Tale Of Two Cities Society Analysis

How Far Have Social and Political Norms Come?

By : Ryan Grady While venturing through the world of “A Tale of Two Cities” there are many practices seen throughout the book that would be unheard of in society and politics today. The book, written by the famous English author Charles Dickens, explains the story of people from both France and England and what part they took in the French Revolution. Some of these people, the aristocrats, were against the revolution because they wanted to maintain the form of government where they ruled over the people. If the revolutionaries won, the aristocrats would lose both their power and their wealth. This tension between people and clear class definition is a perfect example of how far both society and

A major change has occurred with respect to concepts of crime and punishment. Prisons have become a more physically healthy environment, and the use of capital punishment has evolved. The death penalty is much less widely used today, many societies have eliminated it, and those that retain it have attempted to find more humane methods of carrying it out. In the 19th century, prisons were harsh and dank, and execution methods were gruesome. In the story, Charles Darnay is taken to prison by the revolutionaries and will spend the rest of his life in prison until his execution date. The prison is described by the narrator as Darnay is locked away. The text states, “It struck cold and damp, but was not dark” (Dickens, 293). When first entering the prison, Darnay meets his fellow prisoners and they see a door leading to another area in the prison. They open this door and describe what the prison felt, and looked like. This is consistent with many of the other prisons that characters in “A Tale of Two Cities” were confined in. The La Force, where Darnay was kept, was not even the harshest of the prisons in France. These conditions were acceptable and quite normal for the time, but would never be considered acceptable in in the United States or in many other modernized

These changes were brought about by new ideas and norms within society and politics. In earlier times, prisons were one of the harshest places to be in, and the conditions in which prisoners were put in would be unthinkable in the world today. Now, prisoners are treated with care, as their cells need to pass rules of hygiene, and each prisoner must receive an specific amount of food per day. This is seen as a large change in the political side of the change in the world. Another way the world has changed, is the way people with more money are treated. In the time of the 1800s, many people could get away with crimes purely because of their social status. In the world today, everyone is tried equally within the legal system, and one person is not viewed as higher than another. These are all large contributions to how the world has changed from the time of “A Tale of Two Cities” to the world