A Tale of Two Cities fits snugly into several contexts. It is an historical novel about a major event of the (then) recent past. Published in 1859, the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of the fall of the Bastille, it depicted an event that was still a touchstone of history and politics for Dickens’s contemporaries. In the years between the Revolution and Dickens’s book, France and the rest of the Continent had been rocked by other revolutions, notably in 1830 and 1848, the year of revolution. English politicians and thinkers had been reflecting on the significance of these upheavals for the better part of a century before Dickens took up his pen.
Creative writers had contributed to the national debate on the issues thrown up by the Revolution. Romantic poets in the main were supportive of the Revolution, viewing it as a blow on behalf of universal liberty. In his “France: An Ode,” Coleridge recorded his initial enthusiasm for the revolution. Even when France went to war with England in 1793, he says that despite his love for England, he still “sang defeat/To all that braved the tyrant-quelling lance” and “blessed the paeans of delivered France, and hung my head and wept at Britain’s name.” Horrified as he was by the Terror, he still hoped that France shall “compel the nations to be free/Till Love and Joy look round, and call the Earth their own.” When France invaded Switzerland in 1798, Coleridge shifted gears, lamenting that he had betrayed Liberty in praising France.
Dissenting preacher Richard Price shared Coleridge’s early hopes for the Revolution. Price preached a sermon on November 4, 1789, in which he coopted the language of Scripture to celebrate the exodus of the French from slavery:
“What an eventual period this is! I am thankful that I have lived to see it; and I could almost say, ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation . . . . I have livd to see 30 millions of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice; their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects . . . Be encouraged, all ye friends of freedom, and writers in its defense . . . . Behold, the light you have struck out, after setting America free, reflected to France, and there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes, and warms and illuminates Europe.”
It was in response to Price’s sermon that Edmund Burke wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790, which crystallized the anti-revolutionary party in England. Burke was contemptuous of Price, a preacher who knew little about the political movements he was praising, and Burke was horrified at the actions of the Revolutionaries. “The French have rebelled against a mild and lawful monarch,” Burke wrote, “with more fury, outrage, and insult, than ever any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper, or the most sanguinary tyrant.” Their violence was not aimed at abuse and tyranny but at “concession; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities.” The only possible result of this “unnatural” act was a breakdown of all order: “Laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence.” Burke denied that the revolution was the “inevitable result of the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade through blood and tumult, to the quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty.” On the contrary, the ruins of France are “sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorance counsel in time of profound peace.” Burke’s essay sparked a wide-ranging controversy among English writers and thinkers. Nearly two hundred pamphlets, books, and essays responded to Burke, the most famous being Thomas Paine, William Godwin, and Thomas Carlyle.
Dickens was particularly inspired by Carlyle’s three-volume history of the French Revolution, published in 1837. Carlyle believed that individuals shaped the course of history, and devoted his work to depicting the great figures of the Revolution. Dickens was inspired to write his novel by reading Carlyle, and his novel is not only an historical novel about the French Revolution but an intervention into an on-going English debate about Revolutionary principles. It was a contribution to Dickens’s own world as much as a reflection on the past.
It was a contribution to his own world in other senses as well. When Dickens wrote his novel, Marx was in his heyday, and socialist movements were breaking out all over Europe. In England, most of the “workers’ movements” were comparatively peaceful, but some outbreaks of violence had raised the fear that something like the French Revolution might engulf England. Dickens believed that the French Revolution erupted partly because the evils of the ancien regime were ignored, and he observed similar dynamics at work in the English scene. The Industrial Revolution had confined workers to drudgery, injustice and ignorance, while English aristocrats went on indifferently with their comfortable luxurious lives. Dickens’s intention was in part to display the evils of past revolutions in order to warn his fellow Englishmen about new ones.
This double interest is seen in the title, A Tale of Two Cities . The novel itself has a double focus in Paris and London. But the double focus is not only on Paris in 1789 and London in 1789; it is on Paris in 1789 and London in 1859. Dickens posed the uncomfortable question, Is nineteenth-century London in danger of an eruption like that of eighteenth-century Paris?
