Exploring the Themes and Message of 'A Tale of Two Cities'

"A Tale of Two Cities" is a novel set against the backdrop of the French Revolution. It tells the story of Dr. Manette, who was imprisoned in the Bastille for 18 years. After his release, he lives in London with his daughter, Lucie, whom he had never met.

The main theme of the book focuses on the ideas of resurrection, sacrifice, and justice. The events follow Dr. Manette’s life and the lives of others, including Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a London lawyer.

This novel can be hard to read due to its historical context and the complexity of its characters. It is important to understand the moral and meaning behind each event. The story is full of twists, and the message of personal sacrifice is clear.

In this review, we will explore the book’s meaning, provide a summary, and answer critical questions. We will also discuss key annotations, providing a report by chapter. The story has a deep impact, with a clear message about the choices people make in difficult times.

Book: A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities is a historical novel published in 1859 by English author Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. Wikipedia

• Originally published: November 26, 1859
• Author: Charles Dickens
• Playwright: Charles Dickens
• Genres: Novel, Historical Fiction, historical novel
• Characters: Charles Darnay, Madame Defarge, Sydney Carton 
• Book date: 1859

About the  Author: Charles Dickens

British novelist, born into a family of naval clerks, his family was forced to move to a debtor's prison when he was 10 years old, and he had to do heavy housework at the age of 11. He was an apprentice in a shoe workshop, a copyist in a law firm at the age of 16, and later a reporter for a newspaper. He only went to school for a few years and became a famous writer through hard self-study and hard work.

He lived in the transition period from semi-feudal society to industrial capitalist society in Britain. His works describe various aspects of social life in this period broadly and profoundly, vividly and vividly portray the representative figures of various classes, expose and criticize various ugly social phenomena and their representatives from the perspective of humanitarianism, and sympathize and support the suffering of the working people and their resistance struggle. 

But at the same time, he also advocated tolerance and class reconciliation centered on "benevolence". He held a contradictory attitude towards the resistance struggle of the working people, supporting them in action but denying them morally. This shows the strong power and weak fantasy of his realism.

Dickens created 14 novels, many short and medium-length novels, essays, travelogues, plays, and sketches in his lifetime. Among them, the most famous works are Hard Times (1854), a long masterpiece describing the contradiction between labor and capital, and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), another masterpiece describing the French Revolution of 1789. 

The former shows the cruel exploitation and oppression of workers by industrial capitalists, describes the united struggle of the working class, and criticizes the principle of free competition and utilitarianism that defend the exploitation of capitalists. 

The latter uses the debauchery and cruelty of the French aristocracy, the suffering of the masses, and the historical power of the French Revolution to reflect the social reality of Britain at that time, predicting that this "terrible fire" would also be repeated in France. 

Other works include Oliver Twist (also translated as Oliver Twist, 1838), The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Dombey and Son (1848), David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1861), etc.

Dickens is the main representative of British realistic literature in the 19th century. He is famous for his witty humor, meticulous psychological analysis, and the organic combination of realistic description and romantic atmosphere. Marx praised him and Thackeray as "a group of outstanding novelists" in Britain.

Book Summary

I first read only fragments of this book by Dickens, and later I found the complete book to read, which was also many years ago. 

After many years, the most profound impression of this book is not about the love story of the protagonist, but the background description of the French Revolution. 

The French Revolution in the book seems to be different from the revolution in our history textbooks. Various brutalities and deaths are intertwined. 

This may be the historical truth that we have never understood. 

It is not a few simple sentences that "with the development of capitalist economy and the spread of enlightenment ideas, the class struggle between the third estate and the privileged estate has become increasingly irreconcilable, and various social contradictions have become increasingly intensified."

The beginning of "A Tale of Two Cities" is a famous quote: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was a wise age, it was a foolish age; it was a period of confidence, it was a period of doubt... We were all going straight to heaven, we were all going straight to hell." 

