Dickens, Doubled: The Hidden Architecture of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’
One Crime, Two Survivors, and the Three Pairs Holding the Story Together
David Copperfield nearly killed me. For the last several years I’ve given myself a goal of reading a certain number of classics each year. This year my ambition involved what I affectionately call the big-ass classics—the longer works of writers like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Dickens.
I sailed through East of Eden, The Woman in White, Crime and Punishment, even The Brothers Karamazov. I was genuinely excited about Copperfield. Then I started it, and my excitement slowly died with every turn of the page. I won’t get into why here—I explain it in my review—but I’ll tell you what I did next.
Risking the undying scorn of literary Substack, I posted a Note about my trouble with the novel and asked whether Dickens is overrated. More than a hundred replies came back. Some in the affirmative but most emphatically not. The majority loved him, and several recommended I try another, suggesting their favorites. A Tale of Two Cities came up again and again, so I put Davey on hold and jumped in.
Where David Copperfield, which he wrote without the benefit of an outline, reads at times as if Dickens were being paid by the pound of the paper used, A Tale of Two Cities is a tightly engineered book with a magnetic plot that speaks to the present in some surprising ways.
Maybe it should have been obvious to me from the title: If Dickens were building a machine, his primary means of narrative propulsion would be dynamic pairings. The titular duo, London and Paris, provides the context for the swarm of action the novel contains, but fascinating character juxtapositions run all the way through it, central among them:
Alexandre Manette and Madame Defarge;
Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton; and
Lucie Manette and Jarvis Lorry.
The first of these pairs is bound by a single, horrifying crime, committed long before the novel begins, driving everything that follows.
Manette and Madame Defarge
In 1757, the Evrémonde brothers—the Marquis and his younger twin—summon a young Paris physician, Alexandre Manette. A tenant woman working the younger brother’s lands had caught his covetous eye, and the brothers connived to eliminate her husband by harnessing him to a cart and working him to death. They then raped the woman, and the Marquis fatally stabbed her young brother when he tried to avenge her honor.
By the time Manette arrives, the woman is raving and dying of fever and the boy is bleeding out. But before he succumbs to his injury, the boy hoists himself up, jabs a bloody finger at the Marquis, and pronounces a fatefully inclusive curse on the Evrémonde family “to the last of their bad race.”
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Manette can do nothing for either victim. Horrified by the crime, he writes a letter of protest to the officials. But the Evrémondes, practically above the law, intercept the missive and have him imprisoned in the Bastille for eighteen years. He is, in the narrator’s image, buried alive.
And Madame Defarge? Thérèse is the murdered woman’s younger sister, herself a small child at the time and hidden away by relatives in a far-off fishing village. While Manette disintegrates in prison, slowly losing his mind, the girl grows, eventually marries, and takes up her brother’s curse. She’s determined to see it carried out—till the last Evrémonde is no more.
But all of this is backstory, and there are a few more pieces to put in order before the action really begins, namely the formal link between Manette and Madame Defarge.
By the time the novel begins in 1775, Manette has been released from the Bastille, a shattered man. He’s being kept in a room above the wineshop owned by Ernest Defarge, who had served in Manette’s household as a boy. In the years since his master’s imprisonment, he married a woman with her own grievance against the Evrémondes: young Thérèse, now Madame Defarge.
The book opens with two travelers soon crossing the English Channel to retrieve Manette, long believed dead but now rumored alive, from his wineshop garret. The travelers are Manette’s old friend Jarvis Lorry and his daughter, Lucie Manette, whose presence he’s been denied since she was a baby.
We’ll come back to Lucie and Lorry, but for now note the first part of the novel involves the pair’s mission to bring Manette back to England and restore what they can of his broken life. And it’s there in England where our next pair appears.
Darnay and Carton
In 1780, now five years after Manette’s return to England, a young Frenchman named Charles Darnay faces charges of treason at the Old Bailey for supposedly passing English military intel to France during the American Revolution. If convicted, the unfortunate man will be hanged, drawn, and quartered—one of the more troubling ways to go. But thanks to his crafty team of defense attorneys, Mr. Stryver and Sydney Carton, Darnay dodges certain doom.