Doubles
The double title is played out in the structure of the book, which is organized by a transition from England to France. Most of Book 1 is in England, but the whole of Book 3 is in France. In between there is a gradual shift. The
“first four chapters take place in England, the next two, completing book 1, take place in France; the first six chapters of Book 2 are in England, and the next three in France, then five in England and two in France. As the threads of the two stories start to come together with Lucie’s wedding, Doctor Manette’s mental relapse, and Carton’s declaration of love to Lucie, four England chapters are followed by ‘Echoing Footsteps,’ which begins in England but ends in France, the link between the countries being the realization in Saint Antoine of the footsteps heard more and more urgently by Lucie in Soho. After two French chapters, book 2 ends with a London chapter, but it is a London drawn into the happenings across the channel by the rush of aristocrats fleeing to the safety of Tellson’s bank.” [1]
The doubling goes beyond the cities to character and plot. Most obviously, Darnay and Carton are twins, but there are also contrasting women – the predatory Madame Defarge and the protective Miss Pross – as well as two trials for Darnay and two crossings from France to England with the very same people - Lorry, Manette, Lucy, Darnay. The doubling of plot knits together Books 1 and 3. In both, a man is “re called to life.” Manette is recovered by his daughter in book 1, Darnay also escapes from an unjust trial and a French prison in Book 3. In both books, there is an initial trip to Paris to release a prisoner, and in both there is a returning coach to England, each containing a “buried man.” The symmetry of setting, plot, characters gives a dualistic structure to the whole novel.
Yet, it is easy to mis-draw the line between the two. The double setting of the title is not only a contrast between two cities, but describes a duality within both Paris and London. Both England and France are “best and worst” simultaneously. The famous opening paragraphs of the book do not present a nostalgically rosy portrait of England. Dickens had only disdain for those who love the “good old days” of England. The story is not good England against evil France; it is not the case that “best” refers to England and “worst” to France. Both good and evil exist on both sides of the Channel. England too has its share of evils – spiritualist movements, social chaos, brigands on the roads, a barbarous justice system that hangs petty thieves as well as murderers. Cruelty and violence exist on all sides. After the introductory chapter, Dickens opens the novel on a road shadowed by mist, mud, and fear of highwayman, where the fog threatens travelers like an “unwholesome sea.” And this is in England .
Tellson’s and London
This social chaos is made all the worse by the fact that those who oversee the distribution of English loaves and fishes think everything is set forever. The ruling classes are equally indifferent on both sides of the Channel. For Dickens, Tellson’s Bank is an outpost of the ancien regime in the heart of London. Dickens probably borrowed the name of the bank from the name of a French financial institution, Thelusson, where Necker served before becoming financial minister for Louis XVI. His description of the bank indicates that it is as brutal as anything France has to offer:
“Tellson’s was the triumphant perfection of inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson’s down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street, and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple Bar. If your business necessitated your seeing “the House,” you were put into a species of Condemned Hold at the back, where you meditated on a misspent life, until the House came with its bands in its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in the dismal twilight. Your money came out of, or went into, wormy old wooden drawers, particles of which flew up your nose and down your throat when they were opened and shut. Your bank-notes had a musty odour, as if they were fast decomposing into rags again.”
Filled with the aroma of decay, Tellson’s is as much a grave as the French prison where Manette is held. With its barred windows, it is a financial Bastille.
Tellson’s is as resistant to change as the old regime of France. Tellson’s partners would sooner have disinherited their sons than entertain a suggestion for improvement. In this, the bank was representative of the entire country, “which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable.” The bank’s involvement in oppression and violence is quite direct.
“at that time, putting to death was a recipe much in vogue with all trades and professions, and not least of all with Tellson’s. Death is Nature’s remedy for all things, and why not Legislation’s? Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death; the purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the holder of a horse at Tellson’s door, who made off with it, was put to Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of three-fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of Crime, were put to Death. Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention—it might almost have been worth remarking that the fact was exactly the reverse—but, it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each particular case, and left nothing else connected with it to be looked after. Thus, Tellson’s, in its day, like greater places of business, its contemporaries, had taken so many lives, that, if the heads laid low before it had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately disposed of, they would probably have excluded what little light the ground floor bad, in a rather significant manner.”
