tale of two cities research paper topics

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Essays on A Tale of Two Cities

Prompt examples for "a tale of two cities" essays, the theme of resurrection.

Explore the theme of resurrection in "A Tale of Two Cities." How does the concept of resurrection manifest in various characters and situations throughout the novel, and what is its significance?

Character Analysis: Sydney Carton

Analyze the character of Sydney Carton. How does his transformation and ultimate sacrifice contribute to the themes and message of the novel?

The Contrasting Cities of London and Paris

Compare and contrast the cities of London and Paris as depicted in the novel. How do these settings represent different aspects of society and revolution?

The Role of Fate and Coincidence

Discuss the role of fate and coincidence in the lives of the characters. How do chance encounters and twists of fate drive the plot and shape the characters' destinies?

Social Injustice and Class Struggles

Examine the themes of social injustice and class struggles in "A Tale of Two Cities." How do these issues lead to the French Revolution, and what commentary does Dickens offer on society?

The Sacrifice of Darnay and Carton

Discuss the theme of sacrifice in the novel, focusing on the sacrifices made by Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton. What motivates their sacrifices, and what do they achieve?

The Influence of History and Politics

Analyze the historical and political context of the novel. How do real historical events, such as the French Revolution, impact the story and its characters?

The Role of Women in "A Tale of Two Cities"

Examine the portrayal and significance of female characters in the novel, such as Lucie Manette and Madame Defarge. How do they contribute to the themes and conflicts of the story?

Violence and Revenge

Discuss the themes of violence and revenge in the novel. How do these themes drive the actions of characters and influence the outcome of the story?

Dickens's Commentary on Humanity

Explore Charles Dickens's commentary on the nature of humanity and the possibility of redemption as presented in "A Tale of Two Cities."

Duality of Jerry Cruncher

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A Tale of Two Cities: Resurrection Theme

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A Tale of Two Cities: Sacrificial Way of Characters

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A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: The Impact of Close Relationships on People

Analysis of sydney carton’s character in a tale of two cities by charles dickens, dickens’ use of foreshadowing in a tale of two cities, charles dickens’ use of fate as portrayed in his book, a tale of two cities, the popularity of the theme of death in the literature of the 17th-19th centuries, overcoming all odds in a tale of two cities, how charles dicken makes england a mirror of france in a tale of two cities, the theme of pollution of power in a tale of two cities, love and hatred in a tale of two cities, justice and sacrifice in charles dickens’ a tale of two cities, a tale of two cities: history of prisons.

Charles Dickens

Historical Novel

• Book the First (November 1775): Jerry Cruncher, Jarvis Lorry, Lucie Manette, Monsieur Defarge, Madame Defarge, Jacques One, Two, and Three, Dr Alexandre Manette
• Book the Second (Five years later): Mrs Cruncher, Young Jerry Cruncher, Charles Darnay, John Barsad, Roger Cly, Mr Stryver, Sydney Carton, Miss Pross, "Monseigneur", Marquis St. Evrémonde, Gaspard, The Mender of Roads, Théophile Gabelle
• Book the Third (Autumn 1792): The Vengeance, The Seamstress

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A Tale of Two Cities

118 pages • 3 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Before You Read

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 1, Chapters 1-3

Book 1, Chapters 4-6

Book 2, Chapters 1-3

Book 2, Chapters 4-6

Book 2, Chapters 7-9

Book 2, Chapters 10-13

Book 2, Chapters 14-16

Book 2, Chapters 17-20

Book 2, Chapters 21-24

Book 3, Chapters 1-5

Book 3, Chapters 6-9

Book 3, Chapters 10-12

Book 3, Chapters 13-15

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Discuss the significance of the title in terms of its themes, style , etc.

Sydney Carton is a lawyer, and several scenes in the novel take place in courtrooms. What role does the law or justice play in the novel, and how does it interact with the maticideas about redemption?

Several characters in A Tale of Two Cities seem to function largely as comic relief—Miss Pross, Jerry Cruncher , etc. Choose one of these humorous characters and explain how they contribute to the novel’s broader meaning.

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18 A Tale of Two Cities

Nathalie Vanfasse is Professor of English at Aix-Marseille Université, France. She graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and the Paris School of Political Science (Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris) and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne. Her monograph Dickens entre normes et déviance (Publications de l’Université de Provence) was short-listed for the 2008 prize of the SAES/AFEA (French Society for British and American Academic Studies), and she is the author of articles and chapters on Dickens’s work and on nineteenth-century travel writing. She has co-edited special issues on Dickens Matters, Dickens His/story (Dickens Quarterly, 2012); Dickens in the New Millennium (Les Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, 2012); and two volumes on Charles Dickens, Modernism, Modernity: Colloque de Cerisy (Éditions du Sagittaire, 2014). Her new monograph entitled La plume et la route: Charles Dickens écrivain-voyageur (Presses de l’Université de Provence, 2017) won the 2018 SELVA Prize (Société d’Etude de la Littérature de Voyage du Monde Anglophone).

• Published: 09 October 2018
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A Tale of Two Cities is one of Dickens’s shortest and possibly one of his most atypical and puzzling novels. For French readers in particular—whose history this novel purports to reinterpret—the novel proves especially challenging. This chapter provides new insights into the understanding of this perplexing work. It argues that the complexity of the novel stems from its interculturality—especially in relation to translation—as well as from the historical, political, philosophical, and sociological perspectives it engages with, and the interdisciplinary connections it thus establishes. The novel’s puzzling quality also derives from its intricate handling of the concept of identity and its multifarious ramifications that involve gender but also revolutionary crowds. Moreover, the elaborate combination of strong visual elements, added to an as yet underexplored but just as intense and multi-faceted kinaesthetic dimension, enhance our reading of A Tale of Two Cities , and open up new possibilities for performing and adapting the novel.

A Tale of Two Cities is by no means the most popular Dickens novel in France, possibly because it tackles, in what the French may deem a somewhat unsubtle way, a major traumatic episode of French history, namely the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. In this respect, French translators of A Tale of Two Cities are known to have toned down the gruesome and terrifying revolutionary episodes depicted in Dickens’s novel to make them more palatable to a French readership, whose collective psyche is still haunted by the trauma that pervades evocations of revolutionary Terror. 1 What this transformation of the original text demonstrates is that translations of A Tale of Two Cities not only raise questions regarding interculturality, but also imply memory, and sometimes trauma. In this respect, an extensive study of the novel in the light of French memory, with the help of memory studies and possibly of trauma studies, would certainly yield a deeper understanding of the effects upon the French psyche of the novel’s representation of revolutionary Terror. 2 A revealing anecdote seems to corroborate the need for such a memorial and intercultural undertaking. On the occasion of the bicentenary of the Revolution in 1989, the English Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, did not just commit a diplomatic faux pas, but revealed an interesting amnesia of sorts on the part of the English government: she offered the French President, François Mitterrand, a copy of A Tale of Two Cities !

