A Tale of Two CitiesStudy Guide

A wine cask breaks in the Saint Antoine street, and the people of the quarter drop to their knees to drink from the gutter before it runs away. Someone dips a finger in the spill and writes BLOOD on a wall. Dickens is not painting a symbol for a textbook. He is naming what happens when a people are treated as scenery until they answer in kind. A Tale of Two Cities will spend two cities, a recalled prisoner, and a wasted man on that bill.

Lucie Manette is the golden thread, patient enough to sit through a father's silence and a husband's danger. Jarvis Lorry is the Tellson's banker who pretends he has no heart and then spends the novel proving the opposite. Dr Manette has spent eighteen years in the Bastille. His hands know shoes better than they know her face. Charles Darnay has refused the Evrémonde name and still cannot refuse the claim that name makes on him. Sydney Carton does a barrister's grinding paperwork, drinks what is left of his evenings, and loves Lucie knowing he will never be the man she chooses. A marquis of the Evrémonde line treats a dead child as a bill paid with a coin. Madame Defarge knits names into a register and does not forget. A fierce companion guards Lucie with a force that has no French. The pressure among them is not a romance triangle. It is a debt moving between London and Paris, and someone will have to pay it in a face that is not his own.

A messenger stops the Dover mail and hands Lorry a scrap that says Recalled to Life. In the room above the wine shop Lucie meets the cobbler. At the Old Bailey, Darnay is charged with treason. Carton saves him because they share a face, and later uses that same face as a key. In Paris the marquis's coach kills a child. He tosses a coin and is found stabbed in his bed. Darnay marries Lucie. Carton tells her he would give his life to keep a life she loves. The Bastille falls. Defarge finds a paper in One Hundred and Five, North Tower. A local official writes from a French prison. Darnay crosses to answer for his house and is locked up as an emigrant aristocrat. Dr Manette's suffering buys a first acquittal. The hinge is a new denunciation: the Defarges, and a third accuser, Manette himself, through the Bastille letter that names every Evrémonde for a raped peasant girl and a murdered brother. Carton drugs Darnay in the Conciergerie and takes his place. Lucie's fierce companion stays behind. The pistol that goes off in her struggle with Madame Defarge ends the register. Carton rides the tumbril with a seamstress who does not know the swap.

Dickens is not writing a costume romance that the Terror interrupts. He is building a machine in three books, Recalled to Life, The Golden Thread, and The Track of a Storm, and every wasted hour Carton spends is a part. He drew on Carlyle and on a fear that England could walk the same road if it kept treating poverty as scenery. The London courtroom and the Paris grindstone belong to one case. The swap at the end is not a last-minute trick. Lucie's family leaves. Carton thinks of a far, far better rest. The book lets him have that sentence because the cart has already been paid for.

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