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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

Background of the Novel

Historical context.

The last two decades of the 18 th century is marked as a turning point in the history of Europe. The French Revolution that began in 1789 changed the political landscape of Europe. With the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the citizens of France destroyed the centuries-old institutions of feudalism and absolute monarchy. The poor economic policies of the king and the discontent of the citizens with the French monarchy gave rise to the upheaval. King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were executed.

Though the French Revolution could not achieve its ultimate goal and turn into a chaotic bloodbath, it played an important role in influencing the modern nation by portraying the inherent power of will of the common people.

The French Revolution, just like the American Revolution, was started to inculcate political liberty and rational thought among the masses. The ideals that the Enlightenment period of the 18 th century inculcated in the people were soon compromised when the Revolution of French citizens turned into “terror.” Moreover, the French Revolution was not restricted to France.

It also cast a sharp and long shadow on nineteenth-century industrialized Britain. With the advent of industrialization, Britain was divided into two classes: the rich and the poor. The Elite classes started fearing the oppressed class to start the Revolution and rebel against the monarchy; however, political compromises and wake-up calls by literary figures like Dickens attempt to stop the crisis in England.

Literary Context

The genre of historical fiction is founded by Sir Walter Scott. In order to display the historical war-time, Scott created the fictionalized characters in his novels. One of his famous novels on war-time history is Waverly.

Just like the distinct narrative voice of Dickens, Scott narrator also off and on explains, preaches, expounds, and makes jokes. The Middlemarch by George Eliot contains multiple plots and has realistic psychological details, therefore evolving the genre of historical fiction.

The novelists like Dickens, Scott, and Eliot used the genre of historical fiction to talk about the problems that were prevailing in their societies. They would use the events of the past to reveal the present to revolve around the crisis. The novels of these novelists discuss how individuals are created and shaped by political history and vice versa.

A Tale of Two Cities Summary

The novel opens in the year 1775 with Mr. Jarvis Lorry traveling on a mission to Dover to meet Lucie Manette. Mr. Jarvis Lorry is the employer of Tellson’s Bank in England. On his way to Dover, Mr. Lorry happens to meet a man who gives him a mysterious message, and Mr. Lorry replies with the message, “Recalled to life.” At Dover, in a restaurant, Mr. Lorry meets Lucie Manette and reveals that her father, Dr. Alexandre Manette, is alive, whom she thought had been long dead.

For 18 years, Dr. Manette had been clandestinely imprisoned in France. However, Monsieur Defarge, the old and former servant of Dr. Manette, has smuggled him out of prison and hid him in the upper story of the store. In Paris, Defarge now owns a wine shop, which is the center of the rebellious activities that result in the French Revolution. In the meantime, Madame Defarge, wife of Monsieur Defarge, enlists the name of the enemies of the Revolution by knitting. When Lucie and Mr. Lorry arrive to receive Dr. Manette, they find him in a dark corner, spontaneously making shoes. He has been left insane by prison. They receive him lovingly and return to London.

During their return to London, Lucie and Dr. Manette met Charles Darnay, the French aristocrat. He does not withstand the policies of his family against the working class and leaves France to go to England.

The story jumps to the year 1780. Charles Darnay is standing trial in London for spying. Lucie and Dr. Manette also attend the trial. Mr. Stryver is a defense lawyer of Charles Darnay. However, his associate Sidney Carton, a drunk and bored-looking man, win the case. Carton ruins the credibility of the witness by pointing out his resemblance to Darnay.

The wealthy aristocrats of France ignore the misery of poor people who are dying due to hunger and are staggering in luxury. The carriage of Marquis St. Evremonde, a wealthy aristocrat, irresponsibly runs over a child and kills him.

When he reaches his castle, he meets Charles Evremonde, his nephew, who has returned from England. Charles Evremonde is actually Charles Darner. In the meeting with his uncle, he abandons his association with his family. When Marquis is sleeping in his luxurious room that night, he is murdered.

Charles Darnay, Sydney Carton, and Stryver being impressed with Lucie, frequently pay their visit to Dr. Manette and Lucie. When Mr. Stryver decides to ask Lucie for marriage, he is warned by Mr. Lorry that his proposal will not be likely to be accepted by Dr. Manette and Lucie. Similarly, Carton admires Lucie for how she proved to be a person who changed his life by making him believe that he still has scraps of goodness hidden inside him, despite the ruined past he has.

Charles Darnay asks Dr. Manette’s permission to marry his daughter Lucie. Moreover, he wants to tell him his real name; however, Dr. Manette refuses to know until the day of the wedding. After the wedding, he is upset and feeling alone when his daughter and son in law go for honeymoon, Dr. Manette setbacks into his madness and starts making shoes. Mr. Lorry comforts him to recover, and the other day he was all fine and wants Mr. Lorry not to tell Lucie about the episode when she returns. Lucie and Charles Darnay give birth to a daughter.

The story again jumps to the year 1789. To destroy the monarchy, Defarge leads the rebellious peasants in Bastille. He investigates the old cell of Dr. Manette and discovers a letter written by Dr. Manette in a chimney. They later use this letter against him. The French Revolution was at its peak, and the new state has been declared. However, the citizens are growing extremely fierce and capture the aristocrats and kill them by execution. Charles Darnay goes to Paris when he receives a letter from his servant, Gabelle, asking for his help. However, Darnay is taken into prison.

To rescue Darnay, Lucie and Dr. Manette go to Paris and join Mr. Lorry, who has been there on a Bank Business. The 18 years of imprisonment make Dr. Manette a local hero. With his influence, he gets a trial for Charles Darnay; however, it takes a year. Lucie walks near the prison every day in the hope that Charles Darnay may see her. With evidence of Dr. Manette, Charles Darnay is freed. However, on that very night, he is again imprisoned by the charges carried by Madame Defarge and Monsieur Defarge.

Jerry Cruncher and Miss Pross have also come to help Dr. Manette and Lucie Manette. On the streets of Paris, they encounter Solomon Pros, the brother of Miss Pross. Jerry recognizes him as John Barsad, who was a witness of the allegation against Charles Darnay in the trial in England. Carton also appears and forces Barsad to cooperate with him in helping Charles Darnay or else he will reveal him as a spy.

At the second trial of Charles Darnay, Madame Defarge shows the court a letter written by Dr. Manette that she previously found in a chimney. In the letter, Dr. Manette wrote how the father and uncle of Charles Darnay – Evremonde’s brothers – abused a peasant girl and to protect themselves imprisoned Dr. Manette. Darnay is sent back to prison with the sentence to death. Dr. Manette loses his consciousness, thinking that his letter has caused the death of Charles. Moreover, Sidney Carton overhears the conversation of Madame Defarge, who has resolved to eliminate the line of Evremonde by killing Lucie and her daughter. At that spot, she also revealed to be the sister of a peasant girl and boy whom Evremonde abused and killed.

