A Tale of Two Cities

OverviewSummary of the NovelA Tale of Two Cities is concerned with events in Paris and London before and during the French Revolution. The story focuses on Charles Darnay, the self-exiled nephew of French nobility, and his wife, Lucie Manette, daughter of Dr. Alexandre Manette. As the first of the novel’s three sections begins, Jarvis Lorry is on his way to Paris to reunite Dr. Manette with the daughter who thought he has been dead for the past 18 years. Over this time Dr. Manette has forgotten his past life; he sits in a small attic room and makes shoes. Slowly, Jarvis and Lucie Manette “recall (him) to life.”

The novel’s second section starts five years later. Lucie Manette marries Charles Darnay. Darnay confesses a secret to Dr. Manette on the eve of the wedding. This secret turns out to be that Darnay is really Charles Evremonde, a member of the French ruling class. Darnay has renounced his past and wishes to settle in England. Meanwhile, unrest is growing in the Paris suburb of St. Antoine. The center of this unrest is a wine-shop owned by the Defarges, who are shown leading the storming of the Bastille.

The final section of the novel opens with Darnay on his way to Paris at the entreaty of a former servant who is endangered. Darnay is arrested and sentenced to die. The Manettes and Lorry hurry to Paris and succeed in freeing Darnay, but he is soon arrested again. He is sentenced to the guillotine. Sydney Carton, who bears a striking resemblance to Darnay, sneaks into the prison and switches places with Darnay. Carton is on his way to the guillotine, willing to die for the love of Lucie, while Darnay, the Manettes and Lorry flee to London.

A Tale of Two Cities Summary (Critical Survey of Literature for Students)

The early rumblings of the French Revolution are echoing across the English Channel when, in Paris, an old man waits in an attic for his first meeting with a daughter whom he has not seen since she was a baby. With the aid of Mr. Jarvis Lorry, an agent for the Franco-British banking house of Tellson & Co., the lovely Lucie Manette is brought to Paris to be reunited with her father, who was imprisoned for eighteen years in the Bastille. Above the wine shop of Madame and Monsieur Defarge, Dr. Manette is kept secretly until his rescuers can take him safely back to England. Day after day, Madame Defarge sits outside her wine shop, knitting into a long scarf strange symbols that will later spell out a death list of hated aristocrats and enemies of the Revolution.

Five years later, Lucie sits beside her father in the courtroom of the Old Bailey, where Charles Darnay, a teacher of languages, is on trial for treasonable activities that involve his passing between France and England on secret business. A man named John Barsad brings charges against him. Lucie and her father testify that they met Darnay on the boat when they traveled from France five years earlier. The prisoner was saved when Mr. Stryver, the prisoner’s counsel,

pointed across the courtroom to another man, Sydney Carton, who so resembled the prisoner that legal identification of Darnay was shaken and Mr. Stryver was able to secure an acquittal for the prisoner. Carton’s relationship to Stryver is that of the jackal to the lion; the alcoholic, aimless Carton writes the cases that Stryver pleads in court.

Lucie and her father live in a small tenement under the care of their maid, Miss Pross, and their kindly friend, Mr. Lorry. Jerry Cruncher, the porter at Tellson & Co. and a secret resurrectionist, is often helpful. Darnay and Carton become frequent callers in the Manette household, after the trial that brought them together.

In France, the fury of the people grows. Monseigneur the Marquis St. Evrémonde is driving in his carriage through the countryside when he carelessly kills a child of a peasant named Gaspard. The nobleman returns to his castle to meet his nephew, Charles Darnay, who is visiting from England. Darnay’s views differ from those of his uncle. Darnay knows that his family committed grave injustices, and he begs his uncle to make amends. Monseigneur the Marquis haughtily refuses. That night, the marquis is murdered in his bed.

Darnay returns to England to seek Dr. Manette’s permission to court Lucie. In order to construct a bond of complete honesty, Darnay attempts to tell the doctor his true French name, but Manette fearfully asks him to wait until the morning of his marriage before revealing it. Carton also approaches Lucie with a proposal of marriage. When Lucie refuses, Carton asks her always to remember that there is a man who will give his own life to keep a life she loves beside her.

In France, Madame Defarge knits the story of the hated St. Evrémondes into her scarf. Gaspard was hanged for the assassination of the marquis; Monseigneur’s house must be destroyed. Barsad, the spy, brings news that Lucie will marry Darnay, the nephew of the marquis. This news disturbs Defarge, for Dr. Manette, a former prisoner of the Bastille, holds a special honor in the eyes of the revolutionists.

