BOOK TO READ: A TELL OF TWO CITIES

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With well over 200 million copies sold, it ranks among the most famous works in the history of literary fiction.

BOOK SUMMARY

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," Charles Dickens writes in the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities as he paints a picture of life in England and France. The year is late 1775, and Jarvis Lorry travels from London to Paris on a secret mission for his employer, Tellson's Bank. Joining him on his journey is Lucie Manette, a 17-year-old woman who is stunned to learn that her father, Doctor Alexandre Manette, is alive and has recently been released after having been secretly imprisoned in Paris for 18 years.

When Mr. Lorry and Lucie arrive in Paris, they find the Doctor's former servant, Ernest Defarge, caring for him. Defarge now runs a wine-shop with his wife in the poverty-stricken quarter of Saint Antoine. Defarge takes Mr. Lorry and Lucie to the garret room where he is keeping Doctor Manette, warning them that the Doctor's years in prison have greatly changed him. Thin and pale, Doctor Manette sits at a shoemaker's bench intently making shoes. He barely responds to questions from Defarge and Mr. Lorry, but when Lucie approaches him, he remembers his wife and begins to weep. Lucie comforts him, and that night Mr. Lorry and Lucie take him to England.

Five years later, the porter for Tellson's Bank, Jerry Cruncher, takes a message to Mr. Lorry who is at a courthouse. Mr. Lorry has been called as a witness for the trial of Charles Darnay, a Frenchman accused of being a spy for France and the United States. Also at the trial are Doctor Manette and Lucie, who are witnesses for the prosecution. Doctor Manette has fully recovered and has formed a close bond with his daughter.

If found guilty of treason, Darnay will suffer a gruesome death, and the testimony of an acquaintance, John Barsad, and a former servant, Roger Cly, seems sure to result in a guilty verdict. Questions from Darnay's attorney, Mr. Stryver, indicate that Cly and Barsad are the real spies, but the turning point in the trial occurs when Sydney Carton, Stryver's assistant, points out that Carton and Darnay look alike enough to be doubles. This revelation throws into doubt a positive identification of Darnay as the person seen passing secrets, and the court acquits Darnay.

After the trial, Darnay, Carton, and Stryver begin spending time at the Manette home, obviously attracted to Lucie's beauty and kind nature. Stryver decides to propose to her, but is dissuaded by Mr. Lorry. Carton confesses his love to Lucie, but does not propose, knowing that his drunken and apathetic way of life is not worthy of her. However, he vows that he would gladly give his life to save a life she loved, and Lucie is moved by his sincerity and devotion. Eventually, it is Darnay whose love Lucie returns, and the two marry with Doctor Manette's uneasy blessing. While the couple is on their honeymoon, the Doctor suffers a nine-day relapse of his mental incapacity and believes he is making shoes in prison again.

Meanwhile, the situation in France grows worse. Signs of unrest become evident when Darnay's cruel and unfeeling uncle, the Marquis St. Evrémonde, is murdered in his bed after running down a child with his carriage in the Paris streets. Although Darnay inherits the title and the estate, he has renounced all ties to his brutal family and works instead in England as a tutor of French language and literature.

The revolution erupts with full force in July 1789 with the storming of the Bastille. The Defarges are at the center of the revolutionary movement and lead the people in a wave of violence and destruction.By 1792, the revolutionaries have taken control of France and are imprisoning and killing anyone they view as an enemy of the state. Darnay receives a letter from the Evrémonde steward, who has been captured and who begs Darnay to come to France to save him. Feeling a sense of duty to his servant and not fully realizing the danger awaiting him, Darnay departs for France. Once he reaches Paris, though, revolutionaries take him to La Force prison "in secret,"with no way of contacting anyone and with little hope of a trial.