Carton makes a plan with Mr. Lorry to immediately arrange a carriage for everyone to escape for England and handover his identity paper to him. With the help of Barsad, Carton goes into the prison where Charles is imprisoned. He drugs him and switches his clothes with him. Thinking that Sidney has lost his consciousness due to overdrinking, Barsad takes Charles, disguised as Sidney Carton, to the carriage arranged by Mr. Lorry. Mr. Lorry, Dr. Manette, Lucie, her daughter, and Charles Darnay leave for England. They do not know that Sidney has replaced himself with Charles Darnay.

Soon after their departure, Madame Defarge shows up at the apartment of Dr. Manette to kill Lucie. However, before she could get in and know that Lucie has fled to England, Miss Pross stops her at the gate. The two start arguments and Madame Defarge takes out her pistol to threaten Miss Pross but shoots herself. The sound of a gun deafens Miss Pross.

While moving to the place of execution, in place of Darnay, Carton holds the hand of a young lady who has been accused of wrongly. He dies, realizing that the sacrifice he has made for Lucie is the greatest thing he has done in his life ever.

A Tale of Two Cities Characters Analysis

Sydney carton.

Sidney Carton is the most vigorous character in the novel A Tale of Two Cities. At the beginning of the novel, he appears to be a drunk and lazy lawyer who aggregates a little concentration in his life. For him, his existence is nothing but supreme waste and claim that he does not care for anything or anyone. However, the readers realize that there is a deep feeling inside Sidney Carton that he wants to articulate it but is unable to do.

Though, in his conversation with Charles Darnay, who has been recently proved guiltless, comments about Lucie. However, his tone was sardonic and bitter and let down his growing interest and developing feelings for Lucie. Ultimately, he gathers courage and confesses his feelings for Lucie to her. Unknowing that Lucie and Darnay are soon going to marry, he proposes his love for Lucie and also claims that he is not worthy of her. This event changes the life of Sidney Carton and makes the basis for the sacrifice that Sidney makes for Lucie at the end of the novel.

Madame Defarge

Holding an act of ruthless revenge, Madame Defarge symbolizes the turmoil of the French Revolution. In the initial chapter of the novel, the readers find her sitting in the chair of the wine shop, knitting quietly. Nevertheless, her outward inactiveness contradicts her persistent desire for revenge. Along with her knitting the clothes, she also knits the names of her revolutionary enemies in her “mental register.”

The real wildness of Madame Defarge is shown when Revolution breaks with the full force. The way terror and chaos destroy Paris, Madame Defarge turns on Lucy and invades both the physical and psychological space of Lucie. At first, she enlists the name of Lucie and her memory into the register of people who are meant to die in the Revolution. She then breaks into Lucie’s apartment to see Lucie mourning the death of her husband, Charles Darnay and then kills her.

Dickens points out that the ruthlessness and hatefulness of Madame Defarge are not inherent but is the result of suffering, oppression, and tragedy she faced at the hand of Evremondes. Though Lucie and Charles Darnay have not done any harm to her, they both are related to Evremondes: Darnay by blood and Lucie by marriage. But still, Dickens does not approve the retributive policies of justice of Madame Defarge, and therefore the readers do not feel any sympathy for her.

The oppression of aristocrats has mage Madame Defarge, an oppressor; likewise, the victims of the oppression of Madame Defarge will turn out oppressors as well. Madame Defarge dies with the shot of her own gun. Through this, Dickens symbolizes that the revengeful attitude that Madame Defarge embodies turns out to be self-damning.

Charles Darnay (a.k.a. Charles Evrémonde)

After renouncing his connection with the Evremondes, Charles Darnay abandons his family and position as the French aristocrat and goes to England. Though Darnay supports the revolutionary ideal of human liberty, he is not a radical revolutionary like French masses. He symbolizes the middle position between the mistreatment practiced by the aristocracy and the lethal anger displayed by the revolutionaries.

Charles Darnay displays a heroic character of obligation and justice when trying to help the oppressed peasants and endangers his own life by helping Gabelle. But Charles also deceives himself by thinking that he can change the power and make the Revolution a positive change in France. Moreover, Charles is not able to see the potential of Sidney Carton and is guided by his wife, Lucie, to believe in the potential of Sidney Carton. Darnay is the representative of virtuous but imperfect humanity.

Lucie Manette

She is the daughter of Dr. Alexandre Manette and wife of Charles’ Darnay. She resurrects or restores her father back to life after eighteen years of imprisonment. She has the qualities of devotion, innocence, and enduring love. In the novel, she is the main figure which symbolizes goodness and laces a “golden thread” that binds together an essential group of people against the cruel forces of politics and history. She also displays religious faith. She believes in Sydney Carton when no one else believes in him. It is her kindness that inspires Sidney for his utmost deed of sacrifice.

Dr. Alexandre Manette

He is an accomplished physician who lived in France and has been imprisoned for 18 years in Bastille. The unjustified imprisonment makes him lose his mind. He embodies a horrible psychological shock of oppression from subjugation. Lucie’s love “resurrects” or restores him to his life. Manette also represents the idea that suffering can also turn into a strength. When he goes back to Paris to rescue his son in law, he gains the authoritative position in the French Revolution. To return Charles Darnay’s favor of resurrection, Manette saved him in the trial. But his old letters again lead to Charles’ execution. He ultimately becomes a tragic figure and falls into madness. The life of Manette shows that individuals are always entrapped in the strong forces of history.

Monsieur Defarge

He is the former servant of Dr. Mannete and smuggles him from the prison. He owns a wine shop that he uses to organize the revolutionaries of the French Revolution. Monsieur Defarge, like his wife Madame Defarge, is aggressively dedicated to dethroning dictatorship and retaliating discrimination. However, he does not support his wife’s planning to kill Lucie Manette. Due to this characteristic of mercy, Defarge becomes a symbol of the French Revolution that failed. The revolution lost its vision and turned into terror and chaos.

Jarvis Lorry

With the development of the plot of the novel, the character of Jarvis Lorry changes from a purely pragmatic and minding-one’s-own-business to an intense and loyal person who devotes his life to protect the family of Dr. Manette and thus become a member of Manette’s family. When Mr. Lorry first meets with Lucie, he asserts that “I had no feelings and that all relationships I hold with my fellow-creatures are mere business relations.”