The author Dickens saw the two sides behind the great revolution that promoted the trend of history, and this is why I understood the meaning of this sentence after reading several historical books about the French Revolution many years later. 

In the book, Dickens not only describes the debauchery and brutality of the privileged class but also shows the even more shocking bloodthirsty revenge of the third class of toiling masses, which shows the author's doubts about the violence of the revolution. 

When enthusiasm covers up a reason, when one kind of violence suppresses another kind of violence, how to ensure the declaration of the Great Revolution of "freedom, equality, and fraternity", social order is broken, one class defeats another, and equality is finally reduced to a slogan.

The book creates a perfect moral benchmark like Dr. Manette, which reflects Dickens's humanitarian compassion. 

In Dickens' eyes, the French Revolution went from one extreme to another. 

Countless people were pushed to the guillotine, and the enthusiasm of the lower classes was constantly incited and manipulated until the Jacobin dictatorship implemented the reign of terror. 

Many of the people who fell from the guillotine were leaders of the Revolution. As Madame Roland said, "Freedom, how many crimes are committed in your name."

In the book, Carton sacrifices his life for love, which is a reflection of the humanitarian light that Dickens pursued. If humanity and love are also abandoned, then any form of revolution is questionable. 

When hatred suppresses everything, people become killing machines like zombies, just like Mrs. Defarge in the book. 

To this day, the French are still reflecting on that history, and there has been a familiar past on our land. Revolution can never be an excuse to destroy humanity, nor can hatred replace the existence of love.

Book Review

A Tale of Two Cities begins with a famous quote: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of doubt... We were all going straight to Heaven, we were all going straight to Hell."

This passage has been widely circulated and has long transcended national boundaries. However, what kind of scene is it when good and bad coexist? I can understand "ignorance, doubts, darkness, despair, and nothing..." If Dickens felt that "that era was so similar to this era", then I can empathize more with the tragic side.

Every day when I turn on the news, from the reports to the readers' reactions, there is anger and sorrow - mostly anger. People express their feelings in violent language as if they have no hope for the possibility of communication. The deceived think that heaven belongs to the powerful, but they don't know that there is darkness there too. I feel suffocated by watching too much news. 

After reading the novel, I found that there is another sentence at the end, which is much less well-known: "I have done better than anything I have ever done; the rest I will get is sweeter than anything I have ever known." - 

What kind of confidence is needed to say "I have done better than anything I have ever done" in this era, and what kind of hope is needed to dare to face an unknown rest? Dickens described the eve of the French Revolution. Both Britain and France were shrouded in dusk fog. 

In Britain, when people left their homes and went out of the city, they had to send their furniture to the warehouse of the furniture store for safekeeping; they were ordinary businessmen doing business during the day, but became highway robbers at night; murderers who committed heinous crimes and thieves who stole 6 pence were both sentenced to death.

France is even more terrible. The rulers and the church are extremely corrupt, and the hatred between people is like poison gas filling every corner of society. Terror is brewing rapidly. In Hugo's writing, all this is the darkness before dawn - for the dawn, the blood and tears at night can be ignored. There are always too many enemies, and friends are just empty seats. You dare not say who will sit on it next moment, and you are not even sure about yourself.

Under this pressure, many writers could not escape the temptation to write about revolution, because the injustice was so obvious, and there was no way out for the powerful and the powerless, just like our news today - in fact, as a Chinese, I have read many stories of blood revenge, but I am not familiar with how to forget the hatred with a smile. Blood revenge or forgetting hatred, this is exactly the story Dickens wants to tell, in his Tale of Two Cities. 

At first, I thought the two cities only referred to Paris and London, but soon some small characters came on the stage, insignificant but specific, they tore off the label of the two cities, making the boundaries between Paris and London blurred. In Paris, we met some ragged and seemingly idle people, all named "Jacques", who gathered in a small hotel and didn't know what was brewing. 

