A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Darnay is a young Frenchman living in England at the time Dickens introduces him. Although he first appears as a prisoner on trial for treason, Darnay is handsome, noble, and hard-working; in fact, it is his virtuousness that has gotten him in trouble, not only because it leads him to sympathize with the American Revolution (a suspicious position in 18th-century England), but also because it places him at odds with his aristocratic uncle, who has actually engineered his arrest.

This uncle is the Marquis St. Evrémonde, who also happens to be the French nobleman who raped Madame Defarge’s elder sister and imprisoned Doctor Manette to ensure that the story didn’t get out. Darnay is not aware of the full extent of his family’s depravity, but is uncomfortable enough with their abuse of the lower classes that he renounces his title and inheritance, instead establishing a career for himself as a French tutor; as he puts it, he chooses “to live by his own industry in England, rather than on the industry of the overladen people of France” (293). In a sense, Darnay joins the ranks of the hardworking English middle-class, which Dickens contrasts favorably with the decadent and predatory French upper classes.

Nevertheless, Darnay can’t entirely escape his aristocratic background. Although Doctor Manette consents to Darnay’s marriage to Lucie, the knowledge of who Darnay truly is causes him great distress in the immediate aftermath of the wedding. Even more to the point, Darnay’s own good character is unable to save him when he returns to France during the Revolution. Darnay travels there in the hopes of vouching for a man in his employment, but the Evrémondes are so hated in France (and, in particular, by Madame Defarge) that Darnay is tainted by his family’s guilt and nearly forced to pay for their sins; it is only Carton’s intervention that spares Darnay’s life.

Lucie Manette is the daughter of Doctor Manette, who was imprisoned in the Bastille before her birth. Her mother (who was English) also died when Lucie was young, and she grew up in England under the care of her maid, Miss Pross. When she is a teenager, however, Lucie learns that her father is not in fact dead (as she had been told), and that he has been released from prison. Together with Mr. Lorry, she travels to Paris to find him, and her love and devotion ultimately pull him back from the stupor into which he sunk while imprisoned. She is such a dedicated daughter, in fact, that she initially hesitates to marry Darnay for fear that it might cause her father pain.

This turns out not to be the case. Marrying Darnay only draws Lucie closer to her father, without at all affecting her ability to fulfill her role as a wife and mother:

Many times her husband had said to her that no cares and duties seemed to divide her love for him or her help to him, and asked her ‘What is the magic secret, my darling, of your being everything to all of us, as if there were only one of us, yet never seeming to be hurried, or to have too much to do?’ (221).

Lucie, in other words, is a nearly a perfect woman by 19th-century standards: she is endlessly selfless and merciful, and these qualities come so naturally to her that she barely seems to exert any effort to support and inspire those around her. Even her housekeeping seems to flow naturally from her personality, and has a wholesome effect on those who witness it:

The disposition of everything in the rooms, from the largest object to the least; the arrangement of colours; the elegant variety and contrast obtained by thrift in trifles, by delicate hands, clear eyes, and good sense; were at once […] pleasant in themselves, and […] expressive of their originator (97-98).

As an idealized Victorian woman, Lucie also serves as a foil to women like the Vengeance and (especially) Madame Defarge, whose suffering under the Ancien Régime has made them bloodthirsty, hardhearted, and (by the standards of the time) unfeminine. In particular, the “golden thread” of Lucie’s hair contrasts with Madame Defarge’s knitting: as Madame Defarge uses her knitting to plot the downfalls of her enemies, Lucie symbolically “wind[s] the golden thread which [binds] her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old directress and companion, in a life of quiet bliss” (218). 

Thérèse Defarge is the wife of the wine-shop owner Ernest Defarge, as well as the sole surviving member of a peasant family that were once tenants on the Evrémondes’ estate. When she was a young girl, her older sister was raped by Charles Darnay’s uncle—the younger Evrémonde brother who ultimately becomes the Marquis. This same man also killed Thérèse’s older brother in a duel and contributed to the deaths (by natural causes) of her brother-in-law and father.