Indeed, Mr. Lorry is a dedicated and hardworking employee who, on behalf of the bank, risks his life by making a dangerous journey to France. He explains his decision by saying that “if I were not prepared to submit to a few inconveniences for the sake of Tellson’s, after all these years, who ought to be?” however, his actions strongly contradict his words. He time and again claims that he is only concerned with his business; he shows great love and affection to the Manette’s family. It is Lorry who helps Dr. Manette when he lapses into madness after Lucie’s marriage.

He explains the episode to Dr. Manette by saying that he is narrating the case of a hypothetical patient. The end of the life or Mr. Lorry is described in the vision of Sidney Carton as “the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years’ time, enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquility to his reward.” The character of Mr. Lorry symbolizes the life of someone who lives conferring on the integrity and principles of both personal and professional life.

Jerry Cruncher

He is a worker of Tellson’s Bank. He is a short-tempered, gruff, illiterate, and uneducated person. He has the second source of his earnings by doing a job of a “Resurrection-Man.” He digs up the graves and sells the dead bodies to a scientist for experiments.

She is Lucie’s maid who raised her. She is a tough, gruff, and loyal servant. As she is a symbol of loyalty and order, she is a foil to Madame Defarge – the one who is an epitome of chaos and disorder.

Marquis Evrémonde

He is the French aristocrat and the uncle of Charles Darnay. He is the embodiment of inhumanity and supports the brutal caste system. He displays no sign of humanity in the novel and wants all peasants of the world to terminate.

Mr. Stryver

He is a determined lawyer. He wants to climb the social ladder by marrying Lucie Manette. He is a proud, bombastic, and foolish person.

John Barsad or Roger Cly

John Barsad and Roger Cly are the same person but switch their roles according to the need of the situation. In England and France both, he swears to be loyal to the state, and all his actions are inspired by patriotism. He spies for the British under the name Roger Cly, while in Paris is named as John Barsad. He claims to a person of a high reputation. However, he is involved in crafty planning.

He is the servant of Evremondes and is charged with the allegation of keeping the estate of Evremondes after the death of Marquis Evremonde. The revolutionaries imprisoned him, and he wrote a letter to Charles Darnay for him. This letter makes Darnay visit France and save him.

Themes in A Tale of Two Cities

Resurrection and transformation.

The novel A Tale of Two Cities By Charles Dickens illustrates the possibility of transformation and resurrection. Charles Dickens, in the novel, declares that resurrection and transformation are possible on a personal level, as well as social level. The death/sacrifice of Sidney Carton not only restores the peaceful life of Charles Darnay but also of Lucie Manette and Dr. Manette and Sidney Carton himself. Carton rises to the status of heroism by providing himself with execution. He becomes a Christ-like figure who restores and rescues the lives of others by his death. Even he gives meaning and value to his life. Moreover, at the end of the novel, the narrative suggests that the life of Sidney Carton – like Christ’s life – will be resurrected as Sidney Carton gains immortality in the hearts of people whom he died for.

Moreover, the novel also asserts that the destruction of the old Monarchy of France is a way to the new and beautiful Paris that Carton envisions during execution. Though Carton spends most of his life in idleness and sloth, his final deed shows the human potential for better change. Though most of the novel describes the cruelness of aristocrats and outrageous peasants both, it also delivers the belief that this violence will pave the way for a better society.

The theme of resurrection Dr. Manette is also called forth by Mr. Lorry, who sends a secret message saying that “recalled to Life.” According to this, the 18 years long imprisonment of Dr. Manette is considered as death. The love of Lucie restores Dr. Manette’s life and supports the notion of rebirth.

The Inevitability of Sacrifice

The themes of resurrection are associated with the theme of the necessity of sacrifice. The resurrection reinforces the idea that for the attainment of happiness, sacrifice is necessary. This theme, like the theme of resurrection, is also applicable to both personal and national life. For instance, the French Revolution in France portrays the idea that a democratic and liberal can be established only with a high coast. In order to bring the change, personal loyalties and affection must be sacrificed.

Similarly, when Charles Darnay is arrested for the second time by the revolutionaries, the guard reminds Dr. Manette of the predominance of the interest of the state against the personal interest. A similar lesson is given to Monsieur Defarge by Madame Defarge when he shows his devotion to Dr. Manette. Lastly, the transformation of Carton into a man of moral worth is only possible when he sacrifices his old self. He not only rescues his friend but also guarantees his rebirth by choosing to die.

The Propensity to Fierceness and Tyranny in Revolutionaries

The novel, A Tale of Two Cities, illustrates the Dickens’ uncertain approach to the French Revolution. Though he supports the causes that give rise to the French Revolution, he highlights the wickedness of the revolutionaries as well. Dickens profoundly understands the dilemma of the French peasantry and stresses on their necessity for freedom.

The chapters in the novel that deals with the oppression of Marquis Evremonde effectively show an image of malicious upper classes that blatantly abuses and subjugates the poor class. Though Dickens denounces this subjugation, he also denounces the strategies of the poor classes to gain liberation against it. The peasants do not affect the Revolution truly by fighting against the barbarism with barbarism. Instead, they only give rise to the chaos they suffered themselves.

While depicting the mobs, in the novel, Dickens makes a standpoint and proves it. The scene in which the revolutionaries sharpen their weapons and dance at the execution of the aristocrat is marked as morbid. The apt view of Dickens is illustrated in the last chapter in which he says that “Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.” The revolutionaries are turning from oppressed to oppressors. Indeed, the French Revolution is a symbol of resurrection and transformation, and he also highlights the violent act stating it to be opposing it causes.

The French Revolution is caused by class conflict and social unrest in France. The ruling class and the monarchs have done nothing but spent their lives in luxury and wealth. A Tale of Two Cities sarcastically spoofs the affectations of the aristocrats by showing how four servants are busy serving a cup of chocolate to their master.

The narrator says, “Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men.” The French aristocrats are not only lazy and spoiled, but they are also brutal and do not regard the lives of poor peasants. After killing a child under his carriage, Monseigneur heatless tells the poor peasant that he “would ride over any of you very willingly, and exterminates you from the earth.” Moral complexity is added to the novel as Dickens does show not only the brutality and oppression of the upper class but also shows the violence of the lower class.

The theme of justice presents in the novel through the institutions that are responsible for serving justice and as well as through the individuals who want to attain justice outside the courtroom. In the novel, the imprisonments and the trials represent justice. Though the legal systems are designed to provide justice to the masses, the prisons and courts, most of the time, punish the innocent people. As the legal system failed to provide justice, the individual seeks it outside it. When Gaspard’s son is killed, he realizes that the legal system will never give him justice against the strong and powerful aristocrat, thus killing Marquis in his bed. Similarly, Madame Defarge has been scheming against the Evremonde’s family for years because she knows that the legal system cannot stand against the wealth and power of Evremondes.