Dickens connects the French Revolution to his own time with his continual use of “machine” and “engine” imagery. On the one hand, Mr. Lorry himself is a “machine,” an impersonal engine of banking business. Explaining to Lucie his connection with Dr. Manette, he insists, “These are mere business relations, miss; there is no friendship in them, no particular interest, nothing like sentiment. I have passed from one to another, in the course of my business life, just as I pass from one of our customers to another in the course of my business day; in short, I have no feelings; I am a mere machine . . . . all the relations I hold with my fellow-creatures are mere business relations, when you reflect that I have never seen you since.” The coalescence of “business” and “machine,” and their contrast to human feelings and sentiments, is critical. The other machine in the novel is the “engine” of the revolution, the guillotine. Throughout it is described as an “engine,” and the lines of the guillotine’s victims make it seem like some horrific factory, an assembly line of carnage. Dickens saw deep similarities, and not much difference, between the murderous engine of English finance and the murderous instruments of the revolution in France.
The other English institution we glimpse early in the book is the court, and Dickens’s portrait here is no more complimentary than his portrayal of the bank. The people observing the trial are “blue flies” looking for a bit of carrion, and the court foreshadows the later revolutionary tribunal before which Darnay appears. Like Tellson’s, the court is immobile:
“the Old Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly inn-yard, from which pale travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches, on a violent passage into the other world: traversing some two miles and a half of public street and road, and shaming few good citizens, if any. So powerful is use, and so desirable to be good use in the beginning. It was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old institution, that inflicted a punishment of which no one could foresee the extent; also, for the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action; also, for extensive transactions in blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom, systematically leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be committed under Heaven. Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of the precept, that “Whatever is is right;” an aphorism that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the trouble some consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wron g.”
If the banks of England are little Bastilles, and the courts full of blue flies and hardened injustice, what might be on the horizon, what storm, what footsteps?
Blood-shop
A Tale of Two Cities has frequently been characterized as the least typical of Dickens’s work. His earlier work was highly comic, full of cartoonish characters, but that wild tone is held in check here. There are a few of his trademark minor eccentrics, with their symbolic names. Stryver, upwardly mobile and “shouldering” his way everywhere; Jerry Cruncher, the “Resurrection Man” who beats his wife for “flopping” in prayer; Darnay, whose French name “Evremonde” signifies “everyman.” Part of the difference with Dickens’s other novels has to do with its theme. In Tale , he is telling a story about an historical movement and therefore the characters and events of individual lives are subordinated to a larger historical setting. At times too, the lack of individuality is deliberate. Some of the revolutionary characters have no names of their own: Jacques 1, 2, 3; “the Vengeance.” The revolution is not about individuals, but a mass movement, and characters gets absorbed into an indistinct, nightmarish “mob.”
Characters function as typical symbolic representatives of class or ideology. Dickens’s representative of the heartless heart of the ancien regime is the Marquis de Evremonde. Like the rest of his class, he fiddles while France smolders, worrying over his chocolate and his finery in grand indifference to the suffering he causes:
“all the company at the grand hotel of Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally correct. Such frizzling and powdering and sticking up of hair, such delicate complexions artificially preserved and mended, such gallant swords to look at, and such delicate honour to the sense of smell, would surely keep anything going, for ever and ever. The exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding wore little pendent trinkets that chinked as they languidly moved; these golden fetters rang like precious little bells; and what with that ringing, and with the rustle of silk and brocade and fine linen, there was a flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and his devouring hunger far away.”
His face is a mask, a stone face, Dickens says. It is immobile, inhuman, almost divine.
While Dickens represents English society with a bank and a court, the central location in Paris is a wine shop. Dickens is perhaps hinting at the frivolity of the French, but he also links wine and blood.
“The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees—BLOOD.”
The fact that the message is written on a wall conjures up the story of Belshazzar’s feast, when the hand of the Lord appeared to write the judgment over Babylon onto the wall of the king’s hall. Judgment is coming on France too, though the handwriting be only that of a “joker.”
In addition to blood and wine, Dickens uses a variety of images to reinforce the sense that the revolution is an almost natural phenomenon. It is a sea, a volcano, footsteps marching, a storm. As he writes in the opening chapter, “There could have been no such Revoution, if all laws, forms, and ceremonies, had not first been so monstrously abused, that the suicidal vengeance of the Revolution was to scatter them all to the winds.” Again, Dickens’s maintains his double focus on the historical situation and on his own time. Toward the end of the novel, he warns, “Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.” The guillotine is not so much the overthrow of the oppressive system as the maturation of what the ancien regime had sown.
As in Hard Times , the architecture and city planning say something about the chaos of the society: “The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools . . . .There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it that there might have been a scavanger in the street.” The revolution is “the deluge of Year One of Liberty — the deluge rising from below, not falling from above,” the chaos of the flood wiping away an already chaotic and violent society.
