One day they are in court to defend a young Frenchman on trial for espionage. His work is drudgery, mostly he’s an aide to an ambitious barrister who takes heartless advantage of him. He’s a lawyer with no love for the law he drinks too much he has no real friend in the world he has lost hope. His name is Sydney Carton - played by Ronald Colman, who can say more in one look of his tremendously expressive face than many actors will say in a whole career. The words are these: “Recalled to life.”īut there’s another character in the novel who needs to be recalled to life even more urgently than does Dr. And the cryptic words make their way across the English Channel to another lonely old man, a banker and a bachelor, but a real friend of the doctor, whom he will take from that prison. He makes shoes, nothing but shoes, even shoes that only he can see, year after lonely year, until a message comes for his release. Manette, an upright and saintly physician who has been walled up in prison for so many years, it hardly occurs to anyone that he might still be alive, and he himself has nearly lost all connection to reality. We’re led at first to believe that the soul in question belongs to Dr. But A Tale of Two Cities is far less about politics than about the coming to life of a human soul. The settings are France and England, mainly Paris and London, during the French Revolution, which Dickens believed was both necessary and terrible, and he’s honest enough not to put a pretty face on it. That is the mysterious message that resounds through the opening of Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities.

A tale of two cities by charles dickens