Oppression and Revolution

The novel A Tale of Two Cities is based on the French Revolution that started in France in 1789. In the novel, Charles Dickens shows how the oppression of the rulers of France nourished wrath in the masses that ultimately resulted in the rebellion. This process is depicted through the character of Marquis, Evremonde, his treatment with the common people. He killed a child and was not ashamed of it.

Though the reasons for common people to revolt against the brutal aristocrats are justifiable, and the ideals of equality, liberty, and fraternity of the French Revolution were highly praised, Dickens seems to be more pessimistic about it. He shows that the revolutionaries fight against oppression and violence with further oppression and violence. This symbolizes that no matter who is in power, whether common people or the aristocrats will fall prey to the pull to use complete power and suppress others. In short, Dickens illustrates that the way oppression causes Revolution, Revolution, also cases oppression. The cycle can only be broken when mercy and justice are practiced.

Secrecy and Surveillance

In the novel, A Tale of Two Cities, every character seems to have a secret. The forgotten history of Dr. Manette is detailed in his hidden letter; the secret profession of Jerry Cruncher; the attitude of Mr. Lorry regarding his profession; the past of Charles Darnay; the underground activities of Madame Defarge and Monsieur Defarge.

The prevailing political instability at the counter results in this secrecy. In Book One, Chapter Three, the narrator points out that “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it.”

The French aristocrats and the commoner both have spies to find out what their enemies are up to. Both sides inflict harsh punishments once they suspect anyone is spying on them. In such circumstances, no one trusts anyone and suspects everyone. To survive, they all feel the necessity to keep secrets.

Fate and History

Lucie Manette and Madame Defarge identify with the Fates – the mythological goddesses who actually control the “threads.” Lucie is titled as the “golden thread,” whereas Madame Defarge is seen as constantly knitting in the novel. The novel A Tale of Two Cities is concerned with the theme of human destiny due to the presence of these two “Fate” characters. The novel deals with how history shapes the fate of the individual. In the novel, Dr. Manette and Charles Darnay try to change their destinies. Charles makes his way to England and tries to escape the cruel history of his family; however, circumstances made him go to France and face the consequences of his family’s past. Similarly, Dr. Manette uses his connection and influence to rescue Charles Darnay; however, he forgets his own letter that causes his execution. Dickens suggests that forces of history cannot be defeated by political influences but by self-sacrifice.

A Tale of Two Cities Analysis

The novel A Tale of Two Cities is an account of the main conflict between Charles Darnay and Madame Defarge. Charles Darnay wants to break his connection with his family, whereas Madame Defarge wants to hold him responsible for the sins of his family and punish him. The conflict between Madame Defarge and Charles Dafarge embodies the characteristics of the French Revolution. On the one hand, the French Revolution was a response to the injustices done to the peasants’ class over the years; on the other hand, this Revolution causes the death of many innocent people who have not done anything wrong.

Being in association with the institution of exploitation was enough to execute a person. In the novel, Charles Darnay is sentenced to death because he is the son and nephew of the Evremonde’s brothers. The plot of the story is structured in the past before the action of the story begins. The two Evremonde’s brothers abused a peasant girl and brother and then killed him. To eliminate any witness, they also imprisoned Dr. Manette. At the end of the novel, Madame Defarge turns out to be the sister of the abused girl.

The readers learn about the causes of Madame Defarge’s action at the end of the novel. However, they have been driving the plot and reflect that how history discloses. The chaotic Revolution does not start all of a sudden; it is the result of the decades’ old exploitation and injustices by power. Likewise, the crimes that were committed years before by the old generation haunted the new generation and held them accountable for it.

Abstract ideas and concepts in a literary text are represented by objects, characters, and figures. Following are the symbols in the novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The wine shop of Madame Defarge and Monsieur Defarge is the center where revolutionary planning is going on secretly. The wine in the novel symbolizes the strong power of the French Revolution. The revolutionaries, drunk on power, turned from the freedom fighters into the wild beasts on the streets murdering everyone. The deep red color of the wine shows the red color of the blood. When the wine drops from the container, the people rush towards it. It shows how these people are bloodthirsty. Just like the wine everywhere on the streets when the sailor could not transport it to the shop properly, after the Revolution, blood is everywhere.

Golden Thread and knitting

Lucie Manette and Madame Defarge identify with the Fates – the mythological goddesses who actually control the “threads.” Lucie is titled as the “golden thread,” whereas Madame Defarge is seen as constantly “knitting” in the novel. Lucie tries to connect the people around him and is the source of their bondage, whereas, Madame Defarge plans to separate them by knitting their names in the mental register. The novel A Tale of Two Cities is concerned with the theme of human destiny due to the presence of these two “Fate” characters. The novel deals with how history shapes the fate of the individual.

It is the machine designed to execute the people who are sentenced to death. It is one of the everlasting symbols of the French Revolution. The guillotine in the novel shows how the chaos created by the Revolution is institutionalized. It shows how the life of humans is cheap, and murdering has become so easy and emotionless. The guillotine is the death of the ideals of the French Revolution: equality, fraternity, liberty, or death.

Footsteps and Shoes

Lucie hears the footsteps of all the people coming into the lives of Manette’s family. These footsteps symbolize fate. It shows how the fate of Lucie is connected with people coming into her life. Similarly, in his madness, Dr. Manette is always seen as making shoes. Shoes are the symbol of the inevitable past.

The Marquis

The character of the Marquis Evrémonde is an archetype of wicked and corrupt social institutions. He exploits the lives of peasants and is completely indifferent to their sufferings. Marquis is a symbol of the brutal aristocrat and cruelty that drives the peasants to revolt against them.

The recurrent images, structures, and literary devices in a literary text are called Motifs. The emphasis on the idea helps develop the major themes of a work. The following are the motifs in the novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

The very opening words of the novel suggest that the narrative of the novel is centered on the double. The novel opens with the words: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” Likewise, the plot of the story is based on the “two cities”: London and Paris. Moreover, Dickens also doubled the characters to highlight the main theme of the novel. The two important female characters in the novel act totally opposite to each other. Madame Defarge is an evil character, while Lucie is loving and affectionate.

Dickens does not compare the two cities or characters by placing them opposite to each other, and he also creates the twins that make the plot of the novel melodramatic. The character of Darnay resembles Sidney Carton in looks. Carton saves the life of Sidney twice by taking advantage of his resemblance to Charles Darney.