The hotel owner Defarge was busy, but not for business. Mrs. Defarge did her knitting without raising her eyes, but she knew everything about secrets and some bloody things and participated in them. Her face was as hard as stone, and even men felt cold when they saw her.

In this city, on one side are the nobles who live luxuriously on the corpses of the poor, their carriages running through the streets, killing people and leaving a few coins before getting away; on the other side are the impoverished people whose future is dark; and then there are these "Jacques" who sneak into the houses of the adults at night and kill one. 

Madame Defarge then crosses out that person's name from the "record" she is woven in her hand - she doesn't know which is easier or more difficult, crossing out a person's name or his life.

The revolutionaries described by Dickens are not abstract. Most of them are victims who have turned into perpetrators. They may have been out of fear or hatred at first, but later they all abandoned their family names for the sake of "justice" and put on the executioner's coat of "Jacques". 

For Dickens, no matter what the reason for the revolution, the essence of the revolution is the same, that is, taking lives. The cause is blood, and the result is still blood. One of the two cities stood up from the blood. 

So where is the other city? Different from the banner-like presentation of Paris, Dickens described the violent scene of the sea, and then turned his eyes and fixed his eyes on an inconspicuous boat among the waves: here is a French doctor Manette who has been imprisoned for 18 years. 

After he was released from prison, he was taken to London by his good friend and daughter Lucie, but he fell into mental illness; Lucie lost her parents at a young age because of this. Her husband Darnay is a descendant of the French nobility. Because he felt that the nobility was unfair to the poor, he hid his identity but was still sentenced to death twice.

Who are the people sitting in this boat? Some suffering people, just like that city. I don't know why, these people who also bear the hatred of the country and the family are not drawn into the whirlpool of that city - they have no ambitions, just want to accompany each other and live a peaceful life. 

However, the harshness of an era means that no matter whether you want to resist or not, there will always be some deadly pursuits. When Darnay got into a lawsuit for the first time, the man who helped him win the lawsuit was a man of the same age and appearance as him. This man's name is Carton. He is an alcoholic, accustomed to self-deprecation, and has a strange self-loathing. 

He is willing to be an assistant to an untalented lawyer, because of his addiction to alcohol and refusal to flatter, he has repeatedly wasted his years, but he is also suffering from it. There are many movie versions of A Tale of Two Cities. 

I found that in any version, Carton is the male number one and is deeply loved by female audiences. I suspect that he is mostly filmed as a late-blooming hero, while in the book, everything is to express contradictions. 

Carton is indeed handsome, but his appearance has been damaged by alcohol and long-term self-opposition; he is not appreciated for his talent, which is more shameful than touching, because he can't struggle but cries secretly; he is very affectionate to Lucy, and he confesses his love not to win love but to declare hopelessness and ask for mercy: 

"When you see a little baby as beautiful as you jumping around your knees, I hope you can sometimes remember that there is such a person in the world who is willing to sacrifice his life to save the life of the one you love!" 

In real life, people like Carton have no halo, because most people are afraid of and hate incompetent people who have lost their fighting spirit, like his boss who said to him complacently: "See how I did it before? How am I doing it now? Your way of dealing with the world is always a lame way."

Dickens used many foreshadowings to describe this thread, and sometimes temporarily put it aside, which prevented me from connecting it with what happened in Paris for a long time. I don't understand why he wrote about the trivial lives of such a group of people. 

In the atmosphere of the Great Revolution, small families and small groups always have difficulty standing up, because "an English man's home is his fortress" has lost its legitimacy. What is legitimate? At first, it seems to be justice.

Mrs. Defarge grew up to be a goddess of revenge and a revolutionary leader for no other reason than that her family was killed by the Marquis. 

She did have reason to hate, but was there any reason for her determination to wipe out their family? Was there any reason for her to infer from her experience that all hostile classes should die? In the end, things developed to the point where anyone who opposed the revolution or even disagreed with her opinion would lose their heads. What was this strange justice?

