The Greatest Love

A Tale of Two Cities

Seeds of Revolution

The sins explored include those that ultimately contribute to revolution. The Marquis St. Evrémonde and his twin brother violate a young bride after working her husband to a cruel death. When her brother comes to avenge her, one of the Evrémonde brothers wounds him in a duel the boy has no hope of winning. They then force a young doctor, Alexandre Manette, to attend to both the dying boy and his sister, now driven mad by the deaths of her husband, father, and brother. To prevent the doctor from reporting these events to the authorities, the marquis has him imprisoned without trial in the Bastille, precipitating the death of his wife and leaving his infant daughter a presumed orphan.

Still, the marquis lives a life of entitlement. After his carriage runs over a child, killing her, he tosses a coin to the grieving father as compensation while his carriage races on to his chateau. His callousness contributes to the growing resentment of the overtaxed and starving poor, and his end comes when the child’s father assassinates him as he sleeps. The scene is thus set for revolution as the sins of the aristocracy are answered by the sins of those they have wronged.

Sin multiplies in the all-­consuming vengeful spirit of Madame Defarge, sister to the young woman violated by the brothers Evrémonde. Her thirst for blood extends to Evrémonde’s nephew, Charles Darnay, along with his wife, his young daughter, and Dr. Manette, who has become his father-in-law. As exemplified by Madame Defarge, the revolutionaries become the new oppressors who have neither mercy nor discernment and who sacrifice both the guilty and the innocent to their new gods, La Révolution and La Guillotine. Like those in rebellion against tradition and reality today, who follow no logic in their campaigns of cancellation, the French revolutionaries react to injustice but hold no true vision of the world their “justice” will create.

Redemption

The theme of redemption plays out in three characters. Dr. Manette is brought out of prison after eighteen years in solitary confinement and taken to London, where he is reunited with his daughter Lucie. Through her filial love and the friendship of the banker, Mr. Lorry, Dr. Manette returns to the life of a learned man who once again sees patients. Further, his “resurrection” from the “grave” of the Bastille into a new life lends him authority among the revolutionaries—but only up to a point, as we shall see.

The most remarkable “resurrection” is that of Sydney Carton, who is introduced as the “idlest and most unpromising of men.” The narrator remarks, “When he cared to talk, he talked well; but, the cloud of caring for nothing, which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very rarely pierced by the light within him.” He doesn’t even like himself. In short, there is in him something of the self-loathing seen in so many men today.

Yet even such a profligate character is touched by love. When he calls on Lucie Manette, she hears what amounts to his confession. When he tells her, “I shall never be better than I am,” she responds with compassion and listens to him, responding, “I am sure that you might be much worthier of yourself.” Still, Carton foresees only doom were she to return the love he confesses for her. Though she loves Charles Darnay, she treats Carton with true charity, promising to keep secret his confession. In gratitude he declares to Lucie, “For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything.” He means these words with all his being.

Under the growing Reign of Terror, Darnay is imprisoned for the crime of being the Marquis St. Evrémonde’s nephew. When Dr. Manette’s efforts to use his influence on the revolutionaries fail to free his son-in-law, he finds himself, his daughter, and his grandchild under threat. At this point, Carton arranges a scheme to rescue Darnay from the guillotine and return him, along with his family, to safety in London: Carton, who bears a striking resemblance to Darnay, arranges to take Darnay’s place in prison, and so Darnay’s rescue will cost Carton his life. Carton’s final words are no understatement: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” His is a Christian confession. 

Carton pulls off the switch, and Darnay returns to civilian life, just as his father-in-law, Dr. Manette, had done. Carton’s self-sacrifice also manifests a kind of resurrection for Carton himself. The man broken by disappointment and convinced of his own worthlessness is reborn into the nobility of character that Lucie had hoped for him when he confessed his love to her.

Self-Sacrifice

Though Dickens’s novels generally celebrate life lived in harmony within the boundaries of Christian morality, none does so more overtly than A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens places in Sydney Carton’s mouth the words of Jesus, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (John 11:25–26). The reformed sinner Carton repeats these words as he walks the streets of Paris before putting his plan to save Darnay into effect. Carton will embody Christ’s words in John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” In laying down his life for Darnay, Carton imitates Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice for all humanity.

Whitney Houston declared self-love to be the greatest possible love in her 1985 hit, “The Greatest Love of All”—an anthem anticipating the celebration of self that rules the West today. Dickens disagrees. Self-sacrifice is surely the most Christlike expression of love we may aspire to in any age. Sydney Carton is himself redeemed in it, and he saves four people by substituting himself as a consignee to the guillotine.

A Tale of Two Cities is a novel to read or re-read. Well-known as a social critic, Charles Dickens was also unashamedly Christian, once writing, “All my good people are humble, charitable, faithful, forgiving, over and over again. I claim them in expressed words as disciples of the Founder of our religion.” Sydney Carton is such a character, one young people today would do well not only to read about but to imitate.