Imprisonment

The characters in the novel are struggling against some sort of imprisonment. In the case of Dr. Manette and Charles Darnay, the struggle is evident as they are kept in prison in the jails of Paris. However, the novel also suggests that past memories also serve as the function of prison. Dr. Manette cannot get over his memories of the torturing past he spent in prison. Similarly, Sidney Carton spends much of his life thinking of harsh memories of the past.

Setting of the Novel

The very title of the novel indicates the two settings of the novel. The novel is set in London and Paris. The main action of the novel starts in the year 1775 with Lucie Manette discovering that her father, Dr. Manette is not dead but had been in prison for the last 18 years and ends with the Carton’s sacrifice to the Manette’s family in 1793. The key events of the plot occur in the year 1757 (before the novel begins). This year, Dr. Manette was arrested by the Evremondes. Due to the two settings, Dickens incorporates many storylines occurring at both places simultaneously. All these storylines are brought together in the last part of the novel, where every character of the novel is seen in Paris.

The two settings give a chance to Charles Dickens to compare and contrast the two cities. The novel criticizes both cities differently. London, in particular, and England in general, are portrayed as conservative, old fashioned, and at odds with the times. The narrator voices Dickens by comparing England to a father who “did very often disinherit his sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs.”

On the other hand, Paris is portrayed as a place of high tension and is on the peak of chaos, for example, and the narrator describes Saint Antoine in the first chapter as “a narrow winding street, full of offense and stench.” It is the place where the violence of the Revolution is at peak. This setting is dominated by the muskets, cannons, and smoke and fire along with the masses that are bloodthirsty.

The style of the novel A Tale of Two Cities is grandiose. The narrator is omniscient who can see both the past and future. The narrator uses his perspective to comment on human nature and foreshadows the upcoming events. The style of the novel also contributes to the outcome of unfolding history. The style also dominates when the narrator describes the prophetic vision of Sidney Carton about the future of Paris.

The novel has a threatening and philosophical tone. All over the novel, the narrator foreshadows the uncountable sufferings this to come. The narrator also employed images that help to create a dark and threatening tone.

Point of View

The point of view of the novel A Tale of Two Cities has a third-person omniscient. The events of the plot are recounted by the all-knowing and all-seeing narrator. The narrator also provides an understanding of the feelings and thoughts of the characters. The point of view helps to provide a thorough perspective on the historical events that occur in different places. It also allows the panoramic view of all the events taking place in the two cities: London and Paris.

The novel A Tale of Two Cities belongs to the genre of historical fiction. Though the novel was published in 1859, the main plot of the novel is set in 1775, the years before the French Revolution. The opening line of the novel gives a sense of the time to the reader:

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times,

it was the age of wisdom; it was the age of foolishness,

it was the epoch of belief; it was the epoch of incredulity…

The plot of historical fiction is set before the time it is actually written. It provides a critical view of the events of the past and helps the readers to think more critically than the facts given by historians.

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.

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A Tale of Two Cities

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

A Tale of Two Cities is full of examples of sacrifice, on both a personal and national level. Dr. Manette sacrifices his freedom in order to preserve his integrity. Charles sacrifices his family wealth and heritage in order to live a life free of guilt for his family's awful behavior. The French people are willing to sacrifice their own lives to free themselves from tyranny. In each case, Dickens suggests that, while painful in the short term, sacrifice leads to future strength and happiness. Dr. Manette is reunited with his daughter and gains a position of power in the French Revolution because of his earlier incarceration in the Bastille. Charles wins the love of Lucie. And France, Dickens suggests at the end of the novel, will emerge from its terrible and bloody revolution to a future of peace and prosperity.

Yet none of these sacrifices can match the most important sacrifice in the novel—Sydney Carton's decision to sacrifice his life in order to save the lives of Lucie, Charles, and their family. The other characters' actions fit into the secular definition of "sacrifice," in which a person gives something up for noble reasons. Carton's sacrifice fits the Christian definition of the word. In Christianity, God sacrifices his son Jesus in order to redeem mankind from sin. Carton's sacrifice breaks the grip of fate and history that holds Charles, Lucie, Dr. Manette, and even, as the novel suggests, the revolutionaries.

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Sacrifice Quotes in A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities

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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

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Important Quotes

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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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A Tale of Two Cities

Lucie manette's suitors rachel lynch 10th grade.

Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities artfully weaves the story of the Manette family through the background of the French Revolution. Though, as readers know, uprising and overthrow in France is imminent, M. Manette and his daughter Lucie deal will mundane aspects of life alongside the unusual. One such aspect: Lucie’s courting by three suitors and subsequent marriage to Charles Darnay. Lucie is sought after by Stryver, Carton, and Darnay, all of whom have strengths and weaknesses, but her eventual marriage to Darnay is the right choice.

While Stryver is wealthy and therefore powerful, and would be able to provide Lucie with a good life, the only thing bigger than his riches is his ego. Stryver makes a good living for himself as a lawyer and presents an image of himself to the public as hardworking and dedicated to his craft. However, behind the scenes, it is Carton who does all the work while Stryver takes the credit. Carton comments that Stryver “was always the front rank, while I was always behind” (93), which proves to be an accurate description of how Stryver sees himself in relation to the world: he is always the top, and others should do what he wants. This egotism is evident when he confesses to Carton that he plans to...

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‘A Tale of Two Cities’ - Exploration of sacrifice, social commentary, and transformation"

First line- “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Analysis of the opening line Repetition: The line begins with a repetition of the phrase "It is a far, far better thing," which immediately draws the reader's attention and emphasizes a strong contrast.

Self-sacrifice: The speaker acknowledges that the action they are about to undertake is a "far, far better thing" than anything they have done before. This suggests that they are about to perform a noble and selfless act, which sets the tone for a significant moral or ethical decision.

Rest vs. Action: The contrast between "It is a far, far better rest" and "that I go to" implies that the speaker sees their forthcoming action as a form of rest or peace, even though it may involve great sacrifice. This juxtaposition hints at the idea that the character is willing to give up their own life for a higher purpose or for the greater good.

Unknown vs. Known: The line also contrasts the unknown rest they are going towards with the known rest they have experienced before. This suggests that the character is willing to embrace uncertainty and take a leap of faith.

Analysis of the title of the book Duality: The title immediately introduces the theme of duality, suggesting that the novel will explore the contrast and comparison between two cities. In this case, the two cities are London and Paris, and the stark differences between them serve as a backdrop for the events of the story.

Setting: The title not only highlights two cities but also emphasizes their importance to the narrative. Both London and Paris are central to the plot, and Dickens uses them to represent different aspects of society, culture, and historical context. London symbolizes order, stability, and the status quo, while Paris represents chaos, revolution, and social upheaval.

