A Tale of Two Cities / YMMV

Character Perception Evolution:
- Jerry Cruncher was intended as comic relief, and was indeed read as such when the novel was first published. While his characterization is obviously slanted towards the Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist side of the spectrum, his abusive behavior towards his wife causes modern audiences to see him as an unredeemable asshole who isn't funny at all (see Values Dissonance below).
- Dickens' portrayal of Lucie Manette as the idealized, archetypal heroine of the Victorian era has aged somewhat awkwardly for present-day readers, who tend to view her as someone whose only two discernible personality traits are her Incorruptible Pure Pureness and her penchant for fainting, and thus find it difficult to relate to her.
Complete Monster: The Marquis St. Evrémonde, uncle of Charles Darnay, is the face of the French aristocracy in the novel and the "worst of a bad race". The crueler of the two infamous Evrémonde twin brothers, the Marquis introduces himself when running over a small child with a carriage, tossing a single coin at the grieving father while chiding him for "not looking after" his dead child. Disappointed that reforms prevent him from wantonly abusing and executing the innocent—including his own nephew, whom the Marquis tells to his face that he'd happily have Charles locked away for "treason"—the full heights of the Marquis's depravity come to light only in the last part of the novel. One night, with his brother, the Marquis raped and tortured a peasant girl to death for his own pleasure, slaying the woman's entire family as well and dooming the good-natured doctor who tries to expose him to almost two decades in the Bastille. The sole survivor of this massacre is the future Madame Defarge, whose fanatical hatred for the Evrémondes almost dooms the entire family, innocent or not. Ultimately, every misfortune in the book—systemic and personal alike—leads back to or is embodied by the Marquis and his endless lack of regard for the lower class.
Designated Hero: Darnay is constantly characterized as a valiant, upstanding figure (and admittedly he's not a bad guy), but his attempts at heroism are not well thought out and wind up causing more problems than they solve, place his family and friends in serious trouble, and ultimately lead to Carton's death by guillotine.
Draco in Leather Pants: Madame Defarge is often regarded with a greater deal of sympathy than the story's "heroes"; Harold Bloom called her, "Everybody's favorite character in the novel." Granted, there are legitimate reasons to feel sorry for her, but they don't excuse her worse misdeeds; she spends much of a climax trying to murder an innocent child to take Revenge by Proxy on the child's great-uncles.
Esoteric Happy Ending: Stryver gets one. Since Carton was the one doing much of the actual work in their partnership, his death means that Stryver's career as a lawyer will probably be ruined.
Fair for Its Day: Although far more critical of the French Revolution than most modern works would be, Dickens was still following a progressive view of history by the standards of where and when he was writing. The novel argues that it was the hideous corruption of the old regime that both created the Revolution in the first place and fueled its worst excesses, finally ending on a prophecy that France would ultimately be a better place because of the changes the Revolution would bring about. This is in stark contrast to the conservative view of history in Dickens's own time, which blamed the Revolution directly for the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that drenched Europe in blood for a generation and unabashedly viewed the old Bourbon royalist system with nostalgia, treating the democratic and egalitarian ideals of the revolutionaries as profane and the Revolution's cause as nothing less than the base ingratitude of a class of people unfit to dream of a better world trying to rise above their divinely (or at least biologically) ordained stations.
Hilarious in Hindsight: Leo McKern, who'd later become famous for playing the title character in Rumpole of the Bailey, has a small role in the 1958 film as a lawyer in the Old Bailey.
Ho Yay: Charles and Sydney, partially due to Have a Gay Old Time but not entirely.
It Was His Sled: Carton dies at the end.
Memetic Mutation: The title and the opening lines have been parodied countless times.
Moral Event Horizon:
- No words are enough to describe the things that the Evremonde brothers did, of which raping Madame Defarges's sister and murdering her brother and imprisoning Doctor Manette in the Bastille is only a fraction.
- Madame Defarge crosses it by attempting to have Lucie and her daughter condemned to death. This marks the point at which she goes from being an overzealous but understandably angry Jerkass Woobie to an outright murderous monster, and her husband, who is generally just as committed a revolutionary as she is, believes she is going too far. She winds up getting a Karmic Death soon afterwards.
Signature Line: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. Far more people know these words than they know what the book is even about.
Slow-Paced Beginning: It takes over a full chapter for any of the main characters to be introduced, and seven chapters for the main plot of the book to begin.
Values Dissonance:
- Cruncher's Domestic Abuse of his wife is more or less Played for Laughs, but to a modern reader it can come across as more disgusting than comedic. This has the side affect of making Cruncher Unintentionally Unsympathetic.
- Dickens's portrayal of the French Revolution, while Fair for Its Day in showing the sympathetic reasons for its occurrence and suggesting its ultimate impact to be positive, is still colored by his perspective as a Victorian Englishman. For example, the novel's famous description of the Carmagnole street demonstration portrays it as an example of crowd madness, when in France it is seen as a beloved protest song against corrupt nobility. The Revolution did produce the Reign of Terror, but it also ushered in universal male suffrage, equal rights for Protestants and Jews, the no-fault divorce, a moderate amount of wealth redistribution and the abolition of slavery for the first time in the history of the world, all of which would have been considered "radical" to the European mainstream.
The Woobie:
- Dr. Manette! The guy is hired in by two noblemen to deal with a situation (that they caused) which is so horrendous that he can't do anything about it. When he tries to report them to the authorities, they have him thrown in prison for nearly two decades, during which his wife dies from grief and he regresses mentally to the point where he believes himself to be a shoemaker. After his release, it is only due to the constant care of his now-adult daughter that he is able to return to his normal state. And at the end of the book, a letter that he wrote while in prison forces him to relive the entire experience of being sent there, and results in his son-in-law being sentenced to death. By the time the family departs Paris, he's a nervous wreck once again, although the closing paragraphs of the book suggest that he did get better in the end.
- Lucie has elements of this as well. Her life gets turned upside down when she finds out her father is a) alive, b) has been wrongfully in prison her entire lifetime, and c) believes himself to be a shoemaker — and only she can bring him out of it. Later, her husband gets himself thrown in prison and she is forced to put on a brave face for her daughter about it for a full year in full knowledge that he could be executed at any moment. Then, just when it seems like he has been acquitted, he is re-arrested and sentenced to death and her father has a mental breakdown and regresses to believing himself a prisoner. It's hard to blame her for her distress at the emotional whiplash.
- In fact, the Manettes as a whole probably qualify as a Woobie Family, particularly when the grief-induced death of Lucie's mother is taken into account.

YMMV / A Tale of Two Cities

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