Lucie and Darnay are married. Carton becomes a loyal friend of the family. Time passes, and tiny Lucie arrives. When the child is six years old, in the year 1789, the French people storm the Bastille. At the Bastille, Defarge goes to the cell where Dr. Manette was a prisoner and extracts some papers hidden behind a stone in the wall.

One day, while Darnay is talking to Mr. Lorry at Tellson & Co., a letter addressed to the Marquis St. Evrémonde is placed on Mr. Lorry’s desk. Darnay offers to deliver it to the proper person. When he is alone, he reads the letter. It is from an old family servant who is imprisoned by the revolutionists. He begs the Marquis St. Evrémonde to save his life. Darnay realizes that he must go to Paris. Only Dr. Manette knows of Darnay’s family name, and the doctor is sworn to secrecy.

Darnay and Mr. Lorry go to Paris, the latter to look after the French branch of Tellson & Co. Shortly after his arrival, Darnay is seized as an undesirable immigrant after Defarge orders his arrest. Mr. Lorry is considerably upset when Lucie and Dr. Manette suddenly arrive in Paris. Some of the doctor’s friends inform him of Darnay’s arrest. The old man feels that his own

imprisonment in the Bastille will win the sympathy of the revolutionists and enable him to save his son-in-law.

After fifteen months of waiting, Darnay is brought to trial. Because he is able to prove himself innocent of harming the French people, he is freed but forbidden to leave France. A short time later, he is again arrested, denounced by Defarge and one other person whose name the officer refuses to disclose.

While shopping one day in the Paris market, Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher, who are in Paris with Lucie and Mr. Lorry, meet a man who causes Miss Pross to scream in amazement and Jerry to stare in silent astonishment. The man is Solomon, Miss Pross’s lost brother. Jerry remembers him as Barsad, the man who was a spy-witness at the Old Bailey. Carton arrives on the scene at that moment, and he is able to force Barsad to come with him to the office of Tellson & Co. for a private conference. Barsad fears detection of his duplicity, for he is now an employee of the Republican French Government. Carton and Jerry threaten to expose him as a former spy for the English government, the enemy of France. Carton makes a deal with Barsad.

When Darnay is once more brought before the tribunal, Defarge testifies against him and names Dr. Manette as the other accuser. Defarge produces the papers that he found in Dr. Manette’s cell in the Bastille. Therein the doctor wrote the story of his arrest and imprisonment because he learned of a secret crime committed by a St. Evrémonde against a woman of humble birth and her young brother. His account is enough to convict Darnay. Sentenced for the crimes of his ancestors, Darnay, the young St. Evrémonde, is condemned by the tribunal to the guillotine.

Carton now begins to visit the Defarge wineshop, where he learns that Madame Defarge is the sister of the woman ruined by St. Evrémonde years before. With the help of the false Barsad, he gains admittance to the prison where Darnay was taken. There he drugs the prisoner and, still aided by the cowed Barsad, has him carried from the cell, himself remaining behind. The resemblance between the two will allow him to pass as Darnay and prevent discovery of the aristocrat’s escape.

Madame Defarge goes to the lodgings of Lucie and Dr. Manette to denounce them. Only Miss Pross is there; the others, including Darnay, are already on their way to safety. To keep Madame Defarge from learning of their escape, Miss Pross struggles with the furious woman when she demands admittance to Lucie’s apartment. Madame Defarge is killed when her pistol goes off. Miss Pross is deaf for the rest of her life. Lucie and Darnay return safely to England. Carton dies at the guillotine, giving his own life for the happiness of those he loved.

A Tale of Two Cities Themes

Themes

Order and DisorderThe story of A Tale of Two Cities takes place during the turbulent years of the French Revolution. Dickens stresses the chaos of Revolutionary France by using images of the ocean.

He calls the Paris mob a "living sea," and compares Ernest Defarge to a man caught in a whirlpool. Defarge and his wife are both at the center of revolutionary activity in Paris, just as their lives are at the center of the whirlpool. Order breaks down once again in the second chapter of the third book, "The Grindstone." "Dickens deliberately set Darnay's return to Paris and arrest at the time of the September Massacres," writes Ruth Glancy in A Tale of Two Cities: Dickens's Revolutionary Novel, "a four-day execution of 1,089 prisoners from four Paris prisons, condemned in minutes each by … 'sudden Courts of Wild Justice.'" Contrasted to the chaos of Paris is the order of England: Dr. Manette's peaceful home in Soho is a place of refuge for Darnay, Carton, and Mr. Lorry, while even Tellson's Bank serves as a center of calmness in the whirlpool of Revolutionary Paris.

