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A Tale of Two Cities

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  • Allegedly Optimistic Ending: Stryver gets one. Since Carton was the one doing much of the actual legal casework in their partnership, his death means that Stryver's career as a lawyer is probably over.
  • Character Perception Evolution:
    • Lucie Manette was very beloved by audiences when the book was released, but Dickens' portrayal of her as the idealized, archetypal heroine of the Victorian era has aged somewhat awkwardly. Audiences of later eras generally have difficulty understanding why she was so popular back in the 19th century, with some saying that she has no discernable personality traits beyond incorruptibility and a penchant for fainting. While she's still generally not outright hated, many modern readers have criticized her as passive, underdeveloped and difficult to relate to.
    • Jerry Cruncher was intended as comic relief, and was generally read as such at the time of the book's release. Today's audiences generally have a far more negative opinion of him; while his characterization is obviously slanted towards the Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist side of the spectrum, domestic violence being taken more seriously than it was at the time of the book's publication means that people today mostly see his abuse of his wife as more disturbing than humorous. As a result, modern audiences almost universally view Cruncher as an irredeemable bastard who isn't funny at all (see Values Dissonance below).
  • 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 and upstanding figure, but while admittedly he is a genuinely decent and moral man who wants to make amends for the awful things his family has done, his attempts at heroism are not well thought out and cause far more problems than they solve. The completely avoidable predicament in which he lands himself in the book's third act indirectly places his family and friends in serious danger, not to mention causing them no end of worry and stress, and ultimately leads to Carton's death by guillotine. He's never really called out for this In-Universe, though it could be argued that the fifteen months he spent in prison were punishment enough.
  • Designated Love Interest: Arguably Darnay and Lucie for one another. We're told that they're very much in love, but the book's multiple Time Skips and frequent Switching P.O.V. means that the scenes in which they meaningfully interact with one another are so rare that it's hard to judge their relationship either way. Even Darnay's proposal to Lucie is absent from the text; instead he's depicted visiting Dr. Manette and asking for his daughter's hand in marriage (in fact, out of Lucie's would-be suitors, the only one who actually states his feelings to her in person is Carton, although his self-loathing is such that he winds up rejecting himself for her).
  • Diagnosed by the Audience: Dr. Manette appears to be suffering from a mixture of what would now be termed post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative identity disorder. To Dickens' credit it's a pretty sensitive portrayal of a man with fragile mental health, given that he was writing at a time when such issues were looked on far less kindly than they are in the present day.
  • 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, namely that she spends most of the climax trying to murder an innocent child to take Revenge by Proxy on the child's (long-deceased) paternal grandfather and great-uncle.
  • 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, and ends with a prophecy that France would ultimately be a better place because of the changes the Revolution brought 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.
    • Lucie gets a lot of critique from modern audiences for having all the traits of a stereotypical Victorian-era heroine, but said traits emphasize her as The Heart around whom the protagonists gather—without her, very few of them would have any reason to interact. Additionally, she experiences more growth and more stress than most characters of the same stock: her loved ones, including her daughter, are endangered several times, yet she, who once fainted over slight shocks, silently endures for the sake of those around her. While her character and role remain entrenched in Victorian expectations of women, the fact that she faces trials most Victorian women never would and bears them well is quite something.
  • 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, swapping places with Darnay so he can escape France with his family and the woman they both love. It's right there on the front page on this site.
  • 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”. To the point where 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 major characters to be introduced, and seven chapters for the main plot of the book to actually begin.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • Cruncher's Domestic Abuse of his wife is more or less Played for Laughs, but to a modern reader it comes across as more disgusting than comedic.
    • 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.
  • Values Resonance: For being written at a time when mental illness was not understood and those suffering it were shipped off to often inhumane asylums, the novel is remarkably forward in its portrayal of Dr. Manette's. Lucie personally tends to him rather than send him away, his family and friends ask what his boundaries are and respect them, and his struggles are given compassion. Yet for all this, his mental fragility does not define him, and in fact he rails against the thought; he maintains his practice despite it, actively takes steps to confront it, and the cast increasingly rely on his resourcefulness and strength (which were born from his suffering!) in the third act. For those facing similar struggles today, Dr. Manette's story can be incredibly uplifting and hopeful.
  • Vanilla Protagonist: The ostensible protagonists of the story, Lucie and Darnay, are often considered to be far less interesting than snarky Anti-Hero Carton and Knight Templar antagonist Madame Defarge. Their generic goodness, however, serves to draw said interesting characters into their periphery-- without Lucie, none of the main characters' paths would have intersected, and without Darnay, there would have been no vengeance-fueled third act.
  • 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 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 imprisoned for her entire lifetime, and c) believes himself to be a shoemaker—and only she can "recall him to life." Later, her husband gets himself thrown in prison and she is forced to put on a brave face for her daughter about it for more than a 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 starts believing himself a prisoner again. It's hard to blame her for her distress at the emotional whiplash.
    • 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.
    • Carton. To a certain extent his issues are self-inflicted, but it's still easy to feel sorry for him. And then there's the ending...
  • Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Madame Defarge having her family destroyed by the Evremonde brothers as a young girl ultimately sets her on the path to becoming the main villain of the story, trying to destroy someone else's family just to take Revenge by Proxy.

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