A Tale Of Two Cities
(Charles Dickens)
A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens' attempt to personalize Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution, A History. A French girl is raped by the Marquis St. Evremonde and goes insane. The Marquis kidnaps Dr. Manette to attend her, then causes him to be imprisoned after she dies. His English wife dies of grief, and their friend Mr. Lorry takes their two-year-old daughter, Lucy, to London to be raised.
Seventeen years later, Dr. Manette is quietly released from prison. Mr. Lorry rescues the crazed shoemaker from the garret of Monsieur Defarge, Dr. Manette's old servant, who is now a wine merchant in filthy, poverty-stricken St. Antoine, and takes him to England where he recovers his sanity and his medical profession under Lucy's care.
Ironically, Lucy marries Charles Darnay, the nephew of the cruel Marquis, who is earning his living as a French tutor in London, having renounced his family's lavish estates and wretched reputation. Darnay returns to Paris during the Revolution to protect an old family servant who has been imprisoned for serving the Evremondes, and finds himself on trial for his life. In another ironic twist, Monsieur Defarge's wife is the revenge-driven sister of the Marquis's victim, and she has vowed that every Evremonde must be destroyed.
Salvation comes at the hands of a dissolute lawyer, Sidney Carton, who saved Darnay's life in England because of their similar appearances. He drugs Darnay and takes his place on the guillotine to fulfill a vow made to Lucy many years previously.
Though the melodramatic style of Dickens' writing tends towards heavy-handedness in the use of irony, foreshadowing and symbolism, the skill with which his characters personify both the idealism and the cruelty manifest in the events of French Revolution is both subtle and powerful.
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