Death and ResurrectionDeath, burial, and resurrection are themes that Dickens returns to again and again in A Tale of Two Cities. The first book of the novel, "Recalled to Life," traces the resurrection of Dr. Manette, who has been held in prison for almost twenty years. Prisons, for Dickens, are symbolic of the grave—a comparison that he makes throughout his works, and which may be related to his father's imprisonment in the debtors' prison at Marshalsea. Mr. Lorry, who travels to Paris in 1775 to secure the doctor's release, views himself as literally digging up Dr. Manette's body. He fancies that the doctor has been buried for so long that he will fall to pieces upon being liberated: "Got out at last, with earth hanging around his face and hair, he would suddenly fall away to dust." Even the doctor's daughter Lucie, whom he has never seen, believes that the person who will emerge from...

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A Tale of Two Cities Characters

Characters Discussed (Great Characters in Literature)

Sydney Carton

Sydney Carton, the legal assistant to Mr. Stryver, a successful London barrister. A drunkard and a misanthrope, he has no aim or purpose in his life until he meets Lucie Manette and falls secretly in love with her. Because of his remarkable physical resemblance to Charles Darnay, who becomes Lucie’s husband, he is able to sacrifice himself on the guillotine in Darnay’s place, a deed that finally gives a real meaning to his life in his own eyes.

Charles Darnay

Charles Darnay, in reality Charles St. Evrémonde (shahrl sah[n]-teh-vray-MOHN), an émigré and an antiaristocrat who has renounced his title. In England, where he becomes a teacher of languages, he finds happiness and success as the husband of Lucie Manette. When he returns to France to aid an agent of the St. Evrémonde family who has been captured by the revolutionists, he himself is arrested and condemned to the guillotine. He escapes because Sydney Carton takes his place in prison. Darnay returns to England with his wife and her father.

Lucie Manette

Lucie Manette (lew-SEE mah-NEHT), a beautiful young French woman, closely connected with political events in France. Her father, a physician, had been a prisoner in the Bastille for many years, sent there because he had acquired knowledge of the hidden crimes of the St. Evrémonde family. Her husband, Charles Darnay, is a member of that family and is condemned to the guillotine during the Revolution. He escapes death through the efforts of his wife, her father, and Sydney Carton. Throughout these trials, Lucie remains level-headed, practical, and devoted.

Dr. Alexander Manette

Dr. Alexander Manette, Lucie’s father, a doctor imprisoned for many years in the Bastille in France because he aided a poor servant girl who was forced to become the mistress of the Marquis St. Evrémonde, Charles Darnay’s uncle. Dr. Manette loses his mind in the Bastille and becomes obsessed with making shoes. His mind mends after his release, but whenever he is reminded of his prison days, he seeks out his shoe bench and begins work. He tries to free Charles Darnay from the French prison by appealing to the sympathies of the revolutionists, but he is unsuccessful. At Darnay’s trial, a document written by the doctor while in prison is presented as evidence to secure the young aristocrat’s conviction and sentence of death.

Lucie

Lucie, her mother’s namesake, the small daughter of Charles Darnay and his wife.

Ernest Defarge

Ernest Defarge (deh-FAHRZH), a wineshop keeper in St. Antoine, a suburb of Paris. A former houseservant of Dr. Manette, he cares for his former master after he is released from the Bastille and before he goes to England. He is also one of the most radical of the revolutionists. With his wife, he tries to get Charles Darnay executed by producing the document Dr. Manette had written years before.

Madame Thérèse Defarge

Madame Thérèse Defarge (tay-REHZ), the wife of the wineshop keeper, a ruthless, cold woman who hates all aristocrats. Madame Defarge attends every guillotining and knits a stitch for each head that drops. She dies while struggling with Miss Pross, Lucie Darnay’s maid.

Mr. Stryver

Mr. Stryver, a self-centered, proud lawyer employed as Charles Darnay’s counsel when the young language teacher is accused of carrying treasonous papers between France and England. He is Sydney Carton’s patron and employer, a shrewd, determined man who looks years older than his actual age.