Parallel Narratives: The novel follows the lives of characters in both cities, and the title suggests that there will be parallel storylines or narratives. It emphasizes that the destinies of characters in London and Paris are interconnected and that events in one city have consequences in the other.

Historical Context: The novel is set during the tumultuous period of the French Revolution, a time of great upheaval and change. The title underscores the idea that the story is not just about individual characters but also about the broader historical context and the impact of historical events on people's lives.

What makes it a must-read 1.Profound Social Commentary: Dickens uses the novel to comment on social injustices, class disparities, and the consequences of unchecked power. His critique of societal issues remains relevant today, making the novel a source of reflection and discussion.

2.Literary Craftsmanship: Dickens' writing style is often praised for its rich description, vivid imagery, and clever use of language. His ability to craft memorable phrases and powerful sentences adds depth to the narrative.

3.Emotional Impact: The novel elicits a wide range of emotions, from heartbreak to hope. The characters' struggles and sacrifices resonate with readers on a deep emotional level.

4.Redemption and Transformation: The character arc of Sydney Carton, in particular, is a powerful exploration of redemption and self-sacrifice. His transformation throughout the novel is both moving and thought-provoking.

5.Universal Appeal: While the novel is steeped in its historical context, its themes and characters have universal appeal. It speaks to the human experience and the enduring struggle for justice, love, and freedom.

Disclaimer: The Times of India editorial team has taken inputs from AI for research purposes to create this article.

For more news like this visit TOI . Get all the Latest News , City News , India News , Business News , and Sports News . For Entertainment News , TV News , and Lifestyle Tips visit Etimes

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‘The Bachelor’ Promises True Love. So Why Does It Rarely Work Out?

Of the 40 combined seasons of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette,” only eight couples have stayed together. We spoke to former contestants and leads about roadblocks to a happy ending.

A man in a blue suit and matching tie smiles alongside a woman in shimmery gown. They both raise Champagne glasses and she holds a golden rose in her left hand.

By Shivani Gonzalez

The season premiere of any installment in “The Bachelor” franchise always starts the same: with the host talking directly to camera about the lead’s almost-certain path to finding lasting love. Unlike other popular reality dating shows, the franchise markets itself as a genuine chance to find love without any other incentives like cash prizes.

But it’s actually not all that probable: Of the 40 combined seasons of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette,” only eight couples have stayed together — not great betting odds.

Morale in the franchise was low going into 2023, with no recently minted couples still together, until ABC announced a hopeful new twist. “The Golden Bachelor” pledged to aid then-72 year-old Gerry Turner make the most of a second chance at love following the death of his wife. At season’s end, he proposed to Theresa Nist in a teary finale. In January their wedding was televised on ABC. By April, they’d announced plans to divorce.

That breakup felt like the last straw in believing this franchise could foster lasting love, so to look into why “The Bachelor” rarely makes good on its premise, we spoke to the former Bachelorettes Kaitlyn Bristowe and Tayshia Adams, as well as the former contestants Tyler Cameron and Melissa Rycroft about the flaws that doom the reality franchises’ lovebirds.

The main prize might not be the catch you thought.

Many love-related reality television shows that are on the air today — think “Love Island,” “Are You the One?” or even “Bachelor in Paradise” — allow for participants to intermingle in environments specifically designed to mimic some version of real life.

On “The Bachelor” circumstances are purposely anti-real-world dating scenarios, the better to “focus” on finding real love. The lead dates 25 or more people at once while the contestants have their sights set on that one person. Prospective love interests don’t have access to any outside distractions like cellphones, books or television.

“When you’re in that ‘Bachelor’ bubble, all you do is focus on and be brainwashed toward that person,” Tyler Cameron, the runner-up on Hannah Brown’s “Bachelorette” season, said.

Since the show is marketed as an opportunity to find love and have the lead establish separate connections with different contestants, Melissa Rycroft, from Season 13, said the competitive feel among the contestants is orchestrated by producers and not necessarily inherent to the environment.

Contestants are isolated and singularly focused on gaining the affections of one target. The competition makes it hard for contestants to know if they even like the lead. Rycroft got engaged to the bachelor Jason Mesnick at the end of his season before he broke it off to instead be with the season’s runner-up.

“They have built him up as this amazing bachelor,” Rycroft said, adding, “I finished this process not knowing a lot about him because I was more interested in making sure he wanted me and didn’t want to reject me than going through the process going, ‘Are you the one that I want to be?’”

Cameron agreed. “You kind of look past the red flags and the signs that it won’t work,” he said, “because you want to work for what you think it could be because of how great or fun the show makes it seem on the other side.”

The fairy-tale dates eventually stop.

Kaitlyn Bristowe, the Bachelorette from Season 11, got engaged at the end of her run but broke off the relationship four years later (“In Bachelor years, that’s like 40 years,” she joked.) Bristowe’s season, like many others, featured elaborate dates including multiple helicopter and yacht rides and a private fireworks display, not exactly a window into what a real-world future would look like.

Bristowe has discussed the troubles with “Bachelor” dating on her podcast, “Off the Vine.” “I always talk about the foundation of a relationship and when the foundation is that it’s built off an edited TV show, a TV show where you’re doing all these dream dates,” she said, “you don’t actually get to spend a lot of time with the person.”

So “the relationship is so built up and put on a pedestal,” she said, “and it’s manufactured, and that’s a tricky foundation to start a life on.”

There’s a letdown after the show wraps.

Tayshia Adams became the lead on Season 16 of “The Bachelorette” after Clare Crawley bowed out a few episodes in to leave with a contestant from the season. Adams got engaged to that season’s winner but that relationship ended just under a year later.

“Where there is a logistical hiccup, it’s the fact that it is a television show and you and your partner essentially have to go into hiding for months on end before the show airs,” Adams said.

“It’s not normal for people to get engaged and then be like, ‘Bye, gotta go, I’ll see you later. Oh, I don’t even have your cellphone number yet,’” she said.

Real-world logistics are hard.

When Turner and Nist announced their divorce, they cited the fact that neither of them wanted to move away from their families.

Bristowe also noted that this type of coordination can be a part of the problem.

“Logistically to live in two different cities, when you have built your foundation for who you are in a certain city, I feel like that all makes it kind of a recipe for a failed relationship,” she said.

Adams said it was important to manage expectations. The leads sign up because they’re ready to get engaged. But the real questions are, “‘Are you ready to uproot your life in order to make a relationship work if you end up in one? Are you ready to leave your job? Are you ready to leave your family? Are you ready to move? Are you ready to start over?’ That’s reality, it’s not just being in a relationship, we can all be in relationships.”

Stable relationships aren’t good TV.

“If you just look at dating shows across the board,” Bristowe said, they’re “not a perfect recipe for happiness.”