Thérèse herself was taken away and raised by a family of fishermen, but never forgave the Evrémondes for the role they played in the deaths of her birth family. Although she initially seems to merely support her husband’s revolutionary activities, it eventually becomes clear that she is their mastermind, patiently but doggedly waiting for a chance to strike back at the Evrémonde family. This is nowhere clearer than in Dickens’s descriptions of Madame Defarge’s knitting, which, in addition to being a literal record of those marked for execution, is also a symbol of the relentless forces propelling France toward revolution: at one point, for instance, Dickens describes her “pointing her knitting-needle at little Lucie as if it were the finger of Fate” (277). This determination to see not only Darnay but also his wife and child executed makes Madame Defarge much more extreme in her views than her husband, who hints to her that he fears the Revolution is going too far.

The Defarge’s relationship, in other words, reverses many of the gender norms associated with 19th-century marriage: Thérèse Defarge is less merciful than her husband, and often succeeds in bending him to her will. This in turn reflects the ways in which Dickens uses femininity as a measure of how far astray first the French aristocracy and later the French Revolution have gone. In effect, years of oppression and loss have twisted Madame Defarge’s “natural” womanly feelings (specifically, her love for her family) into an “unwomanly” desire for revenge. 

Ernest Defarge is a wine-shop keeper in Saint Antoine, and the husband of Thérèse Defarge. As a young boy, he worked as a servant for Doctor Manette, and he acts as Manette’s caretaker after the doctor is released from prison but before he can be reunited with his daughter.

By the time the novel opens (1775), Defarge is already involved in a revolutionary society; in fact, in an attempt to drum up more popular outrage, Defarge allows select members of this group to privately view Doctor Manette, whose imprisonment has left him in a nearly catatonic state. As the years pass, Defarge remains as committed as ever to bringing about an uprising, and ultimately plays a central role in the storming of the Bastille; as Dickens puts it, Defarge is “a man of a strong resolution and a set purpose; a man not desirable to be met, rushing down a narrow pass with a gulf on either side, for nothing would turn the man” (35).

Defarge’s devotion to the Revolution is tempered by compassion in a way that his wife’s is not. He is particularly uncomfortable with the thought of anything happening to his former master—so much so that Madame Defarge ultimately leaves him out of her plot to denounce Lucie Manette. There are hints, however, that Defarge had misgivings about the course the Revolution had taken even before this. For instance, while he does his “duty […] to [his] country and the People” (263) by turning Darnay over to the authorities on his arrival in Paris, he also asks exasperatedly: “In the name of that sharp female born and called La Guillotine, why did you [Darnay] come to France?” (262). Defarge’s relatively moderate views don’t bode well for his future under the new regime, and in Carton’s closing visions of the future, Defarge is in fact ultimately executed.

Alexandre Manette is Lucie Manette’s father. As the novel opens, Manette has just been released from the Bastille after 18 years’ imprisonment. Prior to his captivity, Manette had been a successful physician, and was in fact imprisoned in order to prevent him from speaking about two patients he had treated: the peasant boy and girl who died at the hands of the powerful Evrémonde family. Manette’s long imprisonment takes a toll on him: when Lorry and Lucie first see him, he is emaciated and, despite only being middle-aged, entirely white-haired. Worse yet, he doesn’t seem fully aware of who or where he is, focusing all of his attention on making shoes—a pastime he picked up in prison.

With Lucie’s love and care, Doctor Manette eventually recovers his wits and his health; he once again begins practicing medicine and appears “intellectual of face and upright of bearing” (82). He grows troubled and quiet from time to time, apparently remembering his imprisonment. These fits of “abstraction” (82) come to a head when Lucie marries Darnay—the son of one of the two brothers who arranged for Manette’s imprisonment—and Manette temporarily succumbs to the belief that he is once more in prison.

When Darnay himself is arrested years later, it at first seems that Manette will finally be able to make peace with his imprisonment: “For the first time, he felt that in that sharp fire, he had slowly forged the iron which could break the prison door of his daughter’s husband, and deliver him” (281). In other words, it is Manette rather than Carton who initially seems poised to act as a Christ figure, with his past suffering “redeeming” Darnay in the present. Ultimately, however, even Manette is tainted by his experiences under the Ancien Régime; while in prison, he gave in to hatred and denounced the entire Evrémonde family in a written statement. Although Manette has clearly changed his mind since then, the statement convinces the jury to convict Darnay. Ultimately, Darnay is only saved through the intervention of someone entirely outside the cycle of oppression and revenge that has hold of France, and that managed to (temporarily) corrupt even a noble and generous man like Doctor Manette.