A witness for the Crown confidently identifies Darnay as the guilty party, but Stryver obliterates his testimony with a lucky coincidence. Darnay’s senior counsel asks his fellow attorney, the mildly inebriated Carton, to doff his wig, part of the costume of British barristers since the seventeenth century. The act reveals a man whose face is nearly identical to the defendant’s. Certain identification being rendered impossible, the witness waffles, the case collapses, and Darnay strolls free from prison.
This coincidental likeness will save Darnay’s life more than once. In the meantime, however, Darnay and Carton emerge as unlikely rivals as much as they are unlikely twins. Both men seek the heart and hand of the fair and eligible Lucie. Darnay seizes the initiative and wins the girl, while Carton dithers in self-doubt, his hopes squashed by his own dissolution.
Momentously, however, Carton does declare his love for Lucie before the couple wed. He pledges her his undying devotion. “For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything,” he says. “I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you. Try to hold me in your mind, at some quiet times, as ardent and sincere in this one thing.” It’s a fateful declaration.
So far, Dickens offers us an outrageous crime with two living victims—one being slowly nurtured back to health (Manette) and another stewing in calculated hatred (Madame Defarge). He also gives us two men who share the same face and love for the same woman (Darnay and Carton). All that’s needed now? A spark to ignite the powder keg.
The Peasants Are Revolting
Dickens brings us Paris on the verge of explosion. By 1775, when Lucie and Lorry arrive to fetch Manette home, the Saint Antoine quarter crawls with the ravenous and the revolutionary. Hunger is endemic and tempers are boiling.
Outside Ernest and Madame Defarge’s wineshop a cask falls and shatters in the street, sending gallons of wine into the road where the gawking poor lap it up from puddles. One participant drags his index finger through the inky lees and writes BLOOD on a nearby wall. “The time was to come,” says the narrator, “when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.”
Inside the wineshop, Ernest entertains a parade of revolutionaries, all going by the pseudonym Jacques. Meanwhile, Madame Defarge knits. But not stockings, not a scarf. No, she’s knitting an enemies list, their names ingeniously encoded in the stitches, including the senior Evrémonde, the Marquis—who happens to be Charles Darnay’s uncle.
It’s a case of double jeopardy for Darnay. Though he avoided execution in England, his life is at risk in France if anyone finds out to which family he belongs. Madame Defarge has never forgotten her brother’s curse. “For other crimes as tyrants and oppressors,” she says, “I have this race a long time on my register, doomed to destruction and extermination.” This race, meaning this family—the whole lot of them, including Darnay and any child he might sire. Does it matter he’s renounced his family? Not in the slightest.
Darnay has no idea how precarious his situation is, and while tensions mount in Paris, he settles down to domestic bliss in London with Lucie. He’s safe so long as he stays on the right side of the Channel. Naturally, he doesn’t. The peasants finally storm the Bastille and the ancien régime falls, endangering anyone with too much proximity to the former structures of power.
Caught in the middle sits Darnay’s old family servant Gabelle, sure to face the guillotine if Darnay doesn’t intercede on his behalf. Compelled by a sense of duty and leaving his wife and little daughter in England, Darnay runs to Paris to rescue his friend, only to find himself captured by the revolutionaries and subject to the death he previously avoided.
Who will save Darnay this time?
Lucie and Lorry
Which brings us back to our third pair, the one we earlier deferred. We meet Lucie and Lorry in the novel’s opening chapters. Having retrieved Manette, it’s these two who nurse him back to sanity and health.
Early on, Lorry insists emotions aren’t his concern. “Feelings!” he tells Lucie when she begins to cry at the news her father might still be alive. “I have no time for them, no chance of them.” He’s the practical one. Lorry makes the arrangements to bring Manette to England and to establish the home where he can recover from his long ordeal. Meanwhile, Lucie supplies what Lorry can’t: the daughterly warmth that draws Manette out of his deathly existence and into something like a life.
When the French Revolution arrives and Darnay travels to Paris to answer Gabelle’s letter, it’s the practical Lorry who goes first to find him and hopefully bring him home as he had done for Lucie’s father all those years before. His employer, Tellson’s Bank, has a Paris branch; Lorry installs himself there as the city slides into the terror of the French Revolution.
When Lorry gets word back to London that Darnay has been arrested, Lucie, Manette, and the child cross the Channel and find Lorry waiting. And now all three of our pairs finally converge.