Now the question of the translation of A Tale of Two Cities from English into French can also fruitfully and paradoxically be reversed. One may, indeed, consider the novel as a skilful translation of the French Revolution into English. How did Dickens manage to translate this event for British readers whose imagination was also haunted by the spectre of this disturbing historical episode? For one thing, his transcription of a very French historical event into the English language and culture implied, among other things, the use of a sophisticated Anglo-French parlance in the form of English sprinkled with Gallicisms. 3 This idiom is not just contrived; it also highlights some of the troubling metaphysical questions that the French Revolution raises. Let us take the following dialogue from the famous wine cask scene:

‘How goes it, Jacques?’ said one of these three to Monsieur Defarge. ‘Is all the spilt wine swallowed?’ ‘Every drop, Jacques,’ answered Monsieur Defarge. … ‘It is not often,’ said the second of the three, addressing Monsieur Defarge, ‘that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine, or of anything but black bread and death. Is it not so, Jacques?’ ‘It is so, Jacques,’ Monsieur Defarge returned. 4

‘Comment ça va ’ has come to mean in French ‘how things stand in the present circumstances’, but in the English transposition of this set phrase, ‘How goes it’, the verb ‘to go’ makes the sentence sound stilted. This preserves and highlights the sense of motion contained in the verb ‘to go’. Defarge’s question somehow seems to already foreshadow the vast crowd movements that will typify the French Revolution as depicted later in the novel. In contrast to this potential movement, the French tag questions and answers ‘ n’est-ce pas? ’ and ‘ c’est ainsi ’, which would normally be translated into English as ‘do they?’ and as ‘no they don’t’, are rendered literally in the novel by ‘It is not often’, ‘Is it not so?’, and ‘It is so’, tags emphasizing the verb ‘to be’. This unexpected translation emphasizes the duration of the people’s wretchedness, thereby foregrounding a condition of stasis, which paves the way for discontent and resentment.

Reverse translation also includes the glossing in English of French revolutionary terms like ‘ tricoter ’ (knitting), ‘ lanterne de potence ’ (swinging lamps), or ‘ Guillotine ’. 5 These words do not make sense without a background knowledge of their meaning in French culture or of the meaning of the French words they translate. Such is the case with Madame Defarge’s knitting. Madame Defarge’s needlework clashes with the social and literary model of the Angel in the House, with which Victorian readers were familiar. Her knitting is not connected to the private sphere, but foreshadows her role as the leader of revolutionary women in the Storming of the Bastille ( TTC II:21 and 22), and later as the head of the French ‘ tricoteuses ’, whom she epitomizes. However, Dickens chose not to use the French word ‘ tricoteuse ’, which might have immediately brought to mind the image of French women counting heads at the foot of the Guillotine. Instead, Dickens gradually infuses the English verb with its French meaning that materializes in the final image of the Vengeance and her friends sitting with their knitting at the foot of the Guillotine and waiting in vain for Madame Defarge’s arrival ( TTC III:15, 358). These examples clearly bring to light more of the complex intercultural considerations raised by the novel. 6

In addition to intercultural interpretations, A Tale of Two Cities lends itself to interdisciplinary critical readings that engage with the historical, political, philosophical, and sociological issues that it tackles. Let us leave aside the already well-known critical debates as to whether A Tale of Two Cities can be considered a historical novel, with some critics claiming that the novel does not contain sufficient historical evidence, and others arguing that Dickens offers a more or less convincing private and personal resolution to the political turmoil of a historically troubled period. 7 Let us consider instead the very materiality of historical evidence and how the novel deals with this issue. For one thing, a close examination of Dickens’s manuscript of the novel by Joel Brattin has revealed interesting new interpretations based on textual revisions that bring to light the existence of other doubles for Sidney Carton. 8 But the materiality of paper and documents is tackled in the plot itself, which voices anxiety about the disintegration and disappearance of such historical testimonies, as has been shown by Céline Prest. 9

In keeping with the conventions of historical novels, the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities is not just a backdrop; it is part and parcel of a plot that weaves together national history and the individual and fictional destinies of the Manette family. Strikingly, for French readers like myself, Dickens’s novel exemplifies a definition of history in keeping with what the famous historian Jules Michelet was to call, in his History of France (1869), a ‘complete resurrection’. 10 By this, Michelet meant a historical approach that was not just analytical and interpretative, but aimed at re-enacting events in writing. Though theorized by Michelet, this form of Romantic history had already been put into practice earlier by Thomas Carlyle in England—particularly in his History of the French Revolution (1837), a book which inspired Dickens’s novel.

Besides exemplifying a form of romantic history, A Tale of Two Cities also uses a triple temporality that foreshadows the three-tiered view of historical time delineated by French historian Fernand Braudel. 11 Braudel highlights the existence of a slow, geographical evolution of time, alongside the quicker pace of social history, and the even faster momentum of event-driven history. A Tale of Two Cities strikingly prefigures these three temporal levels, identifiable in the novel first, as the gradual changes in nature wrought by the growing forests of Norway and France alluded to at the beginning of the novel ( TTC I:1, 8); then, as the social history of two nations, England and France; and finally, as the accelerations of event-driven history embodied by the revolutionaries—this revolutionary history also standing for what would later be called ‘history from below’.

Another interesting interdisciplinary connection established by A Tale of Two Cities is the translation or the transposition of time into place, in other words of history into geography. Indeed, the novel maps a historical event onto the geography of two cities. Moreover, this geography—which associates different scales, such as the microcosm of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine quarter with the geography of France and its interactions with the universe—is far from static: it evolves as the Revolution spreads. Sara Thornton and Michael Hollington have looked into this connection of space and time. Thornton considers space not just horizontally but also vertically by showing how A Tale of Two Cities superimposes Paris and London stereoscopically, thus delivering a new political message which runs counter to the popular understanding that the novel was primarily hostile to the French Revolution. 12 Hollington associates time and space in A Tale of Two Cities via the themes of travel, mobility, and restlessness. 13 Further investigations could involve mobility studies, since the novel is filled with journeys and displacements well worth looking into. 14

A Tale of Two Cities offers a poetic transfiguration of the French Revolution that is symbolic, epic, fantastic, and at times quasi-hallucinatory. 15 The Storming of the Bastille is a perfect example of such poetic transmutations: the fairly flat French expression ‘ la prise de la Bastille ’—or ‘taking’ of the Bastille—is transposed by Dickens into a sustained maritime metaphor in which the charging of the Bastille becomes a stormy seascape à la Turner, foreshadowed by the thundering sea watched by Mr Lorry at Dover in one of the opening scenes of the novel ( TTC I:4, 22). The verb ‘to storm’ is used literally and metaphorically by Dickens, who develops the image of a thunderstorm to foreshadow the coming of the Revolution and its metaphorical rendering as a human wave in a raging sea ( TTC II:22, 213). This stylistic device partakes of the previously mentioned strategy of translating the French Revolution into English, by using a quintessentially English metaphor: Dickens plays on the double meaning of the word ‘storm’ in English—namely as a synonym of ‘a tempest’ but also of the verb ‘to charge’. The previous analysis illustrates a well-known interdisciplinary perspective on novel writing, summed up by Pierre Bourdieu’s contention that ‘literature condenses in the concrete singularity of sentient beings, and of individual adventures—which function both as metaphors and metonymies—the complexity of a structure and of history that scientific analyses laboriously unravel and develop’ (translation mine). 16

A Tale of Two Cities undoubtedly lends itself to connections between literature and other disciplines. It offers an interesting take on legal matters, thus partaking of what is now called the interdiscipline of literature and law, aptly analysed by Christine Krueger. 17 It also tackles professional issues, like Sidney Carton’s business as a barrister highlighted by Simon Petch. 18 It can be envisaged as well as a prime meeting point of politics and poetics. If one were to follow the philosopher Jacques Rancière in considering that politics have a quintessentially aesthetic quality, then Dickens’s novel produces a deeper and more inclusive reading of common experience than that given by ordinary political discourses. 19 In A Tale of Two Cities , politics acquire an aesthetic quality which lies in their contribution to the construction of a community or social body—the French revolutionaries—as well as of a common space—France, and more particularly the Saint-Antoine quarter in which this community evolves.

