A Tale of Two Cities

Summary

A Tale of Two Cities moves between London and Paris from 1775 to the Reign of Terror in 1793-94. In Book the First, Recalled to Life, Jarvis Lorry, a clerk of Tellson's Bank, travels by the Dover mail and sends back the cryptic message Recalled to life by the porter Jerry Cruncher. At Dover he tells young Lucie Manette that her father, Doctor Alexandre Manette, believed dead, has been released after eighteen years in the Bastille. In the Paris suburb of Saint Antoine, where a broken wine cask sets the starving poor licking the street, the wine-seller Ernest Defarge keeps the doctor in a garret, where he cobbles shoes and knows himself only as One Hundred and Five, North Tower. Lucie's touch and golden hair begin his recovery. Book the Second, The Golden Thread, opens in 1780 at the Old Bailey, where the French emigrant Charles Darnay is tried for treason; he is acquitted when the barrister Stryver's dissolute assistant, Sydney Carton, shows that he looks so like Darnay that the identifying witness cannot be trusted. Darnay is in fact the nephew of the cruel Marquis St. Evremonde, whose carriage runs down a peasant child in Paris; the father, Gaspard, stabs the Marquis in his bed and is hanged. Darnay renounces his inheritance, teaches French in England, and marries Lucie. Carton, who has wasted his gifts, confesses his love to Lucie and promises he would give his life for anyone dear to her. On the wedding day Manette learns Darnay's true family name and relapses into shoemaking for nine days. Meanwhile Madame Defarge knits into her stitches a register of aristocrats marked for vengeance. In July 1789 the Bastille falls, and Defarge searches Manette's old cell. In 1792 a letter from the imprisoned steward Gabelle draws Darnay to Paris, where he is arrested as an emigrant. Book the Third, The Track of a Storm, follows Manette's efforts, aided by his standing as a former Bastille prisoner, to free his son-in-law. Darnay is acquitted, then rearrested the same night. At his second trial Defarge reads a letter Manette wrote in prison in 1767, describing how the Evremonde brothers summoned him to a dying peasant girl and her wounded brother, and then had him imprisoned for knowing too much; Madame Defarge is the girl's surviving sister. Darnay is condemned to death. Carton, using his hold over the spy John Barsad, enters the prison, drugs Darnay and takes his place. Miss Pross, Lucie's devoted companion, struggles with Madame Defarge, whose pistol goes off and kills her. The family escapes to England, and Carton goes to the guillotine comforting a young seamstress. Dickens serialized the novel weekly in his new magazine All the Year Round from April to November 1859, with simultaneous monthly parts and a volume edition that year.

Top Lessons

• A wasted life redeemed by sacrifice

  Sydney Carton calls himself useless and drinks away his talent, yet he keeps the promise made to Lucie in Book II, Chapter 13. Dickens shows that a life is measured by what it is finally given for, and he frames Carton's death with the words of John 11.

• Cruelty breeds its own monsters

  The Marquis treats the poor as vermin, and the Revolution answers with the guillotine and Madame Defarge's knitting. In Book III, Chapter 15 Dickens says that the same seed will yield the same fruit, judging both the old regime and the Terror it produced.

• Love that restores

  Lucie is the golden thread of Book II: her patience draws her father back from the garret, holds the Soho household together and moves Carton's heart. Dickens presents faithful domestic love as a power stronger than imprisonment and hatred.

• The past does not stay buried

  Manette's letter, hidden in his Bastille cell, returns eighteen years later to condemn the son-in-law he loves. Jerry Cruncher's grave-robbing, Recalled to life, and Carton's resurrection text all play on what rises again from the grave.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Doctor Manette is one of Victorian fiction's most careful portraits of the lasting effects of long imprisonment. Freed after eighteen years of solitary confinement, he has narrowed his identity to a cell number and a cobbler's bench; recovery comes through his daughter's care, and relapse follows when Darnay's true name revives the memories of the Evremonde case. In Book II, Chapter 19, a physician discusses his own illness in the third person as a case, attributes it to the return of a train of distressing associations, notes the patient's amnesia for the episode, and agrees, reluctantly, that the old tools be destroyed. Modern readers often compare these episodes with post-traumatic or dissociative states; that reading is interpretive, and Dickens's vocabulary is the period's language of shock and mental strain. The novel adds an eighteenth-century physician's case history in Manette's Bastille letter (a young woman in a high fever of the brain, treated with narcotics he distrusts, and a boy dying of a sword wound), Carton's purchase of a stupefying drug from a Paris chemist, Jerry Cruncher's trade as a resurrection-man supplying bodies to anatomists, Carton's heavy drinking, and the hunger of Saint Antoine.

• Book I, Chapter 6

  Manette at his shoemaker's bench in Defarge's garret, answering to his cell number and slowly recognizing Lucie's hair.

• Book II, Chapters 18-19

  Manette's nine-day relapse after the wedding; his clinical conversation with Lorry about the case and the destruction of the bench.

• Book III, Chapter 10

  Manette's letter describes attending the Evremonde brothers' victim in a high fever of the brain, using narcotic medicines from their case, and the dying brother's wound, and records his fear that his reason will not remain unimpaired.

• Book II, Chapter 14

  Jerry Cruncher goes fishing by night in a churchyard; his son learns that he is a resurrection-man.

• Book III, Chapters 9 and 13

  Carton buys powders from a chemist and later uses a drug to render Darnay insensible before the exchange in the prison.

• Book II, Chapter 5

  Carton works through the night for Stryver with wet towels on his head and a bowl of punch.

• Book I, Chapter 5

  The starving people of Saint Antoine scoop spilled wine from the street; Hunger is described as a presence in every house.