The conversations that go on in the wine shop, however, show that however much Dickens sees the revolution as a natural response to oppression, he also recognizes that it is a “directed” revolution. Defarge wipes out the handwriting on the wall, not because he is opposed to blood, but because a wall is not the best place to write it. “What now,” he asks the joke
“‘Are you a subject for the mad hospital?’ said the wine-shop keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with a handful of mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it. ‘Why do you write in the public streets? Is there—tell me thou—is there no other place to write such words in?’ In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps accidentally, perhaps not) upon the joker’s heart. The joker rapped it with his own, took a nimble spring upward, and came down in a fantastic dancing attitude, with one of his stained shoes jerked off his foot into his hand, and held out. A joker of an extremely, not to say wolfishly practical character, he looked, under those circumstances.”
The symbolism is complex. Defarge wants his friends to become bloody-minded, but the contrast of an inscription written with a finger on the wall and an inscription on the heart has its own biblical resonance. Paul contrasted the law written with the finger of God on stone tablets with the law written on the heart by the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3). The revolutionaries of Paris constitute a demonic parody of this internalized law, a revolution that is not placarded in the streets but instead lives in the heart.
Progress and Regress
France and England have distinct institutions and social structures, but at bottom there is commonality rather than difference. Both are ruled by indifferent elites, both oppress the lower classes, both are volcanoes ready to explode. As the novel progresses, however, London shows some improvement while France regresses into utter barbarism.
The key figure exemplifying English improvement is Mr. Lorry. He, as much as Manette, needs to be “recalled to life.” As a representative of Tellson’s, he is just doing business, as he protests throughout the early part of the book As his relation with the Manettes deepens, it becomes clear that this is a mask. He becomes double. There is the businesslike Lorry at the desk, and, on the other hand, the avuncular Lorry at Soho. His absorption with business is like Manette’s pathetic obsession with shoemaking, but Lorry eventually becomes a friend and “savior.” Lorry’s progress highlights the role of the Soho home of the Manettes, the setting for most of the London scenes. The house becomes the London counterpoint to the blood-wine shop of the Defarges. The women of the Soho family especially provide a counter to Madame Degarge. Lucy is a perfect mother; true to her name, she is a light in the darkness, and Pross has the maternal instincts of a tigress protecting her cubs.
G. K. Chesterton objected to Dickens’s book because it presented the Revolution as an outbreak of hunger of vengeance rather than an intellectual battle. This is true. Though the violence is being directed from the blood shop, Defarge and especially Madame Defarge, are not motivated by principles of Liberte Egalite Fraternite but by vengefulness for the wrongs done to her and her family. Though Dickens begins with some sympathy for those who will revolt, the fact that he makes the bloodthirsty Madame Defarge the central French character shows that he sees that the revolution eventually degenerated into little more than an outbreak of bestial violence. It is not a high-minded political revolution, like the English Glorious Revolution, but an unleashing of pure vengeance and hatred.
Two scenes especially capture the cruelty of the revolution, which rivals and eventually surpasses the ancien regime for its violence. The first is the Breugelesque scene depicting the storming of the Bastille:
“But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression was in vivid life, there were two groups of faces—each seven in number —so fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did sea roll which bore more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners, suddenly released by the storm that had burst their tomb, were carried high overhead: all scared, all lost, all wondering and amazed, as if the Last Day were come, and those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits. Other seven faces there were, carried higher, seven dead faces, whose drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the Last Day. Impassive faces, yet with a suspended—not an abolished—expression on them; faces, rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped lids of the eyes, and bear witness with the bloodless lips, ‘THOU DIDST IT!’ Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads on pikes, the keys of the accursed fortress of the eight strong towers, some discovered letters and other memorials of prisoners of old time, long dead of broken hearts,—such, and such—like, the loudly echoing footsteps of Saint Antoine escort through the Paris streets in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine.”
The other is the hanging of Foulon, advisor to Louis XVI, who imposed a heavy tax burden on peasants and, when asked how the peasants were to eat, replied, “Let the eat grass”:
“Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building; now, on his knees; now, on his feet; now, on his back; dragged, and struck at, and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands; torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always entreating and beseeching for mercy; now full of vehement agony of action, with a small clear space about him as the people drew one another back that they might see; now, a log of dead wood drawn through a forest of legs; he was hauled to the nearest street corner where one of the fatal lamps swung, and there Madame Defarge let him go—as a cat might have done to a mouse—and silently and composedly looked at him while they made ready, and while he besought her: the women passionately screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly calling out to have him killed with grass in his mouth. Once, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the rope was merciful, and held him, and his head was soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of.”