Jarvis Lorry is a banker at Tellson’s, and often travels between the bank’s Paris and London offices (the name “Lorry” in fact hints at the role he plays in conveying people and information from one place to another). When the novel opens, Lorry is roughly sixty and somewhat set in his ways; he is “orderly and methodical” (20) in appearance, and repeatedly insists that he is simply a “man of business” with “no time for [feelings], and no chance of them” (26). In keeping with this, Lorry has never married, and when he suggests that he might have, Miss Pross regards the idea as ridiculous, exclaiming that he was “a bachelor in [his] cradle” (200). Lorry’s main passion in life at first seems to be faithfully carrying out his responsibilities at Tellson’s; he even travels to revolutionary France in the hopes of saving bank papers from destruction.

Despite his best efforts, however, Lorry isn’t entirely able to transform himself into a “mere machine” (25). Although he insists to Lucie that Doctor Manette was merely a professional acquaintance, he is clearly horrified by the thought of the ordeal Manette has undergone in prison. He also becomes deeply attached to Lucie, even numbering among the few people to attend her wedding. Ultimately, Lorry is forced to acknowledge that it is these human connections that have truly made his life worthwhile. When Sydney Carton reminds Lorry that Lucie would mourn his death, Lorry replies, “Yes, yes, thank God. I didn’t quite mean what I said [that nobody would weep for him]” (322).

Stryver is an English lawyer who helps secure Charles Darnay’s acquittal during his trial at the Old Bailey. Unlike his partner, Sydney Carton, Stryver welcomes the spotlight and presents all their cases in court. However, while Stryver is an ambitious man, he doesn’t have the skills necessary to secure advancement in his field:

It had once been noted at the Bar, that while Mr. Stryver was a glib man, and an unscrupulous, and a ready, and a bold, he had not that faculty of extracting the essence from a heap of statements, which is among the most striking and necessary of the advocate’s accomplishments (90).

Stryver therefore relies on Carton to prepare his cases for him, while he himself relaxes and drinks. Far from being grateful for Carton’s efforts, however, Stryver continually scolds him for not showing more “energy and purpose” (93) in life. In fact, Stryver has little self-awareness in any area of his life; he considers himself charming and desirable, for instance, and is certain that Lucie will gratefully accept his proposal of marriage. In reality, Stryver is a coarse and pompous man whom Dickens describes as “little more than thirty, but looking twenty years older than he was, stout, loud, red, bluff, and free from any drawback of delicacy” (83). Characteristically, Stryver quickly comes to see his failed proposal as Lucie’s loss, eventually marrying a widow whose property will help advance his prospects in life. Ultimately, Stryver’s self-serving behavior makes him a foil for Carton, whose cynical exterior actually conceals great idealism and selflessness.

Miss Pross is Lucie Manette’s maid, but since she has served her mistress since she was a young girl, she in many ways functions as Lucie’s mother. Miss Pross idolizes Lucie for her beauty, sweetness, and sensitivity, despite not being beautiful or delicate herself; she is introduced as a “wild-looking woman […] all of a red colour” with “brawny hand[s]” (29) whom Lorry nearly mistakes for a man. In addition to being somewhat masculine in appearance, Miss Pross is also unusually outspoken and sharp-tongued for a woman, particularly when it comes to anyone she suspects of harming Lucie.

As her protectiveness of Lucie suggests, however, Miss Pross is conventionally feminine in the way that, for Dickens, is most important: she is deeply and selflessly devoted to those she loves, even to the point of being blind to their faults. Lorry, for instance, finds Miss Pross’s loyalty to her brother Solomon (i.e. Barsad) touching despite the fact that it is completely undeserved:

Solomon was a heartless scoundrel who had stripped [Miss Pross] of everything she possessed, as a stake to speculate with, and had abandoned her in her poverty for evermore, with no touch of compunction. Miss Pross’s fidelity of belief in Solomon (deducting a mere trifle for this slight mistake) was quite a serious matter with Mr. Lorry, and had its weight in his good opinion of her (100).

