“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….” We all know those opening lines even if we don’t know anything else about A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Dickens’ “tale” is sentimental, overwritten (in places), and full of improbable coincidences — and its powerful story moves even the most skeptical reader.
We recognize A Tale of Two Cities as a “tale” and not a straight narrative like David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. The language prepares us for a fable with a moral outcome, not with “once upon a time….” but with “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times….” The fatality of events is foreshadowed early and repeatedly. When the wine cask breaks on the pavement of Saint Antoine, the people scoop it but one, at least, speaks of it as blood.
The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be read upon many there.
Meanwhile, in London, at Dr. Manette’s house in SoHo:
The summer light struck into the corner brilliantly in the earlier part of the day; but, when the streets grew hot, the corner was in shadow, though not in shadow so remote but that you could see beyond it into a glare of brightness. It was a cool spot, staid but cheerful, a wonderful place for echoes, and a very harbour from the raging streets.
No early character or incident is wasted, but held in reserve for the time when Dickens builds to his inevitable conclusion. Miss Pross has lost contact with a no-good brother? Keep him in mind, for he may appear. Jerry Cruncher is a resurrection man, a robber of graves? It may matter sooner or later. The woman raped by the evil brother of the evil Marquis had a sister? Look for her. No novelist writing today would multiply the connections and coincidences as Dickens does, and yet it works. It works because this is a tale, in which evil begets more evil, but goodness also has its descendants.
The mob which dances wildly through the streets of Paris is less wicked than demented, driven mad by years of injustice and cruelty. They repay in kind. Lucie Manette, probably the most uninteresting character in the book, is wholly good. Take her, not as a person, but as a model of what a daughter, wife and mother should be. She is an influence for good on her father and her husband, as well as the dissolute Sydney Carton.
Sydney Carton is the smartest, if not the wisest, character in the book. He can figure things out, whether for the barrister he serves, or the desperate Darnay family in Paris. In the Afterword to my edition of the novel, Stephen Koch calls Carton “the embodiment of its mingling of good and evil.”
Sydney constantly calls himself bad (and the novel lets him), but apart from the fact that he is drunk perhaps fifty percent of the time — in which state he still outthinks everybody — we never see Sydney perform a single act that any sane judge could possibly condemn. He is in fact among the best bad men in all literature.
Sydney’s sin is wasting his talents through lack of purpose. Knowing that marriage with Lucie — the one purpose he does pursue — is not possible, he bides his time. Then, confronted with the contrast in action of good and evil, he renews his purpose and acts, decisively.
Posted by SilverSeason 
