Sydney Carton's Last Walk: Dickens's French Revolution Novel From 'the Best of Times' to the Guillotine

At the end of A Tale of Two Cities, the cynical English lawyer Sydney Carton secretly takes the place of his look-alike, Charles Darnay, in a Paris prison and goes to the guillotine in his stead, so that Darnay can escape to England with his wife Lucie, whom Carton also loves. In the same final chapters Madame Defarge, the revolutionary who has hunted Darnay's family, is killed by her own pistol in a struggle with Lucie's loyal governess, Miss Pross. The novel closes on Carton's thoughts as he faces the blade: "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known." That ending is one of the most famous in English literature, and the road to it runs through London, Paris, the storming of the Bastille and the Reign of Terror.

Dickens and the making of the novel

Charles Dickens, born in Portsmouth in 1812 and died in 1870, is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. As a boy he left school at twelve to work in a boot-blacking factory while his father was held in a debtors' prison, an experience that fed his lifelong sympathy for the poor and powerless. By 1859 he was famous, the author of books like Oliver Twist, and he had just started his own weekly magazine, All the Year Round.

A Tale of Two Cities was the new magazine's lead story. Its 45 chapters ran in 31 weekly instalments, beginning in the very first issue on 30 April 1859, and Dickens also issued the chapters in eight monthly parts with green covers. It is one of only two historical novels he wrote, the other being Barnaby Rudge. For his history he leaned especially on Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History, which shaped the novel's rhetoric and symbolism.

The emotional core came from the theatre. Dickens had acted in Wilkie Collins's play The Frozen Deep, playing a man who sacrifices his own life so that his rival can have the woman they both love, and that love triangle became the model for Carton, Darnay and Lucie.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"

The novel opens with one of the best-known sentences in the language, a long chain of opposites: the best and worst of times, the age of wisdom and of foolishness, the spring of hope and the winter of despair. Readers have seen these pairs as a picture of the huge social gap between aristocrats and ordinary people in France before the Revolution, and also as an early hint of the book's interest in doubles. Two cities, two men who look alike, two kinds of love, two kinds of violence: the whole novel is built in pairs.

Book the First: Recalled to Life

In 1775 a banker from Tellson's Bank, Jarvis Lorry, travels to Paris with a young Englishwoman, Lucie Manette. Her father, Doctor Alexandre Manette, whom she believed dead, has been released after 18 years in the Bastille. They find him in an attic above the wine shop of his former servant Ernest Defarge and Defarge's wife Thérèse. Broken by prison, the doctor spends his days obsessively making shoes, a skill he learned in his cell. Lucie and Lorry bring him home to England, where he slowly recovers. The phrase "recalled to life" is the first of the book's many images of resurrection.

Book the Second: The Golden Thread

Five years later a French émigré, Charles Darnay, is tried in London for treason. He is acquitted when his lawyer's colleague, Sydney Carton, shows that he looks so much like the prisoner that a witness's identification is worthless. Carton is clever but drunk and self-hating; Darnay is decent and hard-working. Both fall in love with Lucie. Carton tells her he knows she cannot love him, but promises he would "embrace any sacrifice" for her and those dear to her. Lucie marries Darnay.

Meanwhile, in France, Darnay's uncle, the cruel Marquis St. Evrémonde, runs down a child with his carriage and tosses the father a coin; the father later kills the Marquis in his bed. Darnay, the Marquis's nephew and heir, has rejected his family and taken an English version of his mother's name. In July 1789 the Defarges help lead the storming of the Bastille, and Defarge searches Dr Manette's old cell. Then, in 1792, a letter from an imprisoned former servant pulls Darnay back to Paris.

Book the Third: The Track of a Storm

In revolutionary France Darnay is arrested as a returning aristocrat. Dr Manette, now a hero because of his years in the Bastille, wins his release, but he is arrested again the same day. At the retrial, Defarge reads out a document the doctor wrote in prison long ago. It reveals that the Evrémonde brothers, Darnay's father and uncle, had raped a peasant girl and killed her brother, and had locked Manette away to hide their crimes; the document curses the Evrémondes "to the last of their race". Darnay is sentenced to death. Carton then learns that Madame Defarge is the surviving sister of that peasant family and plans to denounce Lucie and her child as well.

Carton acts. With the help of a spy he can blackmail, he enters Darnay's cell, drugs him, swaps clothes, and has him carried to the waiting carriage. On the way to the scaffold he comforts a young seamstress who realises he is not Darnay and asks to hold his hand. His last thoughts are a vision of a better future for Lucie's family.

Themes: resurrection, sacrifice and revolution

Resurrection runs through the whole book, from Manette "recalled to life" to Carton, who gives his wasted life meaning by giving it away. Carton and Darnay are mirror images: Carton even says, looking at himself, that Darnay shows him "what you have fallen away from, and what you might have been". Some critics connect this doubling to Dickens's own life; Darnay shares his initials, and Lucie may reflect his relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan, though little is known for certain.

Dickens's view of the Revolution is double too. He shows the cruelty of the old aristocracy clearly enough that readers understand the people's anger, but he also shows that anger turning into a machine of revenge. Madame Defarge, knitting the names of enemies into her work, is both a victim and a monster. The lesson is not that one side is good, but that injustice breeds more injustice.

Reception and legacy

Contemporary reviews were mixed. Carlyle was enthusiastic, while the critic James Fitzjames Stephen mocked the novel as cheap melodrama. Jorge Luis Borges later joked that Dickens could not really write a tale of two cities, because he lived in only one: London. Yet readers stayed loyal. The book is often described as one of the best-selling novels of all time, and it ranked 63rd in the BBC's Big Read poll in 2003. It has been filmed many times, including a 1935 version with Ronald Colman as Carton that was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and a Broadway musical in 2008 that has since been staged in Japan and Korea. If you know Dickens through Oliver Twist, this novel shows another side of him: a writer of history, suspense and tragic love.

Learn with A Tale of Two Cities: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
the best of times, the worst of times	a period that is both wonderful and terrible	My first year abroad was the best of times and the worst of times.
a far, far better thing	(literary) a noble act of self-sacrifice	Giving up his seat was a far, far better thing than he usually did.
recalled to life	brought back from a death-like state	After the long winter, the garden seemed recalled to life.
a dead ringer	someone who looks exactly like another person	Carton was a dead ringer for Darnay.
to take someone's place	to substitute for someone	Carton took Darnay's place in prison.

Try this: Write three sentences about a time that felt like "the best of times and the worst of times", using "to take someone's place".