To better understand Dickens’s strategies to make the oppressed and the nameless—in other words the ‘ Misérables ’—visible, one may resort to another political/poetical perspective, that of the philosopher Hannah Arendt. 20 Indeed, A Tale of Two Cities shows the people not as a mere abstraction, but as individuals acting and speaking as distinctive faces, and as a crowd made up of singularities and differences reflecting humanity in its plurality. Dickens also hones in upon the very space that brings these different singularities together: the people’s sovereignty is rendered as much by a focus on the Paris quarter of Saint-Antoine as on the representation of the revolutionaries themselves. They, in turn, are represented through a proliferation of anonymous faces interspersed with a few specific portraits, such as those of the Defarges. Dickens’s novel exemplifies Hannah Arendt’s theory about literature and humanity in dark times, in that it infuses what Arendt calls ‘fragments of humanity’ into a world that has become inhuman, as much through the inhumanity of the ancien régime as through the barbarism of Revolutionary Terror. 21

The connection between politics and poetics in A Tale of Two Cities also implies building the plebeian into the subjects of a political scene, as discussed by political scientist Martin Breaugh. This is achieved by defending the people against the prerogatives of the powerful, thereby giving them a true political status or, as Breaugh puts it, ‘human political dignity’. 22

To further understand Dickens’s aesthetic and political stance in A Tale of Two Cities , a grammar of compassion, like the one delineated by the French sociologist Luc Boltanski, may usefully be called upon. 23 Boltanski distinguishes three levels in the representation of suffering, namely denunciation—which puts presumed persecutors on trial—emotion and empathy, and aesthetics—in which spectatorship prevails. Dickens makes a subtle and complex use of such a grammar by applying it not only to the ordinary people but also to the very aristocracy that the people overthrow.

Interdisciplinarity applies even further to A Tale of Two Cities when one realizes that Dickens’s political stance also tackles crucial ethical and philosophical questions involving crime and punishment; or such difficult choices as speaking or being silenced; accepting the order of things or rebelling against it. Dickens delves into these ethical dilemmas only to spell them out in even more problematic terms. 24 In A Tale of Two Cities , Charles Darnay’s predicament raises, for instance, the question as to whether one should be punished for a crime committed by one’s father. Similarly, Doctor Manette’s imprisonment at the Bastille is the result of an impossible choice between enduring tyranny to keep a semblance of freedom, or speaking up against it and being locked up forever.

Manette’s predicament as an anonymous Bastille prisoner, reduced to being number ‘one Hundred and Five North Tower’, emphasizes how much identity is at the heart of A Tale of Two Cities . The elusiveness and fragmented nature of social identities in A Tale of Two Cities , as well as the violence inherent in family names, have been emphasized by Kamilla Eliott. 25 Elliott focuses on face value, and connects identity in the novel to portraits on promissory notes, French passport descriptions, and photographs. Her study stresses that while the revolutionaries share the same Christian name, ‘Jacques’ from the French expression, ‘ Jacquerie ’—meaning popular rebellion—aristocrats in the novel are essentially reduced to their titles. Some of them, like the Marquis, remain nonetheless obsessed with the preservation of their family name, which in this particular case becomes a curse for his nephew, Charles. In A Tale of Two Cities , characters are disfigured, refigured, and even prefigured—as is the case at the end of the novel—in an endless process, which precludes any stabilization and finalization of identity.

Also primordial to such complex identity issues as those raised by A Tale of Two Cities , is gender. This includes masculinity, women’s studies, queer studies, and the history of sexuality situated within prevailing cultural codes. Critics have analysed the complex portrayals of masculinity and femininity offered by Dickens in his novel. They have related these portraits to issues of power and class relations. They have examined them in the light of Victorian patriarchy and domestic norms, and they have also taken into account subjective experiences depicted in the novel. Thus, Lisa Robson studied representations of women in the novel in the light of the Victorian ideal of the Angel in the House. 26 Regarding men in the novel, Richard Dellamora, Lee Edelman, Holly Furneaux, and Christine Krueger have recently explored alternative modes of masculinity in A Tale of Two Cities —focusing, in particular, on the characters of Mr Lorry and of Sidney Carton. 27

Identity in A Tale of Two Cities could be tackled in yet another way, following Walter Benjamin, who reflected on ways of giving a voice and appearance to obscure masses who usually form just a seemingly undifferentiated social background, and play what appear to be superfluous and secondary roles. 28 However, giving the voiceless a voice is easier said than done, as Jules Michelet testified in his book The People (1846): ‘But [the people’s] language, their language, was inaccessible to me. I was unable to make the people speak’ (translation mine). 29 As a matter of fact, and contrary to Michelet, Dickens, like Victor Hugo three years later in Les Misérables (1862), or later still Émile Zola, did manage to invent a poetics of the people that included giving them a voice of their own.

If we extend the idea of individual identity to that of the French people taken as a whole in A Tale of Two Cities , we are led to take a closer look at how Dickens invented strategies to depict the fugitive and unsettling nature of revolutionary crowds. Cates Baldridge, for instance, examines how Dickens subtly discusses and undermines a Victorian liberal ideology based on the primacy of the individual. This was achieved, Baldridge argues, by highlighting some of the positive sides of revolutionary collective action and of collectiveness in general, though not without alluding to their limitations as well. 30 One of these limitations lies in the fact that, as Robert Alter and J. M. Rignall have shown, the protagonists of the French Revolution depicted by Dickens all seem to be trapped in the broader movements of history. 31 Another limitation, pointed out by John Bowen, touches upon the tensions between the one and the many, as well as on mass history’s difficulty in representing the many and unnamed. 32

Such questions could be taken one step further, by comparing Dickens’s representation of French revolutionary crowds to those made by historians like George Rudé and Albert Soboul, among others. 33 An interesting literary, cultural, and historical study might even be undertaken on Dickens’s French revolutionaries as a superimposition of Victorian representations of French revolutionary crowds with representations of British crowds in the nineteenth century. This could be based on the work of John Plotz, who briefly examines the question of anonymous crowds in A Tale of Two Cities , in connection with Wordsworth’s poetry on the mystery of London and of urban unknowability. 34 More light might be shed on the way Dickens grapples with the problem of the one and the many, by resorting to Maurice Blanchot’s definition, in The Unavowable Community , of the people as being powerful precisely through their very elusiveness. Useful too might be, in this same light, analyses by Jean-Luc Nancy who, in Being Singular Plural , defined crowds as being neither a subsuming entity nor an experience of fusion but a body singularly plural and plurally singular. 35