Miss Pross

Miss Pross, the devoted housekeeper who has looked after Lucie Manette from childhood. She is intelligent and physically strong. Left behind to cover their flight when the Manettes escape from Paris, she struggles with Madame Defarge, who tries to make her confess where the Manettes have gone. Madame Defarge is killed accidentally when her gun goes off. Miss Pross, deafened by the explosion, escapes with Jerry Cruncher and follows her master and mistress to freedom.

Monsieur the Marquis St. Evrémonde

Monsieur the Marquis St. Evrémonde, a cruel French aristocrat and Charles Darnay’s uncle. He kills a child when his coachman drives his horses too fast. The child’s father gains admittance to the chateau and kills the arrogant nobleman. The marquis and his breed are responsible for the peasants’ uprising, causing the French Revolution.

Gaspard

Gaspard (gahs-PAHR), the father of the child who was killed by the marquis’ fast horses. He succeeds in murdering the marquis by plunging a knife into the sleeping nobleman’s heart.

Théophile Gabelle

Théophile Gabelle (tay-oh-FEEL zhah-BEHL), a village postmaster and keeper of rents. Arrested by the revolutionists, he appeals to Charles Darnay in England for aid. In response to his plea, Darnay goes on his dangerous errand in France.

Solomon Pross

Solomon Pross, alias John Barsad, Miss Pross’s brother. A complete scoundrel, he abandons his sister after obtaining all of her money. Calling himself John Barsad, he becomes a spy for the English. He informs Madame Defarge of Charles Darnay’s marriage to Lucie Manette. He is a turnkey at the Conciergerie in Paris while Darnay is imprisoned there. Sydney Carton recognizes him but does not reveal his identity.

Jerry Cruncher

Jerry Cruncher, an employee at the London banking house of Tellson and Company by day, a resurrection man (grave robber) by night. Devoted to Lucie and her father, he aids in Charles Darnay’s escape from France.

Mrs. Cruncher

Mrs. Cruncher, his abused wife, whom he calls “Aggerawayter.” A pious woman, she thinks her husband’s night occupation unspeakably sinful, and she prays for his reformation.

Young Jerry Cruncher

Young Jerry Cruncher, their son. Guessing shrewdly, he has a good idea of the grim trade his father follows at night.

Jarvis Lorry

Jarvis Lorry, the confidential clerk of Tellson and Company. He is instrumental in getting Dr. Manette out of France into England, and he goes with the Manettes to Paris during the dark days of the Revolution while Charles Darnay, in prison, awaits his execution.

Jacques One ,Jacques Two ,Jacques Three ,Jacques Four ,Jacques Five

a group of revolutionists in the suburb of St. Antoine.

The Vengeance

The Vengeance, a female revolutionist, Madame Defarge’s lieutenant.

Roger Cly

Roger Cly, Solomon Pross’s partner and Charles Darnay’s former servant. He testifies falsely when Darnay is on trial at the Old Bailey. He is supposed to be dead and buried, but Jerry Cruncher knows that his coffin was empty.

A Tale of Two Cities Essay - Critical Evaluation

Critical Evaluation

The central paradox of A Tale of Two Cities is that its action involves one of the most important political events of modern European history—and perhaps of its entire history—the French Revolution, while the values of the novel are ultimately antipolitical. Politics and history, neither of which Charles Dickens renders with great faithfulness, loom as a necessity from which his characters must flee to save their souls. Throughout the novel, Dickens reminds his readers that all acts, whether magnanimous or petty, shrink to nothing when viewed in a cosmic context. Indeed, for him, the goal of politics—the finding of a just community—is an absurd one in this world. To paraphrase Sydney Carton’s famous last speech: It is a far better thing to die and join such a community in heaven—the existence of which Dickens cannot with certainty assert—than to engage with society. A Tale of Two Cities demonstrates that Dickens’s political will, wan in his previous novels, is finally exhausted.

In this regard and in one of the first substantial essays dealing with Dickens’s art and thought, published a year before A Tale of Two Cities was completed, Walter Bagehot said, Mr. Dickens has not infrequently spoken, and what is worse, he has taught a great number of parrot-like imitators to speak, in what really is, if they knew it, a tone of objection to the necessary constitution of human society.

Dickens’s strength, Bagehot agreed, appears in the quality of his moral cry, his protest against the injustices of society; yet, as he said, the novelist never indicates how these inequalities might be removed.