Rycroft agreed, adding: “I think what you need to create a lasting relationship is just not really good TV.”

And perhaps, it’s about changing perception — it isn’t a show about love; instead the drama is what reels people in.

“I started watching back way back when you were rooting for these people like you wanted love,” Rycroft said. “And now I’m not even sure that the audience wants a love story.”

Shivani Gonzalez is a news assistant at The Times who writes a weekly TV column and contributes to a variety of sections. More about Shivani Gonzalez

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Opinion: How L.A.’s Chinatown helped reinvent Southern California

Sign reads "New Chinatown welcomes you" on pagoda-style gate in black and white

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For almost 150 years, Los Angeles has been an idea as much as a place. Even before the growth of Hollywood, newspaper publishers and land developers sold a carefully constructed image of the region to the world. These boosters promoted Los Angeles as a suburban paradise to an audience of middle-class white families in the Midwest. Perhaps surprisingly, as both a concept and an immigrant enclave, Chinatown was crucial to developing this image and forming L.A.’s identity.

Following the completion of the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railways in the late 19th century, city leaders, boosters and land speculators began transforming this former small Spanish-Mexican village into a major metropolis. Railroads hired journalists to promote the region. The city’s population exploded from 11,000 people in 1880 to more than a million in 1930. Yet beneath this vision of what booster Charles Fletcher Lummis dubbed the “land of sunshine” lay a violent and exclusionary process that was racialized from the start.

ROWLAND HEIGHTS, CA - JULY 11: Shoppers in the indoor mall at the 1000 block of North Nogales Avenue near the 99 Ranch market on Monday, July 11, 2022 in Rowland Heights, CA. A couple was pistol-whipped and robbed in a parking lot in a parking lot in the 1000 block of North Nogales Avenue near the 99 Ranch market in broad daylight, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Authorities said the two suspects pistol-whipped the victims on their heads and robbed one of the victims of a $60,000 Rolex. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

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Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reports portrayed Chinatown as a neighborhood of filth, violence and vice. The district lay on a street known as Calle de los Negros, which the Los Angeles Times and other papers routinely referred to in print using a more racist moniker. In 1871, an angry mob rampaged Chinatown attacking immigrants, destroying property and lynching 18 people. This event would come to be known as the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre, part of a wave of anti-Chinese actions that swept the North American West toward the end of the 19th century.

If the threat of violence wasn’t enough, by the 1920s most neighborhoods across the city were covered in restrictive covenants, language in housing deeds that prevented people of color from buying homes. Middle-class white residents, however, considered the urban core less desirable, leaving these homes available.

Alongside French, Italian and Mexican immigrants, Chinese Americans thrived in the city’s bustling multiethnic central core. Chinatown featured restaurants, curio shops, two Chinese temples and a Chinese theater; on Los Angeles Street, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Assn. occupied the top floor of the Garnier Building, which today stands as one of the last remaining structures of Old Chinatown. For a while, the community even supported a Chinese newspaper.

But by the early 20th century, the English-language press and regional boosters increasingly constructed L.A.’s image of suburban idyll against representations of Chinatown. Depicting Chinatown as a pariah, newspapers applied outsized scrutiny to the community’s relatively small population.

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The 1930 census identified about 3,000 Chinese in a city of more than a million people. During this decade, the Los Angeles Times mentioned Chinatown more than 1,100 times — compared with just 200 mentions of Little Tokyo, even though the Japanese American community was seven times larger. Coverage even surpassed that of the Mexican American community near the Plaza, nearly all of which predated the arrival of Anglo settlers. Alarmist media depictions contributed to the city’s decision to build Union Station on the site of Old Chinatown, displacing most of the immigrant community.

In the summer of 1938, two neighborhoods emerged as replacements to Old Chinatown. Known as New Chinatown and China City, they pushed back against leering representations of Chinatown by using non-threatening commercialism, surface aesthetics and racial performance to shape popular perceptions of Chinese Americans. Both districts’ commodification of racial differences shaped L.A.’s image as a complex multiethnic metropolis.

Under the leadership of Peter SooHoo, Chinese American merchants created New Chinatown — the Chinatown we still have today near downtown. SooHoo was a Los Angeles-born graduate of city schools and USC and one of the first Chinese Americans hired by the Department of Water and Power. He partnered with attorney Y.C. Hong, the first Chinese American to pass the bar in California, to form a corporation through which Chinese merchants bought land for their Chinatown. To contrast with portrayals of Old Chinatown as riddled with secret underground passages and opium dens, they designed their district as an urban mall with neon lights, wide walkable streets, a wishing well and pagoda-style roofs.

That same summer, Christine Sterling, the white philanthropist behind the pedestrian-friendly Olvera Street, built China City close by, around Hollywood myths. Backed by the publisher of the Los Angeles Times and Hollywood producers, the district included a re-creation of the House of Wang set from the MGM’s “The Good Earth,” a 1937 blockbuster set in China, and the Chinese Junk Cafe, a bar fashioned as a pirate ship run by movie performers Luke Chan and Johnson Sing.

EUREKA, CA - SEPTEMBER 02: Mary Chin says she misses her husband Ben Chin upon seeing his picture on a mural painted by artist Dave Young Kim in Eureka's Chinatown. Ben Chin was the first person of Chinese descent to live in the city since it excluded Asians in 1885 and forced them onto ships bound for San Francisco. Chin died in 2019 at age 97, but Mary and his adult children are continuing his legacy of rebuilding the Asian community there. Photographed on Friday, Sept. 2, 2022 in Eureka, CA. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

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While China City has been dismissed by some as culturally exploitative, the workers there formed a real community. To run the stalls, Sterling hired local Chinese Americans, many of whom supplemented their income working as background extras in Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s. China City, with all its artifice, offered a safe haven and camaraderie for many who felt ostracized by the merchant elite running New Chinatown. These included: Swan Yee, the son of a Pennsylvania laundryman, who ran the rickshaw stand with his brother Johnny; Camille Wing née Chan, a mixed-race Chinese American whose father was a vaudeville performer; and Tsin Nan Ling, the merchant who ran Chekiang Importers and hailed from outside the Pearl River Delta region that most Chinese immigrants called home.

China City was eventually destroyed by fire in 1948. But in the coming decades, New Chinatown continued to allow Chinese Americans to wrest control of their image away from city boosters and create their own representation. Of course, the local papers and elite continued to cast Los Angeles against the idea of a racialized urban core, increasingly by stereotyping Black and Latino communities as urban threats. The ties between Los Angeles’s suburban identity and racial exclusion proved to be stubborn.

