A tale of two lawyers.

I recently reread Charles Dickens' vivid evocation of Paris in the years when the French Revolution had descended into the bloodletting of the Terror, as well as London, which served as a home for French exiles who had fled the murderous impulse for revenge that had swept up the long- suffering and oppressed masses and the revolutionary vanguard that spoke for them. Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities has not overly impressed the critics over the years in the way that the early beginnings of life Great Expectations has, or the serious social and legal novels like Little Dorrit and Bleak House have. However, all lovers of this masterful Victorian novelist should not rest content with merely viewing one of the many film adaptations of the tale, but rather should open themselves up to the original in all its exuberant and dynamic glory. Dickens focussed on his story with a fairly tightly conceived cast of fascinating characters, plunging them eventually into the colorful world of the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, and later, the fearsome Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris.

The novel relies heavily on the character device of the double--the dissolute, despairing lawyer Sydney Carton is found to bear a remarkable physical resemblance to Charles Darnay, the French nobleman who has fled the consuming flames of the Revolution to take up tutoring in French to support himself. Despite his loss of control over his ancestral home and the disruptions to his life, Darnay is depicted as a man of deep optimism and goodwill, ready to surmount his obstacles. Further, he is delighted by the lovely Lucie Manette who he meets and eventually woos. Carton, by contrast, is continually drinking himself into oblivion most evenings and has developed a pessimistic philosophy and a melancholic disposition.

While the plot develops a number of interesting comparisons between these two, the novel also contains another significant contrast. The novel relies heavily on the character device of the double--the dissolute, despairing lawyer Sydney Carton is found to bear a remarkable physical resemblance to Charles Darnay, the French nobleman who has fled the consuming flames of the Revolution to take up tutoring in French to support himself. Carton is portrayed as a key ally to a barrister he works with, and is called a "jackal" of the legal trade--that is, someone capable of digging through extensive records and materials and zeroing in on what will turn out to be...