"Since childhood, she has suffered injustice and has a deep hatred for the hostile class. When the time comes, she gradually becomes a tigress. She has no compassion." Dickens said that many women have been "terribly changed" because of the influence of the times. I have to say that novelists at that time were still ambitious and dared to tackle difficult problems. 

In Hugo's view, the Great Revolution was the rise of the people, although in "Les Miserables", who is considered "the people" is quite vague. 

If the privileged class is not worthy of being the people because of their numerous crimes, then are the oppressed people necessarily clean? Who gives a person the power to deprive another person of his life? The "Jacques" have transformed into a large group, and they have power with the guillotine. Are these new perpetrators who grew up in a pool of blood still the people?

Hugo saw the revolution as a force that swept away the darkness, while in Dickens's writings, the Great Revolution was one of the "countless insatiable monsters created by human imagination". The symbol of the Great Revolution was the guillotine. Interestingly, Dickens did not elaborate on this but just said lightly: "It replaced the cross." 

The cross. This is another tradition that they have been fighting against the guillotine for more than 1,700 years. This tradition originated from a man who was said to have never been tainted by sin and had never wronged anyone. 

To prove that love does not count people's evil and that life is better than death, he was willing to suffer poverty, humiliation, humiliation, and death. He was hung on the cross without complaint. If he wanted to collect debts, all those standing under the cross would not be spared. However, before he died, he only said one sentence: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." 

When Hugo mentioned Jesus, it seemed that he was one of the heroes, the embodiment of some noble spirit, inspiring more people to win glory through their own efforts; when Dickens mentioned Jesus, it was always when someone was heartbroken or dying. 

He died for others was resurrected, and became the comfort and hope in the hearts of countless people who were about to die. Dickens insisted on this belief in all his novels and used it to break this impenetrable world like an iron barrel. 

As a result, the originally hidden line suddenly stood out: Darnay returned to Paris when he was in the most dangerous time. To rescue the housekeeper who was persecuted for serving their family, he was sentenced to death. Manette and Lucie, together with their servants and friends, a group of five people followed Darnay to France without hesitation and shared the hardships with him. 

Carton also came to Paris for Lucy's sake. The ship seemed fragile and could not resist the violence that was about to hit it, just like the common people in the past could not resist the masters' big carts, big dogs, and big guillotines; just like today's masters turned into grass when they were on the guillotine. 

What can a group of people without force do? Dickens mentioned again that Carton and Darnay looked very similar, and Carton seemed to be an unsuccessful version of Darnay. This information makes people shudder. How can an unarmed person save another person who is doomed to die? Yes, replace one death with another.

At this point, I suddenly felt that Dickens suppressed hope so low in the first half of the story, just to bring it up at the last moment. It challenges human nature. Why did Carton die for Darnay? This person is so similar to him, but he is far better than him in everything. Why did Carton die for Darnay? Darnay died, and maybe Lucy would be his one day. 

We can easily understand the ideas of revolution, but it is difficult to understand sacrifice. Carton decided to die in place of Darnay because he loved Lucy, he chose to love what she loved. He secretly arranged and planned to make the most thorough protection for the boat to sail to safety. He used the intelligence rescued from alcohol and regret to make it serve to love for the last time. Darnay didn't know all this. He said to Lucie, "I want to give my love a farewell blessing. 

We will meet again in the place where the weary rest!" On the other hand, Miss Pross, the servant of the Manette family, fought a desperate battle with Mrs. Defarge to prevent her from catching up with the doctor's family. Dickens' words to her were: "Love is always much more powerful than hate."

What about Carton? What did this man who went to his death alone get? "Jesus said, 'I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me will live, even though they die. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die.'" 

Before his execution, Carton met a poor seamstress who was wrongly sentenced by the Revolutionary Committee. They accompanied each other like passengers with assigned seats and walked to the end. She said to him:

"Dear stranger, if it weren't for you, I would not be so calm, because I was born a poor little person, very timid. ... Thinking of the Lord who was put to death, we can still have hope and comfort here today. I feel that you are given to me by God." These are the sources of courage used by the people in the boat to resist the wind and waves. They don't want to die. 