Dickens’s novel reveals how much crowd movements terrified nineteenth-century English readers, partly because collective representations were infused with dire remembrances of the French Revolution. In A Tale of Two Cities , the people are represented at times as being as hideous, ignoble, and grotesque, as in the nineteenth-century French artist Honoré Daumier’s caricatures. In such instances, Dickens’s novel seems to prefigure Gustave Le Bon’s later Psychology of Crowds (1895), in which the people are compared alternately to a pack of dangerous animals, to neurotic, capricious, perverse, irrational, or mad beings, or to hysterical madwomen. Deformity prevails here, and the grotesque becomes the dominant representational aesthetics. Such details can be connected to a rising interest in pathological deformities, which developed at the time when the novel was written—an interest later exemplified in France by the work carried out by doctors like Charcot and Richer and summarized in their book The Deformed and Sick in Art (1889). The very form of crowds and their transformational power, as defined by Elias Canetti in Mass and Power (1960), might also be worth investigating in A Tale of Two Cities . Canetti stressed that crowds were not just given entities, but were processes in the form of closed and open multitudes, crowds fleeing, mobilized crowds, festive crowds, rebellious crowds, but also fragmented crowds. Dickens’s crowds are also worth relating to the myths and figures of revolutionary crowds, or even to Victorian ethnology. 36

Preceding comparisons with Daumier’s caricatures remind us of the strong visual dimension of Dickens’s writing in A Tale of Two Cities . For one thing, the influence of Dickens’s writing on Eisenstein’s cinema has been well documented. Both artists give a striking and epic visual representation of the power of the people. Ana Laura Zambrano has shown that in his film October (1928), Eisenstein drew from A Tale of Two Cities to stage the Russian people in their Revolution. Like Dickens, Eisenstein resorted to pan and high-angle shots to represent collective fury in his film Potemkin (1925). In the famous strike scene of this film, Eisenstein shows the people struggling against the exploitation that alienates them, just as Dickens showed French masses struggling against oppression. 37 The panoramic dimensions of the novel have been further analysed by Robert Alter, who also describes them as picturesque—a quality asserted by Dickens himself in his preface to the novel ( TTC ‘Preface’, 3), and which still gives rise to critical interpretations.

Fred Barnard, ‘The Carmagnole’, 10.7 cm × 13.8 cm. Wood engraving. Illustration for Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities . The Household Edition (London: Chapman and Hall, 1873), page 132. Courtesy Xavier University Library, Cincinnati, Ohio

The visionary intensity of certain scenes of collective violence involves Dickens’s staging of rebellious, cruel, terrifying, and anarchic crowds, 38 whose essence was captured in particular by Fred Barnard’s illustration of the revolutionary dance, ‘La Carmagnole’, in the 1873 Household Edition of the novel (Figure 18.1 ). This, in turn, emphasizes the links between the novel and its illustrations. Philip Allingham has reassessed Hablot K. Browne’s (‘Phiz’) illustrations for A Tale of Two Cities . 39 The images, according to Allingham, helped readers remember the details of a novel published over several months as a discontinuous narrative. Illustrations not only reveal Phiz’s careful reading of Dickens’s text; they actively partake of the very process of reading a novel published in monthly instalments in All the Year Round , alongside the non-illustrated weekly instalments.

The novel displays yet another interesting connection with specific images, namely daguerreotypes. Susan Cook has argued that Dickens’s style and narrative strategies have the same paradoxical ability as daguerreotypes to capture both past and present in one image, and to encapsulate darkness within light. 40 One thing is certain: the sense of sight is prevalent in A Tale of Two Cities , a novel that, according to Catherine Gallagher, depicts the Revolution as an exposure of the private sphere to public scrutiny figured by omnipresent and intrusive gazes and surveillance. 41

The visual dimension of A Tale of Two Cities could also be studied aesthetically and politically, along the lines of recent theories developed by the French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, who maintains in People Exposed, People as Extras 42 that the people are either under-exposed and left in the shadow—like Doctor Manette or the brother of Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities —or over-exposed through ‘spectacularization’, which blinds the eye to what is to be seen. This idea of a blinding ‘spectacularization’ applies, during the Storming of the Bastille, to the revolutionary crowd ‘with frequent gleams of light above the billowy heads, where blades and bayonets shone in the sun’, ‘like a kind of lightning’ ( TTC II:21, 206).

The problem faced by Dickens was that in literature, as in the visual arts, the humble people of the street were often outside the frame. To bring them into focus, Dickens invented a visual poetics of the people, at times lyrical, like the painter Gustave Courbet’s Stone Breakers —reminiscent of the mender of roads in A Tale of Two Cities —at others, cartoon-like, and reminiscent of the grotesque crowds of James Gillray or of Honoré Daumier’s engravings. The novelist animated his pictures by using devices like montage that builds the people into an entity made up of a series of views and perspectives on the individuals that constitute it. At times, the narrative zooms in on specific characters; at others, it shows a multitude of faces and bodies. The visual appeal of representations of the people in A Tale of Two Cities thus partakes of what Didi-Huberman calls ‘the eye of history’. 43

If sight features prominently in A Tale of Two Cities and has given rise to many critical studies, other sense impressions deserve just as much attention, notably sounds and other bodily feelings, as well as the kinaesthetic language associated with them. Through what they reveal and betray, the senses and body language in A Tale of Two Cities are so important that, as Michael Hollington aptly maintains, they sometimes even tell a counter-narrative. Hence the importance of studying all five sense impressions in Dickens’s novel and not just sight. Hearing, smell, taste, and touch are essential to the understanding of A Tale of Two Cities , and they provide new insights into the novel.

In fact, in A Tale of Two Cities kinaesthesia, or body language, sometimes produces humour in the novel. This humour is first and foremost dark and caustic, for instance in Dickens’s satire of French pre-revolutionary society. The scene where Monseigneur takes his chocolate is, in the light of the people’s plight, a grotesque travesty involving ‘four men besides the Cook’: ‘One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a third presented the favoured napkin; a fourth … poured the chocolate out’ ( TTC II:7, 100).

At other times however, the novel elicits pure laughter, as when young Jerry Cruncher comes running home after having discovered that his father is a resurrectionist—a scene that somewhat prefigures an animated cartoon: ‘He [Jerry] had a strong idea that the coffin he had seen was running after him; and, pictured it hopping on behind him, bolt upright, upon its narrow end, always on the point of overtaking him and hopping on at his side—perhaps taking his arm—it was a pursuer to shun’ ( TTC II:14, 155).

