The Greatest Love: A Tale of Two Cities

One of only two historical novels by Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is set during the French Revolution. The main characters travel between the titular cities, London and Paris, both of which are entering into a time of increasing peril. If the novel went no further, it would be a deft exposition of the socio-political pressures in both cities. Yet the themes of sin, death, and resurrection are the most profound motifs of the story. More than mere historical drama, this novel probes the heart of sin, redemption, and the triumph of self-sacrifice foundational to Christianity.

Seeds of Revolution

The sins 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 as 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 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 Evrémond’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 reacted to injustice but held no true vision of the world their “justice” would 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. Mannette 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, up to a point, as we shall see.

But 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 a growing Reign of Terror, Darnay is imprisoned for the crime of being the Marquis St. Evrémond’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 with his family to safety in London, all the while knowing it will cost him his own life. His 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 effects the rescue, a metaphorical resurrection, of Darnay who returns to civilian life just as his father-in-law, Dr. Manette, had. 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 Manette had hoped for him when he came to confess 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. He 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, saving 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.