—and was welcome on that account. He needed all the laughs he could get.

By the time he thought these things Snape could, if he wished, ask Dumbledore's portrait, at least, what he had hoped to achieve all those years ago by lending him A Tale of Two Cities. Snape was, after all, now sitting in the Headmaster's chair, the painted Dumbledore behind his desk. But Snape no longer felt the need to ask. It had taken the terrible summer after Dumbledore's death for Snape to realize that his earlier interpretation of Dickens's novel had been naïve.

Oh, he had noticed even while first reading it that he was not Carton's exact double. But he had tended to forget this fact. For years he thought he might be asked to repeat Carton's sacrifice, not realizing that this was too literal a reading. True, Carton had helped teach Snape about sacrifice, about thinking of others more than himself. But, to the extent Snape was different from Carton, so too was the form of his sacrifice.

Carton's sacrifice had been death. Snape's had been life. He wanted to die, after Lily did. But he had been called upon to live instead. "Recalled to life"—he remembered the phrase Dickens used to describe the Bastille prisoner's release. For Snape, though, to be recalled to life—to be freed from the thrall of the Death Eaters—had meant torture as well as rebirth. But that was what sacrifice meant, did it not? It meant suffering in a way one did not want to, for the sake of a cause larger than oneself. For Carton, depressed as he was, death was still a sacrifice; shortly before taking Darnay's place he told Mr. Lorry that, even when it is misspent, life is worth living: "It would cost nothing to lay down if it were not." What cost Snape more than laying down his life, however, was living with the knowledge that he could save neither Lily nor her child. In laying down their lives for others, they were the ones asked to do what Carton had done. Snape might yet well do the same, but first he had to learn another definition of unselfishness.

And he had learned it, even he, the resentful, grudge-filled child of poverty and abuse, though the knowledge warred with his own inclinations. Growing up, he had believed that the only way to survive was to get in the last word or curse; he had been enamored of the idea of vengeance, very much like A Tale of Two Cities's Madame Defarge. It had taken his love for Lily to win him away from the lust for revenge. A love that could never be gratified in any self-serving sense, his feelings for her prepared him to make sacrifices not only for those he did not like, but those whom he did not even really know. What had he said that night a year ago to Dumbledore, when the headmaster told him not to look so shocked at finding out that Harry had to die? "How many men and women have you watched die?" Dumbledore had asked, and Snape answered "Lately, only those whom I could not save." Only now, in spring 1998, as he neared the end of A Tale of Two Cities for what was surely the last time, did Snape appreciate the significance of that response, and what it revealed about how far he had come in his capacity for sacrifice since he switched sides for what had initially been Lily's sake alone.

Surely, though, for him it would be over soon: though he would probably not spill his blood quite so dramatically as Carton, it would still be spent one way or another. While he accepted this, he wished he could know how it all would end, and whether the Dark Lord would finally be defeated. "The vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate": when Snape reached the description of how Lucie's old nurse Miss Pross overcame the murderous Madame Defarge, he hoped that Dickens and Dumbledore were right to put so much faith in love. If only Snape, like Carton, could know that it all turned out for the best . . .

And then he had one of those epiphanies one has when rereading a beloved book and noticing something one has never noticed before. At the time of his death Carton could not know how it all turned out. The last pages of the novel, including the famous words about the "far, far better thing," imagine what Carton might have said had he actually been as "sublime and prophetic" as he looked on the scaffold. At the moment of his death, however, Carton could not have foreseen that Lucie and the others would in fact escape, that Madame Defarge would not succeed in her quest to get them all killed. He could only hope that all would be well. And that, finally, was all Snape could do too.

So he read the final pages of Dickens's novel with a new appreciation of his likeness to Carton.

"It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."

If Snape were lucky, he would be like Carton in that too.

But it would take that kind of peace for Snape to lay down the burden of a grief he had borne for so long, a grief of which he was always reminded by the last pages of Dickens's novel. Even now, despite his new-found composure, the pain pierced him as he read one of the things a prophetic Carton would have seen: "I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day." And Snape's imagination could not help conjuring, as it had so many times, what Lily might have looked like had she lived to be old. In his mind he saw the deepened laugh lines around her mouth and eyes, the silvering of her dark red hair and the fine wrinkling of her face, and these things, far from making her less lovely, made her more so, made his heart contract as he envisioned what a beautiful, spirited old woman she would have been. If only she had had the chance.

It would, he thought as he closed the book, have been a far better thing.