A Tale of Two Cities: Minor Characters

A Tale of Two Cities:

Roles of Minor Characters

Every story in the history of literature has one or more characters that are not as significant as other characters. Although these characters aren’t as important, they serve to advance the plot or are symbolically important. There are definitely numerous depictions of these characters in A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. Two examples are Lucie Manette Darnay and Miss Pross. Both of these flat characters are important in the development of the story.

Lucie Manette Darnay played an important and symbolic role in the novel. Dickens described her as “the golden thread” of the novel, weaving its good throughout the plot. Along with her good nature, she was also young and attractive. Dickens described her as having:

…a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, and a pair of blue eyes…and a forehead with a singular capacity…of lifting and knitting itself into an expression that was not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright fixed attention, though it included all the four expressions. (Dickens 17)

Dickens created Lucie to be an ideal rather than a real woman. She represented all that is good in humanity—innocence, kindness, faith, and hope—and she served as a touchstone for other characters to find those qualities within themselves. Lucie is a loving and devoted wife to Charles Darnay. After Darnay’s death sentence she tells him:

We shall not be separated long. I feel that this ...