Doctor Manette, Lucie, and Lucie's daughter soon arrive in Paris and join Mr. Lorry who is at Tellson's Paris office. Doctor Manette's status as a former prisoner of the Bastille gives him a heroic status with the revolutionaries and enables him to find out what has happened to his son-in-law. He uses his influence to get a trial for Darnay, and Doctor Manette's powerful testimony at the trial frees his son-in-law. Hours after being reunited with his wife and daughter, however, the revolutionaries again arrest Darnay, based on the accusations of the Defarges.

The next day, Darnay is tried again. This time, the Defarges produce a letter written years earlier by Doctor Manette in prison condemning all Evrémondes for the murder of Madame Defarge's family and for imprisoning the Doctor. Based on this evidence, the court sentences Darnay to death and Doctor Manette, devastated by what has happened, reverts to his prior state of dementia.

Unknown to the Manette and Darnay family, Sydney Carton has arrived in Paris and learns of Darnay's fate. He also hears of a plot contrived to send Lucie and her daughter to the guillotine. Determined to save their lives, he enlists the help of a prison spy to enter the prison where the revolutionaries are holding Darnay. He enters Darnay's cell, changes clothes with him, drugs him, and has Darnay taken out of the prison in his place. No one questions either man's identity because of the similarities in their features. As Mr. Lorry shepherds Doctor Manette, Darnay, Lucie, and young Lucie out of France, Carton goes to the guillotine, strengthened and comforted by the knowledge that his sacrifice has saved the woman he loves and her family.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens' 16th novel, epitomizes the author's popular appeal. It's a tale of chaos, espionage and adventure set in London and Paris prior to, and during, the French Revolution. This backdrop of social upheaval serves as a catalyst for the drama that unfolds in the lives its main characters; the noble and mysterious Charles Darnay, the ignoble yet unfathomable Sydney Carton, and Lucie Manette, the woman they love.
Just over 400 pages long and supported by a motley cast of characters – including gravediggers, a puppet lawyer, a banker with a heart of gold and women who knit fate’s register – A Tale of Two Cities moves at a pace that modern readers of John Grisham or Michael Crichton would appreciate. It has the emotional appeal of a John Irving novel, plot twists to rival Jeffery Deaver and enough violence, suspense, ghosts and good humor to sate any of Stephen King’s constant readers.

Dickens sprinkles his good-natured humor lightly over the novels working-class characters, as in his description of the ‘honest tradesman’ Jerry Cruncher’s striking head of hair: "so like a smith’s work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair..."

Dickens' satirical treatment of the powers that be, however, is more barbed. In the London court of law, where admission prices for spectators is higher even than at Bedlam, and where death is the sentence for such crimes as housebreaking, petty robbery, forgery, the uttering of bad notes and the unlawful opening of a letter, advocates use incomprehensible legalese to present their cases. When evidence is clearly stated it is irrelevant to the case at hand, and witness testimonies are admissible so long as they cannot be proven theoretically impossible.

France’s royal court, as represented in the reception of Monseigneur, is similarly treated. Guests at the reception include “Military officers destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs;” alchemists; convulsionists and doctors with dainty remedies for imaginary illnesses, the comfort being that each of these guests comes perfectly dressed. Monseigneur himself needs “four strong men besides the cook” to take his morning chocolate: “Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have died of two.” This pomp and excess is highlighted by circumstances outside the royal court, where thousands of men, women and children are taxed into starvation.
The result of bad leadership is bad behavior on a grand scale. In England, where the masses at least are fed, Dickens describes the behaviors of unruly mobs with a trace of mirth, as with the ragtag London mob set out to disrupt the funeral procession of a maligned man.

In France, the mob is an animal too frightening to make jest of. The storming of the Bastille, and the long days and nights of violence to follow, are describes in terrible, visceral terms. While much has been made of whether Dickens was a revolutionary, a reformer, a socialist or a Christian moralist, it can be safely assumed that the viciousness with which the red-capped mob of carried out its revolution in A Tale of Two Cities was so described, at least in part, for its entertainment value. Readers of popular fiction were as bloodthirsty in the Victorian era as they are now.

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