Such visual and kinaesthetic qualities open up new possibilities for performances and adaptations of A Tale of Two Cities , 44 a novel whose theatrical nature proves ever more complex. This paradoxical theatricality derives partly from the very nature of its subject matter—the French Revolution—an event, in itself, highly dramatic and even melodramatic. As a matter of fact, melodrama features prominently in A Tale of Two Cities , especially in the trial scenes. Sally Ledger pointed out that Dickens not only exploits the histrionic potentialities of the judiciary system, but combines the attorney general’s posturing and use of technical terms with a masterful use of indirect speech and narratorial intrusions, to produce both a highly dramatic moment and a powerful satire of the legal system and its discourse. 45

The theatrical nature of the novel also lies in the well-known fact that it was inspired from a play, The Frozen Deep , written by Wilkie Collins, assisted by Dickens. 46 In the memoranda book he kept in the 1850s, Dickens himself likened his novel to a French drama. 47 In this theatrical light, Anny Sadrin compared the modulations of the performing narrative voice of A Tale of Two Cities to those of a professional actor trying different effects upon his audience in a detached, but also, at times, impassioned tone, though, paradoxically, this alternation of detachment and implication was devised by Dickens so as to be cleverly misleading: it in fact proves impossible to perform in spite of its apparent theatricality. 48 Nevertheless, new studies on sights, sounds, and body language in A Tale of Two Cities revise this last statement and open up, as we have already seen, new vistas for performances and adaptations of the novel.

At the end of the day, A Tale of Two Cities , by its very nature, definitely lends itself to transdisciplinary analysis. Historical, political, psychological, philosophical, visual, physical, and poetical perspectives combine to offer readers and critics fruitful, rewarding, and stimulating research directions, well worth looking into.

Further Reading

Ruth Glancy , ‘ A Tale of Two Cities’: Dickens’s Revolutionary Novel (Boston: Twayne, 1991 )

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Ruth Glancy (ed.), Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: A Sourcebook (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006 )

Sylvère Monod , ‘Dickens’s Attitudes in A Tale of Two Cities ’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24 (March 1970): 488–505

Andrew Sanders , The Companion to A Tale of Two Cities (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988 )

See Christine Raguet , ‘Terror Foreign or Familiar—Pleasure on the Edge: Translating A Tale of Two Cities into French’, Dickens Quarterly 26, 3 (September 2009): 175–86 .

In this respect, Laurent Bury has studied remembering and dismembering in the novel in Liberty, Duality, Urbanity: Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2012), 133–41 .

Sylvère Monod , Dickens the Novelist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 459–60 .

A Tale of Two Cities , ed. Andrew Sanders , Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) , Book I, chapter 5, pages 35–6. Subsequent references are inserted parenthetically in the text by TTC Book:chapter, page.

See Nathalie Vanfasse , ‘Translating the French Revolution into English in A Tale of Two Cities ’, Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens 78 (Autumn 2013) : n.p. Web. 3 June 2016. Doi: 10.4000/cve.776.

See Murray Baumgarten , ‘Writing the Revolution’, Dickens Studies Annual 12 (1983): 161–76 .

See Irene Collins , ‘Charles Dickens and the French Revolution’, Literature and History 1, 1 (1990): 40–58 ; Barton R. Friedman , ‘Antihistory: Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities ’, in Fabricating History: English Writers on the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) .

Joel Brattin , ‘Sidney Carton’s Other Doubles’, in N. Vanfasse , M-A. Coste , C. Huguet , and L. Bouvard (eds), Dickens in the New Millennium, Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens (February 2012): 209–23 .

Céline Prest , ‘Recalled to Life: Exhuming Documents in A Tale of Two Cities ’, in J.-P. Naugrette et al. (eds), Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities, Cercles 31 (2013): 115–24 .

Jules Michelet , Histoire de France , vol. 1 (Paris: A Lacroix et Compagnie, 1880), iii . ‘Plus compliqué encore, plus effrayant était mon problème historique posé comme résurrection de la vie intégrale , non pas dans ses surfaces, mais dans ses organismes intérieurs et profonds.’ (‘More complicated still, more daunting was my historical problem defined as the resurrection of complete life , not in its surfaces, but in its inner and deep organisms.’ Translation mine; emphasis in the original.)

See Fernand Braudel’s preface to The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (London: Collins, 1972) .

Sara Thornton , ‘Paris and London Superimposed: Urban Seeing and New Political Space in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities ’, Études anglaises 65 (2012–13): 302–14 .

See Michael Hollington , A Tale of Two Cities (Paris: Atlande, 2012) .

Hollington connects the historical notion of Revolution to sundry cyclical movements in space, and he links spatially linear patterns to linearity in time.

On mobility studies, see Jonathan Grossman , Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) ; Ruth Livesey , Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) .

On patterns of imagery in the novel, see Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador , ‘Metaphorical Representations of the French Revolution in Victorian Fiction’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 43 (1988): 1–23 .

Pierre Bourdieu , Les Règles de l’art (Paris, Seuil, 1992), 22 . The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field , trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996) .

Christine L. Krueger , ‘The Queer Heroism of a Man of Law in A Tale of Two Cities ’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 8, 2 (Summer 2012) : n. p. Web. 3 June 2016.

Simon Petch , ‘The Business of the Barrister in A Tale of Two Cities ’, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 44, 1 (Winter 2002): 27–42 . See also Nathalie Jaëck on the banker Mr Lorry in ‘Liminality in A Tale of Two Cities : Dickens’s Revolutionary Literary Proposal’, in Maxime Leroy (ed.), Charles Dickens and Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 72–84 .

Jacques Rancière , Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy , trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) ; The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible , trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004) .

See Hannah Arendt , Qu’est ce que la politique? (1950–9), trans. S. Courtine Denamy (Paris: Le Seuil, 1995), 39–43 .

Hannah Arendt , Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968) .

See Martin Breaugh , L’Expérience plébéienne: une histoire discontinue de la liberté politique (Paris: Payot, 2007), 87–171 ; The Plebeian Experience: A Discontinuous History of Political Freedom , trans. Lazer Lederhandler (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) .

Luc Boltanski , La Souffrance à distance: morale humanitaire, médias et politique (Paris: Métailié, 1993) ; Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics , trans. Graham Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) .

On crime and punishment, see also Jeremy Tambling , ‘Dickens and Dostoevsky: Capital Punishment in Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities, and the Idiot ’, in Dickens, Violence, and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), 129–54 .

Kamilla Elliott , ‘Face Value in A Tale of Two Cities ’, in Colin Jones et al. (ed.), Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 87–103 .

Lisa Robson , ‘The “Angels” in Dickens’s House: Representations of Women in A Tale of Two Cities ’, Dalhousie Review 72, 3 (1992): 311–33 ; On women in the novel see also Barbara Black , ‘A Sisterhood of Rage and Beauty: Dickens’ Rosa Dartle, Miss Wade, and Madame Defarge’, Dickens Studies Annual 26 (1998): 91–106 ; Wendy S. Jacobson , ‘ “The World Within Us”: Jung and Dr. Manette’s Daughter’, Dickensian 93, 2 (Summer 1997): 95–108 ; Hilary Schor , ‘ Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities : The Social Inheritance of Adultery’, in Dickens and the Daughter of the House (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 70–98 ; Michael Slater , Dickens and Women (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983) ; Catherine Waters , ‘ A Tale of Two Cities ’, in Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 122–49 .