By the time of A Tale of Two Cities, distinguished by its outrage against the tyranny of both the governors and the governed, Dickens clearly indicates that society cannot be made to progress or even be substantially ameliorated. For him, the great grasp for freedom by the French people, for example, goes finally unsung, drowned out by the terrible cacophony of the guillotine. To Dickens’s unwillingness to accept the “necessary constitution of human society,” then, must be added his refusal to understand and accept the necessarily slow and painful processes of history.

In his early comic and satiric novels, such as Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), and Oliver Twist (1837-1839), Dickens’s simple stance of protest carried with it a zestful anger that was both invigorating and liberating; but as he grew more serious in his artistic intent, beginning with Dombey and Son, completed in 1848, and continuing through David Copperfield (1849-1850), Bleak House (1852-1853), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1855-1857), for many readers his masterpiece, he lost his sense of the efficacy of the human will to deal with the complexities of a modern, industrial society. His gradual loss of faith was accompanied by a diminishing moral energy; his imagination seemed unable to create viable and pertinent responses to a civilization increasingly encroaching on individual freedom. Particularly in Little Dorrit, the novel published immediately before A Tale of Two Cities, readers are stunned as well as enervated by the hopelessness of the conclusion.

There is a significant scene in A Tale of Two Cities that appears at the conclusion of book 1 and is relevant to Dickens’s social despair. After Dr. Manette has been saved from the Bastille and is on the way from Paris to London, his rescuer, Mr. Jarvis Lorry, asks him, “I hope you care to be recalled to life?” Dr. Manette answers, “I can’t say.” In some ways, the question is never answered by the doctor, for at the novel’s conclusion his mind clouds permanently from the effects of his sufferings. If to be “recalled to life” means to be called back into civilization and history, then the novel implies that the doctor’s answer is “No.” The quality of life in society is actually no better, Dickens seems to claim, than perpetual imprisonment in the Bastille, and humans are caught up in an undertow of events that leaves them helpless; their imagination, intelligence, and will are useless when pitted against politics.

Indeed, the novelist goes further than this in his view of the ineptitude of human beings. If they consent to join in the machinations of society, Dickens asserts, they must inevitably expect to be corrupted. It is a tragic view, unrelieved by a belief in human dignity, or in the human ability to attain nobility through exertion of will. The readers of A Tale of Two Cities, left with Dickens’s vision of unmitigated tragedy, remain unconsoled in their own existence, which is inextricably bound up with the demands of history and politics.

The consolation that Dickens does offer takes the form of a vague promise of supernatural communion and a picture of human fellowship and love. The fellowship, composed of Dr. and Lucie Manette, Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, and the minor characters of Mr. Lorry, Miss Pross, and Jerry Cruncher, provides a sanctuary within the confines of history. There affection, trust, and sacrifice stand opposed to the hate, treachery, and tyranny of the world.

A Tale of Two Cities Essay - A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

Introduction

A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens

The following entry presents criticism of Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859). See also, Hard Times for These Times Criticism, Our Mutual Friend Criticism, and Little Dorrit Criticism.

A Tale of Two Cities was originally serialized in Dickens's own periodical, All the Year Round, in 1859 and chronicles the lives of a number of characters prior to and during the French Revolution. While immensely popular with the reading public, critical response to the novel was mixed. Perhaps the least characteristic of Dickens's works, A Tale of Two Cities prompted more than a few critics to note that the novel lacked the author's trademark humor and that, while it does address important social issues, the time and place depicted are far removed from the author's typical Victorian/Industrial Revolution era concerns. Nonetheless, despite its initial less-than-enthusiastic critical reception A Tale of Two Cities has come to occupy a central place in Dickens's body of work.

Plot and Major Characters

The novel's events begin in Paris, roughly fourteen years prior to the French Revolution. Dr. Alexandre Manette has been released from the Bastille after having been unjustly imprisoned for eighteen years for trying to bring two members of the noble St. Evrémonde family to trial for their crimes. His daughter, Lucie, whom he has not seen since she was a small child, has traveled to Paris from London with Jarvis Lorry, a family friend, to bring him home. Lucie and Lorry arrive in Paris at the wineshop of Monsieur and Madame Defarge, who are both active in the movement to incite a peasant revolution. Dr. Manette, now old, feeble, and too mentally impaired to recognize his daughter, has been staying in a room above the shop, where he works at a shoemaker's bench in the belief that he is a cobbler.

