View article

After years of neglect, A Tale of Two Cities has probably become the most vigorously-defended of Dickens' works. Recently, we have had numerous apologies for the novel that have uncovered its psychological complexities, 1 its historical relevance, 2 and the subtleties of its style3 with remarkable acuity. All of these critiques reveal that Dickens' novel is more sophisticated and more rewarding than has often been recognized. And yet, all of them seem to conclude that the novel ultimately fails in an important way: it adumbrates complex problems that escape the limited range of its" solution"-Sydney Carton's Christ-like martyrdom-which remains artificial, inadequate, and even embarrassing. 4 This constant dissatisfaction with the ending implies that the fundamental prob-lem for readers of A Tale of Two Cities is not the novel's general framework of ideas; 5 the more serious problem is the novel's inability to provide an …