Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities remains the most popular cautionary tale of the Realistic time period. Written to warn against the dangers of the Industrial Revolution, Dickens’ novel uses strong characterization and historical context to demonstrate the cycle of oppression that occurs throughout any social reformation. Sydney Carton, one of his most complex characters, represents Dickens’s desire to break this cycle; a desire explicitly expressed in Sydney’s final speech.
Sydney Carton was primarily portrayed as a drunken waste of potential. During the first one-on-one scene that he appears in, he sits hunched and silent at a table “with the bottles and glasses ready to his hand” (65). Carton uses these copious amounts of alcohol, however, to solve two sets of cases for a lawyer who would not so much as attempt to do them himself; yet he still claims to have “no chance for [his] life but in rust …show more content…
But this is a warning, not the lesson Dickens desired to teach--he required the voice of a beloved character to convey such. The voice of Sydney Carton, in his final testament to the Jacobins who so cruelly reigned, expresses Dicken’s true message: he saw “a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free,” making amends for the wrongs of both the aristocrat and the proletariat. He saw an end to this never ending cycle, one he had broken when he sacrificed himself for the good of
Sydney Carton was primarily portrayed as a drunken waste of potential. During the first one-on-one scene that he appears in, he sits hunched and silent at a table “with the bottles and glasses ready to his hand” (65). Carton uses these copious amounts of alcohol, however, to solve two sets of cases for a lawyer who would not so much as attempt to do them himself; yet he still claims to have “no chance for [his] life but in rust …show more content…
But this is a warning, not the lesson Dickens desired to teach--he required the voice of a beloved character to convey such. The voice of Sydney Carton, in his final testament to the Jacobins who so cruelly reigned, expresses Dicken’s true message: he saw “a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free,” making amends for the wrongs of both the aristocrat and the proletariat. He saw an end to this never ending cycle, one he had broken when he sacrificed himself for the good of