Five years later in London, the Manettes are called to testify in the treason trial of Charles Darnay, whom they had met during their return from France. Darnay, a French language tutor who is the nephew of the Marquis St. Evrémonde, has been accused of spying for the French. Darnay is acquitted when his attorney, C. J. Stryver, confuses a witness by presenting his law partner, Sydney Carton, who so closely resembles Darnay that the witness is unable to make a positive identification. Carton, who has a brilliant legal mind but suffers from alcoholism, becomes attracted to Lucie and through his feelings for her finds new direction in his life. Darnay, Carton, and Stryver, all of whom seek Lucie's hand in marriage, become frequent visitors at the Manette household, which is governed by Miss Pross. In the interim, the situation in France worsens as its citizens grow more angry and dissatisfied with the French aristocracy. Though Darnay has taken his mother's maiden name in an effort to shed his connection with his noble family, he feels compelled to return to France when his uncle runs down a peasant child

with his carriage. Darnay pleads with his uncle to make amends for the past deeds committed by the family, but the Marquis refuses. Later that night, the Marquis is killed in his sleep by Gaspard, the father of the child he killed.

Darnay returns to England and asks Manette for his daughter's hand in marriage. He tries to reveal his true name to the old man, but Manette tells him to wait until the morning of his wedding day. Carton is also in love with Lucie, but she refuses his proposal of marriage. Carton tells her never to forget that he will do anything he can to help her and those she loves. Six years later, the Bastille is stormed and the French Revolution begins. Darnay again returns to France, this time in an effort to save a loyal family servant from the revolutionaries. When his true identity is discovered, Darnay is arrested and put on trial. Lucie and Dr. Manette come to Paris on his behalf, and Manette's sympathetic testimony at Darnay's trial succeeds; Darnay is released, but under condition that he remain in France. Shortly thereafter, Darnay is arrested again, accused of crimes against the people by Defarge and an unknown party. In an effort to help, Carton, Miss Pross, and Jerry Cruncher, an employee of Lorry's, arrive in Paris, where they encounter Miss Pross's long-lost brother, Solomon, whom Cruncher recognizes as John Barsad, the man who accused Darnay of being a spy almost fourteen years before. At Darnay's trial, Defarge testifies against him, claiming that Dr. Manette is the second accuser, presenting papers he recovered from Manette's cell in the Bastille in which Manette chronicled the various crimes of the St. Evrémonde family and showed how they were responsible for his imprisonment. Darnay is found guilty and sentenced to death. Carton blackmails Barsad, a prison turnkey, and gains access to Darnay's cell. He then drugs Darnay and has him taken away so that he may pose as the Frenchman and take his place. While attempting to prevent the Manettes from leaving Paris, Madame Defarge is shot and killed during a struggle with Miss Pross. Lucie and Darnay escape to England, and Carton sacrifices himself, taking Darnay's place at the guillotine.

Major Themes

For Dickens, prisons are symbolic of the grave—a comparison he makes throughout his works. Critics note that the prevalence of this theme may be related to Dickens's father's incarceration in debtors' prison. Coupled with this notion in A Tale of Two Cities is the possibility of resurrection: Manette is “resurrected” upon his release from the Bastille, and Carton, who serves as a Christ-figure in his act of self-sacrifice, essentially lives on in the form of his double, Darnay. Additionally, Dickens uses memory as a driving force in the novel, whether as an instrument of destruction or of hope. While it is the memory of the rape and deaths of her siblings that prompts Madame Defarge's hatred of the aristocrats, it is the memory of Manette's dead wife that begins the process of his resurrection from the grave of his prison and insanity. Carton, in fact, is referred to by Stryver as “Memory Carton” for his brilliant legal mind; Carton renounces the memory of his former life when he dies with the words, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.”

Critical Reception

Though A Tale of Two Cities was immensely popular with general readers, many of Dickens's contemporary critics found fault with the novel. These critical attacks essentially focused on three fronts: that the novel is flawed as history, mechanical and unrealistic in its construction,

and uncharacteristic of Dickens. It is perhaps upon this last point that most critics choose to base their criticisms; many argue that the novel lacks the characteristic humor usually present in Dickens's work, and that the events with which it concerns itself are too far removed from the Victorian issues that Dickens typically chose to address. Rather than examine the novel on its own merits, these critics often fall into comparisons of A Tale of Two Cities with Dickens's other works. Regardless of the initial criticisms leveled at the novel, A Tale of Two Cities has come to receive a great deal of praise from modern critics, and it continues to be included on high school and college reading lists.

