father and daughter, and Miss Pross; appalling though understand-
able in the case of Madame Defarge, who can never forget what
the Evrémondes did to her family.

The unifying idea of Resurrection, discussed in the last para-
graph of this chapter, is both a theme and a literary device.

Another theme, particular rather than universal, is the resem-
blances and parallels Dickens wants us to see between London and
Paris. Though they will be greatly overshadowed by the Paris tum-
brils, Dickens cites first the London carts and coaches, in which
"pale travellers set out continually on a violent passage into the
other world" from the criminal court and prison of Old Bailey ( TTC
ii 2). Later, before he depicts the mob in Paris, he gives us a Lon-
don crowd, which "in those times stopped at nothing, and was a
monster much dreaded" ( TTC ii 14).

Readers of Dickens have often noticed that his most memorable
characters tend to be the eccentrics, the odd-balls in his works. In
A Tale of Two Cities there are few of these: Miss Pross and Jerry
Cruncher are the two most notable. The pushing, shouldering Stry-
ver is there as a foil; he is not really entertaining. Probably Dickens
felt that, with the suspenseful plot he had contrived, he had no
need to hold the reader's interest with personal peculiarities. So,
Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay, Lucie Manette, the good Doctor
Manette, and Jarvis Lorry all seem relatively normal people, who
in other circumstances would not be very interesting.

The same might even be true of the Defarges, husband and wife.
Had they not had a revolution to fight, their lives might have been
routine, humdrum, and not worth investigating.

But in this novel, the force which moves and shakes is an im-
personal one. Its impact on character is felt most strongly when
we consider the two principal antagonists: Sydney Carton and Ma-
dame Defarge. In the former case, we seem to have a spoiled man
who has somehow lost his nerve and his self-respect and bitterly
knows it. He gets the chance to do a noble thing and, in doing it,
redeems his wasted life. But, had there been no such opportunity,
we must suspect that he would have gone on in his downward
track, drinking more and enjoying it less, and at some not too
distant point being cast off by the now affluent Stryver--the man

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