Today, Chinatown is one of many Asian neighborhoods across Southern California. From Little Saigon in Westminster to Artesia’s Little India and the ethnoburbs of the San Gabriel Valley, Asian American neighborhoods help define the region. Within this context, it’s easy to forget the distinct role that Los Angeles Chinatown has played. Too many people dismiss Chinatown’s pagoda-style roofs, fortune cookies and wishing well as inauthentic representations of Asia and Asian Americans. Instead, we should embrace them as reminders that neither the popular image of Los Angeles nor the city itself would have developed as they are today without Chinatown.

William Gow is an assistant professor at Sacramento State, a community historian with the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California and author of “ Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community .”

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EAST LOS ANGELES, CA - March 11: A pedestrian walks by the sundial plaque honoring Cesar Chavez, who was a Latino American civil rights activist, labor leader, community organizer and businessman, at the Latino Walk of Fame on Whittier Blvd. in East Los Angeles Thursday, March 11, 2021. Chavez' sundial plaque was the first on the Walk of Fame, a collection of 10 sundial plaques on Whittier Boulevard that have fallen into disrepair. Eventually, more than 200 plaques will line the boulevard that cuts through East Los Angeles, an unincorporated area of the Eastside. It was inaugurated on April 30, 1997 by the Whittier Blvd. Merchant Assoc of East Los Angeles. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

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Essays on A Tale of Two Cities
2 pages / 987 words. Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities is his first of two historical novels. Published in 1859, the book discusses the themes of resurrection, destiny, and concealment. Dickens' novel both demonstrates his view of society, and contains historical facts surrounding the French Revolution.
A Tale of Two Cities Essays
A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities artfully weaves the story of the Manette family through the background of the French Revolution. Though, as readers know, uprising and overthrow in France is imminent, M. Manette and his daughter Lucie deal... A Tale of Two Cities essays are academic essays for citation.
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SOURCE: "The Carlylean Vision of A Tale of Two Cities," in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp. 23-35. [In the following essay ...
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In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens issues a warning to his fellow Englishmen, asserting that if they "sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again" (p.340), they too may find ...
A Tale of Two Cities Critical Essays
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 ...
A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities, novel by Charles Dickens, published both serially and in book form in 1859. The story is set in the late 18th century against the background of the French Revolution. Although drawn from history, the novel offers more drama than accuracy. Learn more about A Tale of Two Cities in this article.
A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities is a historical novel published in 1859 by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution.The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris, and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie whom he had never met. The story is set against the conditions that led up to the ...
A Tale of Two Cities Summary and Complete Analysis
A Tale of Two Cities Summary. The novel opens in the year 1775 with Mr. Jarvis Lorry traveling on a mission to Dover to meet Lucie Manette. Mr. Jarvis Lorry is the employer of Tellson's Bank in England. On his way to Dover, Mr. Lorry happens to meet a man who gives him a mysterious message, and Mr. Lorry replies with the message, "Recalled ...
A Tale of Two Cities
Abstract. 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.
Sacrifice Theme in A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities is full of examples of sacrifice, on both a personal and national level. Dr. Manette sacrifices his freedom in order to preserve his integrity. Charles sacrifices his family wealth and heritage in order to live a life free of guilt for his family's awful behavior. The French people are willing to sacrifice their own lives ...
A Tale of Two Cities Essay Topics
1. Discuss the significance of the title in terms of its themes, style, etc. 2. 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? 3. Several characters in A Tale of Two Cities seem to function ...
A Tale of Two Cities Sample Essay Outlines
Following each topic is a thesis and sample outline. Use these as a starting point for your paper. Topic #1. Write an analytical essay that examines how A Tale of Two Cities views different forms ...
A Tale of Two Cities Essay Questions
6. Examine the motifs of light and darkness in this novel, and trace how they relate to Carton, Lucie, Dr. Manette, and/or Madame Defarge's character development. 7. The most recurrent criticism of this novel is that the characters do not have the psychological depth or development of other Dickensian figures.
A Tale of Two Cities Essay
Lucie Manette's Suitors Rachel Lynch 10th Grade. Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities artfully weaves the story of the Manette family through the background of the French Revolution. Though, as readers know, uprising and overthrow in France is imminent, M. Manette and his daughter Lucie deal will mundane aspects of life alongside the unusual.
'A Tale of Two Cities'
The analysis of the opening line of "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens highlights the repetition, self-sacrifice, contrast between rest and action, and the embrace of uncertainty. The title ...
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Discussion of themes and motifs in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. eNotes critical analyses help you gain a deeper understanding of A Tale of Two Cities so you can excel on your essay or test.
'The Bachelor' Promises True Love. So Why Does It Rarely Work Out?
The fairy-tale dates eventually stop. Kaitlyn Bristowe, the Bachelorette from Season 11, got engaged at the end of her run but broke off the relationship four years later ("In Bachelor years ...
L.A.'s Chinatown helped reinvent Southern California
In an 1885 expulsion, the city of Eureka, Calif., put its Chinese residents on two ships and kept them out for seven decades. Now, the Eureka Chinatown Project tells the story. Nov. 12, 2022

Essays on A Tale of Two Cities

Character Analysis: Sydney Carton

The Contrasting Cities of London and Paris

The Role of Fate and Coincidence

Social Injustice and Class Struggles

The Sacrifice of Darnay and Carton

The Influence of History and Politics

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

Violence and Revenge

Dickens's Commentary on Humanity

Duality of Jerry Cruncher

A Tale of Two Cities: Resurrection Theme

A Tale of Two Cities: Sacrificial Way of Characters

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

Relevant topics

Background of the Novel

Literary Context

A Tale of Two Cities Summary

A Tale of Two Cities Characters Analysis

Madame Defarge

Charles Darnay (a.k.a. Charles Evrémonde)

Lucie Manette

Dr. Alexandre Manette

Monsieur Defarge

Jarvis Lorry

Jerry Cruncher

Marquis Evrémonde

Mr. Stryver

John Barsad or Roger Cly

Themes in A Tale of Two Cities

The Inevitability of Sacrifice

The Propensity to Fierceness and Tyranny in Revolutionaries

Oppression and Revolution

Secrecy and Surveillance

Fate and History

A Tale of Two Cities Analysis

Golden Thread and knitting

Footsteps and Shoes

The Marquis

Imprisonment

Setting of the Novel

Point of View

More From Charles Dickens

18 A Tale of Two Cities

Further Reading

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A Tale of Two Cities

Sacrifice ThemeTracker

Sacrifice Quotes in A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities

Essay Topics

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A Tale of Two Cities

‘A Tale of Two Cities’ - Exploration of sacrifice, social commentary, and transformation"

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