A Tale of Two Cities Essay - Essays and Criticism

Essays and Criticism

Critical Analysis of A Tale of Two Cites

With its famous opening line "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," A Tale of Two Cities was plainly intended by Dickens as a study in dramatic contrasts. Clear-cut polarities furnish this story of individuals caught in the maelstrom of the French Revolution with its central dynamic. Portraying events that take place over nearly two decades, the novel's setting shifts from the repression of autocratic rule and the impassioned violence it unleashes in Paris to the rule of law and the humane concern in London as a (temporarily) safe haven. The author's over-arching message arises in the context of sharp contrasts between chaos and order, light and dark, hope and despair, heaven and hell. This is a work that is essentially devoid of all ambiguity, one in which the good characters are without moral blemish, while the evil ones are without redeeming qualities. But A Tale of Two Cities is also open-ended. Its uplifting outcome pivots upon miracles of personal resurrection and self-sacrifice, as the author insists that nothing short of spiritual renewal can prevent his own society from suffering the type of upheaval that erupted across the English Channel at the end of the eighteenth century.

The theme of duality is manifest in Dickens's recourse to the device of twinned characters. Charles Darnay's father and his uncle are, of course, biological twins, and the elder St. Evermondes are indistinguishable in their haughty cruelty. It is, however, the close physical resemblance between Darnay and the world-weary lawyer Sidney Carton that the author exploits to the utmost. Unjustly accused of treason, Darnay's case in London appears to be lost until his attorney, Mr. Stryker, discredits the testimony of an eyewitness by challenging him to discriminate between the defendant and Carton. The uncanny physical likeness between the two men surfaces again in the novel's concluding chapters, when Carton substitutes himself for Darnay as a victim of revolutionary justice in France. As personalities, Carton is plainly the more complicated of the two and he is far more competent than his well-intentioned but consistently ineffective counterpart. Yet both men are in love with the exceedingly pure Lucy Manette, a saintly figure whose goodness matches that of Darnay and, at the same time, has the power to transmute Carton from a cynic into a self-sacrificing idealist.

In the first of the novel's three sections, we learn that Darnay's father and uncle were responsible for the imprisonment of Dr. Manette, and we see the fruits of despotism in his wasted, spectral

figure. But it is not until Book Two that Dickens gives us a first-hand example of the callous indifference that the French aristocracy has adopted toward the common people. When the gilded carriage of the Marquis St. Evermonde tramples Gaspard's child, leaving behind a tossed gold coin in its wake, it is apparent that the rule of the great lords is directly responsible for misery that the peasants and workmen of France have suffered for so long. We later learn that Madame DeFarge's entire family has been raped or murdered by the Evermondes, and that these crimes are characteristic of the entire class of aristocrats.

Despite the evident injustices, Dickens depicts the French Revolution of Book Three in elemental terms, as a storm driven by a passion for revenge. It is not social injustice of the ancient regime, but individual barbarity, which Dickens assaults. Indeed, an intemperate urge for revenge is presented by the author as being as evil as the indifference of the aristocrats to the miseries that they have inflicted. Arguably, the work's central villain is not Darnay's uncle, but his chief accuser, Madame DeFarge. The French mob hangs the aristocrat Foulon without trial and they hold captive Monsieur Gabelle, a St. Evermonde family retainer whose only offense is that he has served in an aristocrat's household....

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A Tale of Two Cities Analysis

Places Discussed (Critical Guide to Settings and Places in Literature)

Tellson & Co

Tellson & Co. English merchant bank with branches in London and Paris. The bank’s London office is dark, ugly, and staffed by old-fashioned bankers. Dickens describes the bank as resembling both a prison and a grave. As the oldest bank in England, Tellson’s is a symbol not only of English economic dominance but also of resistance to change. The bank’s London office is located “in the shadow” of Temple Bar, a large stone gateway which was used until 1780 to display on spikes the heads of executed criminals. The London office becomes a place of refuge for French aristocrats fleeing the violence of the revolution. In the yard of the bank’s Paris branch, the mob sharpens its weapons on a large grindstone, while the blood of already-executed victims drips from their clothes.