See Lee Edelman , No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) ; Richard Dellamora , Friendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) ; Holly Furneaux , ‘Charles Dickens’s Families of Choice: Elective Affinities, Sibling Substitution, and Homoerotic Desire’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 62, 2 (September 2007): 153–92 ; Furneaux , Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) ; Krueger, ‘The Queer Heroism of a Man of Law’ .

This question also partakes of a sociology that can be traced back to Georg Simmel and is represented today by researchers like Guillaume le Blanc. See Georg Simmel , ‘Le Pauvre’, in Sociologie: étude sur les formes de la socialisation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), 453–90 ; Guillaume Le Blanc , Vies ordinaires, vies précaires (Paris: Le Seuil, 2007) .

Jules Michelet , Le Peuple (1846), ed. P. Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 246 . The People , trans. and introd. John P. McKay (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973) .

Cates Baldridge , ‘Alternatives to Bourgeois Individualism in A Tale of Two Cities ’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 30, 4 (Autumn 1990): 633–54 .

Robert Alter , ‘The Demons of History in Dickens’ “Tale” ’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 2, 2 (Winter 1969): 135–42 ; J. M. Rignall , ‘Dickens and the Catastrophic Continuum of History in A Tale of Two Cities ’, ELH 51, 3 (Autumn 1984): 575–87 .

John Bowen , ‘Counting on: A Tale of Two Cities ’, in Colin Jones et al. (eds), Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution , 104–25 .

George Rudé , The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959) ; Albert Soboul , The French Revolution 1787–1799: From the Storming of the Bastille to Napoleon (New York: Random House, 1984) .

See John Plotz , The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 39–40 ; also David Craig , ‘The Crowd in Dickens’, in Robert Giddins (ed.), The Changing World of Charles Dickens (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983), 104–25 .

Maurice Blanchot , The Unavowable Community , trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988) ; Jean-Luc Nancy , Being Singular Plural , trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000) .

See Fanny Robles, ‘Émergence littéraire et visuelle du muséum humain: les spectacles ethnologiques à Londres, 1853–1859’, doctorate, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, 2014.

Ana Laura Zambrano , ‘Charles Dickens and Sergei Eisenstein: The Emergence of Cinema’, Style 9 (1975): 469–87 .

See Rignall, ‘Dickens and the Catastrophic Continuum of History’ , 579–80.

Philip V. Allingham . ‘Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Illustrated: A Critical Reassessment of Hablot Knight Browne’s Accompanying Plates’, Dickens Studies Annual 33 (2003): 109–57 . On illustrations see also Elizabeth Cayzer , ‘Dickens and his Late Illustrators: A Change of Style: “Phiz” and A Tale of Two Cities ’, Dickensian 86, 3 (Autumn 1990): 130–41 .

Susan Cook , ‘Season of Light and Darkness: A Tale of Two Cities and the Daguerrean Imagination’, Dickens Studies Annual 42 (2011): 237–60 .

See Catherine Gallagher , ‘The Duplicity of Doubling in A Tale of Two Cities ’, Dickens Studies Annual 12 (1983): 125–44 . The novel, Gallagher argues, insidiously exposes violence, the better to hide its own violent strategies of exposure.

Peuples exposés, peuples figurants: l’œil de l’histoire 4 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2012) .

Didi-Huberman has published a series of volumes under this general title: L’Œil de l’histoir e, 6 vols to date (Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 2009–16) .

Regarding performances of the novel, see Charles Dickens , ‘ The Bastille Prisoner , in Three Chapters’, in Charles Dickens: The Public Readings , ed. Philip Collins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 279–93 . For critical approaches to this question, see Brian Bialkowski , ‘Facing up to the Question of Fidelity: The Example of A Tale of Two Cities ’, Literature/Film Quarterly 29, 3 (2001): 27–42 . See also Charles Barr, ‘Two Cities, Two Films’, 166–87; Judith Buchanan and Alex Newhouse, ‘Sanguine Mirages, Cinematic Dreams: Things Seen and Things Imagined in the 1917 Fox Feature Film A Tale of Two Cities ’, 146–65; Joss Marsh, ‘Mimi and the Matinée Idol: Martin-Harvey, Sidney Carton, and the Staging of A Tale of Two Cities , 1860–1939’, 126–45, all of which can be found in Colin Jones et al. (eds), Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, and the French Revolution . See also Arthur Hopcraft , ‘The Spirit of Revolution’, Listener (18 May 1989): 10–11 .

Sally Ledger , ‘From the Old Bailey to Revolutionary France: The Trials of Charles Darnay’, in Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution , 75–86 ; for melodrama see also Juliet John , ‘Unmasking Melodrama: Sidney Carton and Eugene Wrayburn’, in Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) .

For further information on A Tale of Two Cities and The Frozen Deep , see Robert Louis Brannan (ed.), Under the Management of Mr. Charles Dickens: His Production of ‘The Frozen Deep’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966) ; Malcolm Morley , ‘The Stage Story of A Tale of Two Cities ’, Dickensian 51 (1954): 34–40 .

Charles Dickens’ Book of Memoranda , ed. Fred Kaplan (New York: New York Public Library, 1981), 5 .

Anny Sadrin , ‘ “The Paradox of Acting” in A Tale of Two Cities ’, Dickensian 97, 2 (Summer 2001): 124–36 . Sadrin likens the alternately detached and involved narrative voice to the manner of other ‘performers’ like the mender of roads or Sidney Carton.

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A Tale of Two Cities

Charles dickens, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

A Tale of Two Cities: Introduction

A tale of two cities: plot summary, a tale of two cities: detailed summary & analysis, a tale of two cities: themes, a tale of two cities: quotes, a tale of two cities: characters, a tale of two cities: symbols, a tale of two cities: literary devices, a tale of two cities: quizzes, a tale of two cities: theme wheel, brief biography of charles dickens.

Historical Context of A Tale of Two Cities

Other books related to a tale of two cities.

• Full Title: A Tale of Two Cities
• When Written: 1859
• Where Written: Rochester and London
• When Published: 1859
• Literary Period: Victorian era
• Genre: Historical novel
• Setting: London and Paris
• Climax: Sydney Carton's rescue of Charles Darnay from prison
• Antagonist: French revolutionaries; Madame Defarge
• Point of View: Third person omniscient

Extra Credit for A Tale of Two Cities

Serial fiction: Like many of Dickens's novels, A Tale of Two Cities was first published in installments in his magazine All the Year Round . Many Victorian novels were first published in serial parts and then later collected into books.

American favorite: Since its publication, A Tale of Two Cities has always been Dickens's most popular work in America.

“The Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens Essay

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The story ‘The Tale of two Cities’ written by Charles Dickens is considered to be dedicated to the disclosure of French Revolution period; it is the classic work representing the archetypal characters through the concepts of good and evil interaction, physical and moral courage. The paper will be concentrated on the analysis of the story central heroes, Charles Darnay, Sydney Carton, Lucie Mannette and Madame Defarge, combining the elements of violence and horror with the romanticism and realism style portrayed by Dickens.