Darnay sits in La Force prison, in secret. Though he is denied any outside contact, Lucie paces the street below his barred window on the off chance he will see her and take hope. Manette uses his prestige as a Bastille survivor to keep his son-in-law alive through more than a year of waiting, while Madame Defarge stokes the revolutionaries and continues to knit her hit list.
Bad news for him, but Madame Defarge has known the truth about Darnay for years. When he and Lucie were just engaged, an English spy let slip in the wineshop that the young Frenchman Manette’s daughter was about to marry was none other than Charles St. Evrémonde. She knows what she must do and returns to her ominous knitting.
The Closing Trap
As Darnay awaits judgment, Madame Defarge visits Lucie’s lodgings. Lucie has no idea who she is talking to or the danger she represents. All she knows is that Madame Defarge has influence. She pleads with her woman to woman. “As a wife and mother,” she says, “I implore you to have pity on me and not to exercise any power that you possess, against my innocent husband, but to use it in his behalf. O sister-woman, think of me. As a wife and mother!”
The wives and mothers of her people, Madame Defarge heartlessly rebuffs, have suffered for generations without anyone taking notice. “Is it likely,” she snipes, “that the trouble of one wife and mother would be much to us now?”
When Madame Defarge’s husband suggests they might spare Manette any further suffering and draw the line at Darnay, she cuts him off: “Tell Wind and Fire where to stop. Not me.” Remember the curse: “the last of their bad race.” No, Darnay’s wife and daughter are also in her sights.
When Darnay is at last brought to trial, Manette testifies on his behalf and Darnay is acquitted. But Madame Defarge sees that he’s rearrested that same night, finding a devious way to recruit Manette unwittingly and unwillingly against him. Sentenced to die within twenty-four hours, Darnay twists in his cell, Manette falls broken, and Lucie stands helpless.
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But two halves of the other two pairs have been busily at work. The practical Lorry has planned a flight from Paris, and somewhere in Paris Darnay’s double, Sydney Carton, has been making preparations of his own. While Madame Defarge is only hours away from fulfilling her brother’s grim curse, Carton moves to fulfill his long-ago promise to Lucie.
To and for Each Other
Dickens populates his story with dozens of characters, some like the porter and graverobber Jerry Cruncher who are wonderfully vivid on their own terms. But the story is built upon the frame of these three pairs—not only what they bring as personalities, but what they do to propel the intricate plot by and through their contrasts, their complementarities, and their chemistry.
Where David Copperfield—at least for me—meanders without discipline, A Tale of Two Cities drives to its completion, providing moments to reflect on the world outside the novel along the way.
Consider, for instance, Madame Defarge. Wounded by injustice, her whole life becomes distorted by hatred. She rebuffs the plea of an innocent wife and mother because other women have suffered—as if the existence of past injuries justifies callous indifference to present wrongs or, worse, reason to inflict more. Worse still, given the chance to relent, she refuses. She could have chosen otherwise. She could have chosen mercy. Minus the guillotines, I can’t help but think this echoes the us-againt-them currents of American public life.
History is, in the end, what we do to and for each other. When introducing the Everyman edition of A Tale of Two Cities, G.K. Chesterton said that historians failed to understand the meaning of the French Revolution. Thomas Carlyle had the facts but missed the import. Meanwhile, said Chesterton, Dickens got to the heart of the struggle, despite using Carlyle as his primary source.
How? By pitting and pairing the loves and hatreds of his central characters and reminding us that what we do to and for each other is ultimately a choice.
I’m reading twelve big-ass classic novels this year. Here’s the full schedule for 2026. Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities was a bonus book. I’m running behind on Tom Jones for May, but I’m about a third of the way through and loving it. Wish me luck!
January: John Steinbeck, East of Eden
February: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
March: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
April: Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
May: Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
June: Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
July: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
August: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
September: Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
October: Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
November: Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke
December: George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
Bonus big-ass classic: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
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Excellent summary. I would point out one more pairing. The title speaks of two cities — London and Paris — and the novel provides an obvious contrast about life in the two cities. In one, juries decide; in the other, mobs do. Very reassuring for his English readers. I hear you on David Copperfield, but give Our Mutual Friend a try in 2027,
OK. I just finished the Brothers K…loved it. Will go back to Tale of Two Cities….read as “required” years ago. Amazing what 76 years of life does to my perspective on the classics!!!