Charles Dickens’ Novel A Tale of Two Cities

Tale

Outside resources and research often inspire authors to write about their personal feelings. Charles Dickens’ classic novel A Tale of Two Cities satirizes the French Revolution, based upon his infatuation with French culture. The novel opens in the pre-revolution year of 1775, when Lucie Manette (a classic Victorian heroine) is told that her father is alive. Dr. Manette, Lucie’s father, has been imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille, a prison in Paris. Even though Lucie has never met her father, she is drawn to him by love and treats him as if she has known him her entire life. Lucie along with her father travels back to London to start a new life, and along the way meet a man traveling under the name of Charles Darnay. Lucie and Charles fall in love with each other and move back to London with Dr. Manette. Several years later Charles is drawn back to his home city of Paris only to find that the revolutionaries have taken over France and have become the hated leaders themselves. The novel A Tale of Two Cities illustrates that intentions, ambitions, and power can overtake people, making themselves into the hated leaders. Revolutionaries in the novel were (very poor) third class citizens hoping to bring justice to France. Some citizens of Paris were so poor that a bandanna of wine was an infant’s meal for the day. “Or even with handkerchiefs from women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants mouths” (Dickens 21).

The aristocrats also treated the peasants poorly. In chapter 7 of the first book, Gaspard’s child is ran over by the carriage of a rich monseigneur. Instead of showing concern for the dead child the rich man asks, “The horses there; they alright?” (Dickens 85). Once the revolution began however, these patriots drunken with abusive power, start the extermination of the much-hated aristocrats. Power driven peasants would often become the oppressors out of their intentions to establish justice as Dickens states:

[Revolutionaries will] Crush humanity out of the shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious licence and oppression over again and it will surely yield the fruit according to its own kind (288). This quote explains why the revolutionaries overtook the aristocracy, killing innocent people such as the seamstress. Using their power driven designs they become “the same tortured forms” as the uncaring aristocrats once were.