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A Tale of Two Cities starts in 1775, with Mr. Lorry, a respectable and humorous London banker, meeting Lucie Manette in Paris, where they helped Lucie’s father, a doctor, and mentally enfeebled by an unjust and prolonged sentence to the Bastille. This assemblage, on their journey back to England, met Charles Darnay, an immigrant to England from France who made frequent trips between London and Paris. When they were about to return to England, Darnay found himself on trial for spying France and in league with American revolutionaries. His attorney, Stryver, is obviously intelligent, with his morally corrupt and debauched, assistant, Sydney Carton, managing to get Darnay exonerated of these charges against him. Darnay, a self-exiled former French aristocrat, had to return to France in the initial stage of the French Revolution, drawing all those around him into a dangerous scene. As A Tale of Two Cities is a novel driven by historical story and plot, the characters find themselves forced to deal with the tide of epic accident. This novel parallels the rise of the French revolution, compares and contrasts life in two cities Paris and London. It also develops a very intricate plot that is difficult to follow if one does not read steadily. Despite the supposed difference between England and France in the novel, Dickens seems to suggest throughout that there are no real differences, due to the way that human nature is consistently portrayed.
Many of Dickens’ characters are “flat”, not “round”, in the novelist E. M. Forster’s (1927) famous terms, meaning roughly that they have only one mood. From Luo Jinguo’s Critics on Charles Dickens, Richard Horn holds similar opinion to E.M. Froster as he thinks “Chrles Dickens is faithful to his characters he creates from the beginning to the end of the novel” (1981: 12). For instance, the Marquis is unremittingly wicked and relishes being so; Lucie is perfectly loving and supportive. As a corollary, Dickens often gives these characters verbal tics or visual quirks that he mentions over and over again, such as the dint in the nose of the Marquis.