If possible, they hope to spend this journey together in peace. However, if they really have to die, they are not afraid, because they believe that pain and death are not everything. There is a real and beautiful country waiting at the end of the world, which is the eternal home. They don't need to rob or sweep someone away from their front to get there. As long as they love each other, they can say with faith:

"What I have done now is better than anything I have ever done, and the rest I shall have is sweeter than anything I have ever known."

My Thoughts After Reading A Tale of Two Cities

  "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." The first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities has been quoted countless times. But I guess those who know this sentence don't know what kind of story the novel "A Tale of Two Cities" tells, nor do they know why this sentence was said. 

If you want to understand the original meaning of this sentence and why this classic sentence was written, you naturally have to read the original work.

    "---In short, that era was so similar to this era." This sentence actually explains two problems of the above classic sentence: why it is said, and to whom it is said. This is one of the reasons why the novel was born. Dickens hopes to express his concerns through such a novel by describing the disaster brought to the masses by the French Revolution, and at the same time warn Britain of its dangerous situation. A revolutionary history, two cities representing two countries, and several people in the storm constitute the main elements of the novel.

    Although "A Tale of Two Cities" is a classic novel, because it clearly states that the background of this revolution is the French Revolution, the expression of the revolution is considered to be the author's historical view. And this is the focus of countless controversies about the novel. 

In addition to showing the cruelty of the nobles with delicate writing in the novel, Dickens also shows the irrational destruction of the revolutionary masses. 

He believed that revolution was a kind of oppression replacing another kind of oppression, and a direct and intense bloody riot replacing another kind of blood. The most eye-catching part of the novel is the series of descriptions of the capture of the Bastille and the rioting people - bloody, cruel, cunning, and vicious.

    Dickens devoted a lot of time to describing the evil of the mob, showing his hatred for the mob, which can be said to be hatred of the revolution to a certain extent. Of course, as a humanitarian, Dickens also pointed out the panacea to save the world: love. 

This kind of love, reflected in the novel, includes personal feelings such as family affection, love, and friendship, as well as the kind of fraternity that abandons the nobility and saves the people. Among them, the most outstanding is the description of Carton's love.

    I like Carton very much. In fact, Carton is the incarnation of Dickens. Dickens first thought of Carton and a certain spirit in him and then conceived this novel. So, what kind of person is Carton? The novel describes: "The sun rises sadly, and the scenery it illuminates is no more miserable than this man. 

He is talented and has noble emotions, but he has no chance to display his talents and express his emotions. He cannot do anything and is unable to seek his own happiness. He knows his own problems, but he resigns himself to fate and allows himself to waste his time year after year and consume it all."

    This is a young man who indulges in depravity and obliterates his talent and youth. Why did he indulge in depravity? The novel does not seem to explain that he has been like this since he appeared, and there is not much description of his family background. 

Personally, I think this person represents Dickens himself, so he does not need to be described too much - Carton's depravity stems from his disappointment with the increasingly decadent society. Before he went to the guillotine, he said, "I see the evil of this age, and the evil of the previous age that caused this evil, gradually redeeming their sins and dying."

    Carton, the pessimist abandoned by himself, suddenly appeared when his friend was in trouble and the husband of the woman he loved was about to be sent to the guillotine. At the cost of his own life, he used a substitution strategy to save the husband of the woman he loved at the critical moment.

    Isn't this the love of Christ, redeeming his sins and dying. In fact, Carton in the novel did say in the tone of the Bible before he died, "Resurrection is in me, life is in me, those who believe in me will live, though they die; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die." 

This is the good medicine Dickens prescribed for the "worst times", but it is an ideal after all. Some people say that "A Tale of Two Cities", as an immortal work, would lose its value and glory without the existence and deeds of Sidney Carton. I completely agree.