Charles Darnay is depicted by Dickens as a French aristocrat, living in England through his inability to accept the injustice and cruelty of French social system. The character is the embodiment of moral values and greatest virtues by his rejection of uncle Marquis Evremonde’s snobbism. Darnay, who is presented as the protagonist of the story, is the expression of nobility and morality. Moving to London, he marries Lucie Manette and they have a little daughter Lucie.

‘He had loved Lucie Manette from the hour of his danger. He had never heard a sound so sweet and deer as the sound of her compassionate voice; he had never seen a face so tenderly beautiful, as hers when it was confronted with his own on the edge of the grave that had been dug for him.’ (Dickens 131)

The events surrounding the character are filled with envy, evilness and hatred; nevertheless, the power of love and deep moral values make the character remain just and faithful. Dickens depicts Darnay as a flat character; despite this fact, he undergoes only minor changes in the flow of the novel. It is interesting to note that the story beginning shows Darnay as a noble character with aristocratic behavior and fleeing to England.

But gradually then character is turned into a loving husband and devoted father, who is a generous and kind son-in-law and a considerate friend at the same time. His attempts to help the servant can be characterized as naïve and noble gesture making him returning to France at the period of revolution oppression. Being imprisoned and helpless, Darnay has no opportunities to help anyone and himself either. Only the character’s faithfulness and devotion, as well as honors and appreciation, expressed in the world perception and attitude to close people and society saved him through actions of Carton and Dr. Manette. (Chisick, 2000)

Sydney Carton is presented as an unrecognized lawyer and heavy drinker; physically the character resembles Darnay, nevertheless, he is quite different. Carton is shown as worthless human being having no high social position and loving family to who he can devote his life. The loneliness was the only friend of his accompanying the character’s thoughts and actions.

‘I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.’ (Dickens, 99)

Nevertheless, it is necessary to stress that Carton never harmed anybody and even strived to provide some help he could. He helped in Darnay’s prosecution for treason allowing his colleague Stryver (a friend, who lacks ambitions and gets success due to Carton’s efforts) to reveal him. Carton’s assistance to people positioned the character as a positive personage; despite Carton’s slight hatred to Darnay through their mutual love with Lucie, he wished to become a friend of his, which characterizes carton as a kind-hearted person.

It is necessary to stress that Dickens managed to demonstrate Carton’s gradual changes in his attitude and position in the world; the novel events underline the idea that carton has got the real sense of life being ready to help others and even sacrifice his life. The depiction of Sydney Carton contributed to the central theme of the novel, underlining the symbolism of moral and physical courage. The readers gave an opportunity to see how people can sacrifice all they have for the only love of their love. Carton’s love for Lucie appeared to be the embodiment of happiness and greatest virtue. (Sims, 2009)

‘Think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you’ (Dickens, 184)

The fact that Carton gave his life for Darnay, Lucie’s husband, depicted him as a noble, generous, warm-hearted person who believed in the power of love and came to the self conclusion that his life sense was Lucie’s happiness, the only person he lived for. (Stout, 2007)

Lucie Manette seems to be an angel in the world of evilness and hatred; blue eyes and golden hair made the image of this character marvelous attracting attention of all men. Lucie, who is physically and spiritually beautiful, is considered to be ‘lesser developed’ character in the story possessing the best qualities and virtues. The readers have an opportunity to judge Lucie analyzing her actions and attitude to surrounding people, rather than words. She is the inspiration of loyalty and love; her character managed to connect the lives of Darnay, her husband, and Carton, who gave his life for his love to her, in the power of love.

‘I think, Charles, poor Mr. Carton deserves more consideration and respect than you expressed for him to-night… I fear he is not to be reclaimed; there is scarcely a hope that anything in his character or fortunes is reparable now… remember how strong we are in our happiness, and how weak he is in his misery?’ (Dickens 207)

The flatness of Lucie character does not push her to indifferent position in the story; she is an important figure who indirectly symbolizes unconditional compassion and love. It is necessary to stress that dickens uses this character to underline the power of love and spiritual wealth in the atmosphere of hatred and violence. Her rare dialogues in the novel do not make her actions transparent to the readers; the author managed to depict successfully the symbol of kindness and justice, which is also transferred to Lucia’ and Darnay’s daughter.

The character of Madame Defarge is considered to be unrelievedly horrible; she is illustrated as cruel revolutionary combining the features of aristocracy hatred with evilness expressed to everyone interacting with her interests.

‘Madame Defarge was a stout woman…, with a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of manner.’ (Dickens 35)

It is necessary to stress that throughout the novel Madame Defarge is busy with making a list of those, who are to die for revolution. The character is depicted as blood-thirsty with the unbounded lust for vengeance. Dickens underlined the fact that Madame Defarge and her family used to suffer cruel oppression, influencing her worldview and attitude to the society.

‘…imbued from her childhood with a brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class, opportunity had developed her into a tigress.’ (Dickens, 369)

It is necessary to stress that the flow of story events shows Madame Defarge as less than human, characterized by the features of Greek tragedy moral world. The early life experience resulted in the woman moral oppression and internal evilness expressed to people.

The author lets the readers to understand how people, who suffered deprivation and old regime oppression from the very childhood, change their perception of the surrounding environment and react violently to the opportunities they get. Reading ‘The Tale of Two Cities’ provides a clear connection between the people making the Revolution and those, who suffered its conditions. It is necessary to stress that Dickens success fully illustrated a memorable, powerful and chilling character through Madame Defarge depiction, who was concerned about the Revolution flow in England. (Patterson, 2009)

The analysis of four different lives in the story ‘The Tale of two Cities’ written by Charles Dickens gave an opportunity to the reader evaluate the features of the characters living in the same era. The characteristics presented above demonstrate the idea that Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton can be perceived as the dynamic characters, while Lucie Manette and Mrs. Defarge as static ones. Such a position underlines the fact that the author strived to depict female characters for the novel events and mood background, symbolizing the contrast of evil and good, hatred and justice. Dickens managed to centralize these characters even through their rare communicative roles and dialogues, making special stress on dynamism of Darnay and Carton in the play.

The novel ‘The Tale of two Cities’ appeared to be a valuable contribution to the world literature. This masterpiece is generally recognized on the international level, through the author’s successful description of the most important virtues of humanity.

The description of four different lives in one epoch, living under the pressure of old regime and French revolution, disclosed the way in which people can change through weak willed nature and lack of resistance to internal interference. Despite the focus on evil and cruelty promotion, Dickens brightly illustrated the victory of good and justice. The author managed to underline the importance of love, showing how his characters were ready to sacrifice everything they had for human virtues and this great feeling.

Works Cited

Chisick, Harvey “Dickens’ Portrayal of the People in A Tale of Two Cities.” European Legacy 5.5 (2000): 645. MasterFILE Premier . EBSCO. Web.

Dickens, Ch. “A Tale of Two Cities: Easyread Edition”. ReadHowYouWant. 584p. 2009.

Patterson, Frank M. “Dickens’s A tale of Two Cities” Explicator 47.4 (1989): 30. MasterFILE Premier . EBSCO. Web.