It is not only the chaos of the revolutionary regime that offends Dickens, but the transformation of the Revolutionary regime into God: “If the Republic should demand of you the sacrifice of your child herself, you would have no duty but to sacrifice her.” Like the Lord with Abraham, the revolution can demand the sacrifice of a child. For the revolutionaries, the guillotine replaces the cross as the instrument of purification and renewal.
Because the revolution ends with a mindless bloodbath, it betrays everything that was good and noble in its origins. We see in Darnay’s second trial that the revolutionary regime establishes a system as oppressive as the ancient regime it destroyed. The Marquis sees everything in terms of class; but so do Defarge and his group. Both are hostile to English individualism, recognizing the work and dignity and uniqueness of individual people. The mechanical repetitions that were part of early description of Pross and Lorry become characteristic of the revolutionaries. Lorry is a business machine, but that quality is taken over by Madame Defarge’s ceaseless, tireless, mechanical knitting.
Two Loves, Two Cities
What accounts for the difference between the story of London and of Paris? They begin similarly, but France descends to hell and England has at least a point of light in the small community of Soho. Why do they diverge? There is certainly an element of English patriotism in Dickens. Miss Pross is superior to Madame Defarge in part because she acts on solid English instincts. In some respects, too, Dickens’s suggests that England is moderated by Christianity, though any claims about English superiority are undercut by the presence of Jerry Cruncher, the parodic “J.C.” and caricatured “resurrection man.” He despises his wife for “flopping” in prayer, and he gets so angry with her that he beats her head against the headboard of the bed, with little Jerry watching. Fittingly, he is confused about the origins of A.D.: “Mr. Cruncher himself always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it.”
Yet, the progression we see among the English characters has a great deal to do with their embodiment of a Christian or at least semi-Christian ethic, their embrace of the Augustinian heavenly city as their true home. Dickens is not resigned to this choice between the two earthly cities he describes in ch 1. There is hope for redemption, but it does not come by choosing London over Paris or Paris over London. The more basic opposition of two cities are the city of this world, and the city of the next. Redemption of the human city comes by living according to the demands of the city of God.
Sidney Carton most clearly exemplifies this theme. Early on, surrounded by the waste of his own life, he stands on the terrace and sees “lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight.” It lasts only a moment, and then is gone, and Carton, despairing, climbs “to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a n eglected bed, and its p illow was wet with wasted tears.”
Though only a glimpse and a momentary vision, it inspires Carton, and when he walks through Paris on the night before exchanging places with Darnay, meditating on Jesus’ words “I am the resurrection and the life,” he again seems to see a vision of a bridge of light leading to a heavenly city:
“The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to the water as it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris, where the picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the light of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a dead face out of the sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the stars, turned pale and died, and for a little while it seemed as if Creation were delivered over to Death’s dominion. But, the glorious sun, rising, seemed to strike those words, that burden of the night, straight and warm to his heart in its long bright rays. And looking along them, with reverently shaded eyes, a bridge of light appeared to span the air between him and the sun, while the river sparkled under it.”
As always in Dickens, redemption is through acts of self-sacrifice and love, in following the morality of Christ. The guillotine has replaced the cross as the object of veneration and worship. Like the cross, it’s an instrument of torture and death. Carton’s willingness to go to the cross transforms this instrument of torture into an instrument of redemption, and thus lays the foundation of a different city. Giving up self-love for self-sacrifice, he shows the way of transformation, the way that Dickens’s England might take to avoid an eruption.
Conclusion
Violence breeds violence. Blood will have blood. Cycles of vengeance never end, and a city that is built on the vengeance produced by the love of self will always have the wine of blood flowing in the streets; its walls will always be inscribed with “blood.” There is one way to stop the cycle. Appropriately, Carton sees his act as leading not just to the salvation of Darnay, but to a wider redemption. He saves Darnay for Lucy, and therefore saves the community of light in Soho. But he points the way to the redemption of the earthly city itself:
“I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.”
No wonder he can say, in the novel’s closing words that remain as powerful as ever despite their familiarity: “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.”
[1] Ruth Glancy, A Tale of Two Cities: Dickens’ Revolutionary Novel (Twayne, 1991), p. 43.