In light of this, it’s significant that it is Miss Pross who ultimately kills Madame Defarge; like Miss Pross, Madame Defarge in many ways also flouts gender norms, but unlike Miss Pross, she is motivated largely by hatred rather than by love.

Technically, two people of this title appear in A Tale of Two Cities (not counting Charles Darnay, who renounces his inheritance early on). Darnay’s father was the Marquis St. Evrémonde at the time Doctor Manette was imprisoned; although he himself did not commit the outright crimes against the peasantry that his twin brother did, he views the lower classes with disdain and helps to cover up his brother’s actions by conspiring in Manette’s arrest.

Darnay’s uncle, meanwhile, combines this callousness with outright sadism; his features, which are otherwise “like a fine mask,” are somewhat marred by two “dints” in his nose, which “[give] a look of treachery, and cruelty, to the whole countenance” (113). As a young man, he raped the elder sister of Thérèse Defarge and fatally wounded her brother in a duel. By the time the main action of the novel takes place, he has succeeded his brother as Marquis and delights in terrifying the French peasantry by nearly running them over in his carriage (eventually, he does strike and kill one boy).

In fact, the Marquis’s sole regret seems to be that does not have unlimited power over the lower classes; he laments, for instance, that the family does not still enjoy “the right of life and death over the surrounding vulgar” (127). That being the case, he has no sympathy with his nephew’s democratic sensibilities, and even arranges for Darnay to be tried for treason in an attempt to kill him. The Marquis’s cruelty eventually comes back to haunt him, however; he is murdered in his bed by Gaspard, the father of the boy he ran over.

Jerry Cruncher is a working-class man employed by Tellson’s for various odd jobs. Unbeknownst to his employers, however, he also robs graves one the side, supplying corpses for doctors and medical students to study and practice on. This is an extremely disreputable profession, but Cruncher has no patience with his wife’s intense feelings of guilt and fear; in fact, he beats her whenever he catches her praying on his behalf. This in turn makes it all the more ironic that Cruncher describes himself as a “Resurrection-Man” (170). Although his work involves bringing people back from the dead (or, at least, from their graves), it is starkly opposed to the kind of spiritual rebirth the novel is mostly concerned with. Ultimately, however, Cruncher himself experiences this form of moral resurrection, since his experiences in revolutionary France frighten him so much that he resolves to give up grave-robbing and treat his wife with more kindness.

Although she only appears in the novel briefly and is never named, the seamstress who is executed alongside Sydney Carton is central to both his development and A Tale of Two Cities’ themes. Unlike the novel’s other characters, who view Carton as at best a pitiable figure, the seamstress looks up to and relies on Carton for strength in the last moments of her life; she knows nothing about his background, and therefore sees him only as a man who is sacrificing himself for the sake of someone else. In speaking with her, then, Carton is finally able to secure what he earlier hinted he never had before: the “love and attachment, the gratitude [and] respect” of a fellow “human creature” (322).

The seamstress also serves as a commentary on what Dickens sees as the failings of the French Revolution. In addition to being young and innocent, the seamstress is a member of the very class the Revolution promised to uplift; far from conspiring against the new regime, the seamstress says she is “not unwilling to die, if the Republic, which is to do so much good to [the] poor, will profit by [her] death” (368). The fact that she is condemned and executed reveals the extent to which the Revolution has betrayed the principles that originally motivated it, become simply one more oppressive regime.

John Barsad is a spy whose true name is Solomon Pross. He is the brother of Miss Pross and stole a hefty sum of money from her before disappearing from her life. By the time of Darnay’s trial in London, he has taken the name Barsad and is working as a spy and professional fixer; in fact, he is testifying against Darnay on the orders of Darnay’s uncle, the Marquis St. Evrémonde. He later collects information for the French monarchy, before finally turning up as a spy in the French Republic’s prisons—probably, Sydney Carton guesses, as a double-agent in the pay of the English government. Carton blackmails Barsad into helping him switch places with Darnay, and Barsad, for all his own failings, is impressed enough by Carton’s sacrifice that he tries to quiet the people who jeer at him on his way to execution. In his final vision, Carton foresees that Barsad will also fall victim to the Revolution.