Stout, Daniel “Nothing Personal: The Decapitation of Character in A Tale of Two Cities.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 41.1 (2007): 29. MasterFILE Premier . EBSCO. Web.

Sims, Jennifer S. “Dickens’s A TALE OF TWO CITIES.” Explicator 63.4 (2005): 219. MasterFILE Premier . EBSCO. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2021, December 22). “The Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-tale-of-two-cities-by-charles-dickens/

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IvyPanda . 2021. "“The Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens." December 22, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-tale-of-two-cities-by-charles-dickens/.

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"A Tale Of Two Cities" --Theme of 'Social Injustice'

Related Papers

Sonia Fanucchi

Daniel Stout

Devin Griffiths

This essay examines Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities through the defining historical mode of the nineteenth-century historicism: comparative history. An under-appreciated response to the failure of stadial and progressive accounts to explain the French Revolution, comparative history drew from a range of allied disciplines, including comparative philology, mythology, and anatomy. This investigation tracks comparatist inquiry through a range of nineteenth-century theories of society and nature, and--by addressing the novel’s concern with historiography, secularism, melodrama, alterity, and multiple modernities--locates Dickens’s sensational account of Revolutionary France as a key text in the emergence of comparative history as an independent Victorian discipline.

William Mouat

IJCIRAS Research Publication

In the present research paper, the emphasis is on the method Dickens catches the excess of idealism and horror of the revolutionary period of the late 18th century. Although the terrors of the French Revolution have been concealed for present readers by the world wars and killings of the twentieth century, the horror story of Dickens's time were the horrors of the French Revolution. English society is depicted as unsafe but not fatal. Paris and London (opposite cities) Paris and London establish the true heroes of the novel. With the fictionalized description of the events A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is leading up to the birth of the new French Republic. This novel clearly reveals fierceness of authority and gives faultless depiction of the million lost lives by stating that while subjugation will certainly lead to revolution, revolution will lead just as unavoidably to tyranny. Dickens continuously insists upon the worthless terrors of revolution, the injustice, the ever-present terror of scouts and the horrible blood lust of the mob. The portrayals of the Paris mob, for example the gang of murderers struggling to sharpen their weaponries before slaughtering the prisoners in the September massacres outdo anything. These are the dealings in the history of France which form the burning background of A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Its explanation of the French Revolution has powerfully fashioned the British opinions of national identity and political legitimacy.

Brahma Dutta Sharma

nadia aissou

Review 19 (www.review19.org)

Laurence Davies

Tatjana Jukić

In his essay "On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature," Gilles Deleuze privileges English and American literatures as a kind of counter¬-archive where the collective and the political are configured for philosophy, also where the contact zones of philosophy are negotiated. Anglo-American literature therefore appears to constitute a critical apparatus (dispositif) which preempts, even invalidates, the attempts to found English and American studies as disciplines in their own right; in consequence, English and American studies emerge in this Deleuzian perspective as a curious economy of knowledge based in surplus and structured in metonymy. In my presentation I would like to test this proposition against a number of Victorian texts (Carlyle, Dickens, Arnold). They all address revolution as a political event of the first order which presses on the archival logic. Yet the revolution as they see it presses on memory regimes precisely in the positions where archives - unlike revolutions - depend on downgrading metonymy and on processing surplus out of existence. While this particular assemblage calls for a more nuanced reading of surplus and metonymy in Victorian culture, now in terms of politics and memory, it also demands that Deleuze's approach to Anglo- American literature be reassessed: not in order to invalidate it, but rather to call attention to its own implicit economy of knowledge.

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5 best topics for A Tale of Two Cities essay

The Charles Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities is one of the most well-known works in the history of literature. As well as a being historical account of the French revolution and its causes it explores a variety of moral, social and philosophical issues. For these reasons it's a common subject for essays. The biggest problem with writing an essay on it is choosing a topic, because dealing with the novel as a whole can easily fill another book. Here are five possible topics.

• Resurrection. Dickens uses the theme of resurrection frequently, relating it to both people and societies. He stresses the injustice of pre-Revolutionary France, where peasants could be executed without trial at the whim of an aristocrat. That society is now dead but France will be resurrected as a new sort of nation. Similarly, at the end of the novel Sydney Carton is spiritually resurrected after dying to save Darnay.
• Sacrifice. Sacrifice is a major element of the novel. Miss Pross sacrifices her own happiness to give Lucie every chance in life, for example; Dickens stresses the extent of her selflessness. Carton makes the ultimate sacrifice; he voluntarily gives his life by impersonating the condemned Darnay and being executed in his place. His motivation is to make Darnay's wife Lucie, whom he loves, happy.
• Violence and revolution. Dickens shows clear sympathy with many of the aims of the French revolutionaries and portrays the degeneracy of the aristocracy vividly; foe example in one scene an aristocrat kills a child with the wheel of his carriage and casually throws the parents a coin to compensate for their loss. However he also illustrates the indiscriminate violence unleashed by the revolution itself, and uses the unjust death sentence imposed on Darnay, a virtuous man, to show this.
• Light and darkness. Light and dark are used as metaphors for good & evil. Arrests happen at night. Dark blood on snow slowly spreads a stain, as evil spreads through the Revolution. Madame Lafarge is followed by dark shadows.
• Duality. The novel is built around opposing pairs. The two cities of the title are stable but corrupt and socially divided London, and Paris with the high ideals and violent reality of the Revolution. Lucie and Madame Lafarge represent good & evil women. Carton and Darnay have a very close physical resemblance but Darnay is highly moralistic and worthy, while Carton (until he rises above himself) is dissipate and lazy.

Any one of these topics is a good basis for an essay. Each of them can be shown by many examples from the novel, which provides a lot of material to write about and gives the opportunity to produce an interesting, in-depth piece of work.

Professional essay services (writing, editing, proofreading) - get your essays written or edited by expert writer.

Yet Another Tale of Two Cities: Buenos Aires and Chicago

Buenos Aires and Chicago grew during the nineteenth century for remarkably similar reasons. Both cities were conduits for moving meat and grain from fertile hinterlands to eastern markets. However, despite their initial similarities, Chicago was vastly more prosperous for most of the 20th century. Can the differences between the cities after 1930 be explained by differences in the cities before that date? We highlight four major differences between Buenos Aires and Chicago in 1914. Chicago was slightly richer, and significantly better educated. Chicago was more industrially developed, with about 2.25 times more capital per worker. Finally, Chicago's political situation was far more stable and it wasn't a political capital. Human capital seems to explain the lion's share of the divergent path of the two cities and their countries, both because of its direct effect and because of the connection between education and political instability.

Both authors thank the John S. and Cynthia Reed foundation for financial support. Conversations with John Reed helped start this project. We also thank the Taubman Center for State and Local Government for financial assistance. We are grateful to Kristina Tobio for her usual superb research assistance, and to Esteban Aranda for his outstanding assistance with the Argentinean data. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

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Published Versions

“ Yet Another Tale of Two Cities: Buenos Aires and Chicago ” (with Edward L. Glaeser), prepared for book Argentine Exceptionalism (edited by Rafael Di Tella and Edward L. Glaeser).

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