For Dickens, England is peaceful only on the exterior. Like France, it suffers from cruelty and widespread oppression of the majority of its population. The Old Regime in Europe comprises an upper class resistant to change and high-handed kings attempting to maintain the status quo. Dickens models Tellson’s Bank on Child and Company (founded in the seventeenth century on 1 Fleet Street and Thelusson’s Bank in Paris, in which a major financial adviser to King Louis XVI named Jacques Necker once worked).

*Saint Antoine

*Saint Antoine (sah[n]-tahn-twahn). Poor and densely populated district in Paris’s eastern suburb, where the attack on the Bastille takes place. It is an emotionally charged setting in which actions of violence and vengeance take place during the revolution. Descriptions of streets and buildings in Saint Antoine take on the character of the residents. It is at the main fountain in St. Antoine that a child is accidentally hit by the speeding coach of the marquis, who offers a few coins as a compensation for the child’s life.

Defarge’s Wine Shop

Defarge’s Wine Shop. Parisian wine shop which for Dickens is the eye of the storm that becomes the French Revolution. The shop serves as a meeting place for the leaders of the revolution. It is in front of the wine shop that one of the most memorable scenes in the novel takes place. A broken casket of wine results in neighborhood people rushing to salvage the precious drops of wine from the casket with their earthenware mugs, thus establishing not only an intoxicating brotherhood of blood but also one of wine.

*Bastille

*Bastille. Massive fortification in Paris that served as an armory and a prison for the four centuries preceding the French Revolution. Although it houses only four prisoners in 1789, the Bastille stands as a gargantuan symbol of the oppression of the Old Regime. In Cell 105, North Tower (a fictional creation), Dr. Manette languishes for eighteen years. As the revolution begins, a great firestorm surrounds the Bastille. Dickens borrows from Thomas Carlyle’s history The French Revolution (1837) in describing the storming of the Bastille in minute detail. It was at the Bastille that Defarge finds the letter from Dr. Manette that will later be used to condemn Darnay.

Château St. Evrémonde

Château St. Evrémonde (shah-toh sah[n]-tev-ray-MOHND). Sumptuous but heavily stoned mansion of the marquis. The villagers meet at the fountain at the château, and their rural poverty is stressed by Dickens. The descriptions of the stony home symbolize the coldness and inhumanity of the French aristocracy. The decadence of the marquis’ salon, at the château and in Paris, stands in stark contrast to the poverty of the general populace. It is the château life that Charles Darnay, the nephew of the marquis, rejects. Ultimately, after the assassination of the marquis, the château is destroyed by fire. Water boils in the fountain, followed by molten lead and iron; fountains symbolized life and also death for Dickens.

*Beauvais

*Beauvais (boh-VAY). French province that was the center of the fourteenth century serf revolt against the aristocracy. The revolt was bloodily suppressed. The Defarges originate from Beauvais, and their blood lust is an attempt to gain retribution for historical crimes. Beauvais, which is thirty miles north of Paris, is also the hometown of Dr. Manette. It is in Beauvais, a symbol of the rural violence of the French Revolution, where Darnay is almost killed by an infuriated mob.

*Dover Road

*Dover Road. Filled with ruts and clouded with steamy mist and fog, this access road to the ferry leaving Dover for France is a dangerous road to travel. Dickens uses it as a symbol of the rampant lawlessness still a part of England. Shooter’s Hill, near the road, is a thickly wooded rise that is the scene of many robberies by highwaymen. The hill was so named because of the many armed robberies that took place in the vicinity. In the novel, Dickens discusses many roads, all of which have metaphorical significance. In short, Dickens attempts to portray England as similar to France in burglaries, highway robberies, and exploitation of the general population by the elite minority.

*Soho Square

*Soho Square. London neighborhood that is the site of the Manettes’ secure and peaceful household, which is located in a fashionable square laid out in 1681. It is here that Lucie hears footsteps in a rainstorm, a symbol of the threat of revolution within England. For Dickens, although England is just across the English Channel, it is relatively secure compared to events on the Continent.

*La Force

*La Force. Prison used during the French Revolution for the proceedings of the Revolutionary Tribunal courts. La Force was the scene of the 1792 September Massacres, in which more than 1,100 accused counterrevolutionaries were massacred. The killing of prisoners is meant by Dickens as an ironic contrast to the saving of prisoners at the Bastille, three years earlier. It is at La Force (and three other prisons) that Dr. Manette tends to the medical needs of inmates.