Monseigneur first appears as a nobleman whose favor the Marquis St. Evrémonde is seeking. He is noteworthy, even amongst the French nobility, for his decadence: Dickens introduces Monseigneur by noting that he requires four separate servants just to take his morning hot chocolate. However, over the next several pages (and for the rest of the novel), “Monseigneur” comes to stand in for the entire French aristocracy. In this respect, his most notable qualities are his greed, his preoccupation with his own pleasure, and his blindness to the anger of the French people; Dickens describes Monseigneur as a parasite “rapidly swallowing France” (108) who can’t fathom that the status quo might not “see the very stars out” (112).

Once the Revolution is underway, Monseigneur becomes a symbol for the aristocrats who flee the country: “Monseigneur, as a class, had dissociated himself from the phenomenon of his not being appreciated: of his being so little wanted in France, as to incur considerable danger of receiving his dismissal from it, and this life together” (243). In this way, Dickens portrays much of the French aristocracy as both opportunistic and cowardly; having drained the country of everything they can, they leave rather than face the consequences of their actions.

The mender of roads is a rather gullible man who becomes involved in the Defarges’ plots. He initially works near the Marquis’s chateau and sees Gaspard on the day he murders the Marquis (later on, he also witnesses Gaspard’s arrest). Defarge brings the mender to Paris to testify to these events, and he and his wife begin to groom the mender for eventual participation in the Revolution. By the time of Darnay’s imprisonment, the mender of roads is working as a wood-sawyer near La Force prison; he is entirely under the control of Madame Defarge, and willing to say that he witnessed Lucie passing coded signals to prisoners as she stood on the street outside La Force.

In a nod to the Jacquerie (a 14th-century peasant uprising), the members of the revolutionary society Defarge belongs to all go by the name “Jacques.” Most of these men are background figures, but “Jacques Three” stands out somewhat: he is often associated with images of hunger and consumption, and Dickens at one point characterizes him as a “life-thirsty, cannibal-looking, bloody-minded” (328) man. These kinds of descriptions work alongside the motif of predators and prey in the novel; after being preyed upon by the aristocracy, Jacques Three becomes a predator himself. 

The Vengeance is the wife of a grocer in Saint Antoine, and a “lieutenant” (231) of Madame Defarge’s. Even more than Madame Defarge, however, she represents the distortion of traditional femininity under the revolutionary regime; she is just as bloodthirsty and vindictive as her leader (whom she eagerly backs up at every turn), but she lacks Madame Defarge’s sympathetic backstory. In fact, she is never even given a name in the text beyond “the Vengeance”—a nickname she earns after the fall of the Bastille. True to her name, she is essentially the personification of the desire for revenge.  

Like the Defarges, Gaspard is a resident of the impoverished Saint Antoine neighborhood. He first appears scrawling the word “blood” on a wall, using spilled wine for ink. Defarge scolds Gaspard for his rashness, foreshadowing Gaspard’s later impulsive actions: when his son is struck by the Marquis’s carriage and killed, Gaspard hitches a ride on the underside of the coach, and then kills the Marquis in his sleep. He is later caught and executed, but his actions help inspire the later revolution. 

Gabelle is the tax collector and postmaster in the village near the Marquis’s chateau. As such, he is largely a servant of the Evrémonde family, and manages the family property in Darnay’s absence, with the ultimate intent of restoring it to the French people. However, his association with the Evrémondes nearly kills him twice—first when the Marquis’s chateau is burned down, and later when he is accused of helping an emigrant (i.e. Darnay). He writes to Darnay after his arrest asking him to come to Paris and defend him, setting in motion the events of Book 3. 

Like Barsad, Roger Cly is a spy and conman. He testifies against Darnay at his trial in London before public opinion in England forces him to fake his own death and escape to France, where he eventually surfaces as a spy in the French prisons.

“Little” Lucie is Lucie Manette and Charles Darnay’s daughter. She is approximately nine when her father returns to France and remains in Paris with her mother for the duration of Darnay’s imprisonment. Perhaps the most significant thing about her is her fondness for Sydney Carton; the implication is that Lucie, in her childish innocence, can see Carton’s inner nobility in a way that more cynical adults cannot.