A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens

Sydney Carton is the emotionally central character, despite not being the formal protagonist. He is a man who perceives himself as a worthless failure, and it is precisely for that reason that his final act is so devastating and beautiful: he finds his only greatness in the moment he chooses to disappear. Madame Defarge, for her part, is one of Dickens's great antagonists: she is not simply evil, but the logical product of decades of oppression. Her knitting is one of the most powerful images in the entire Victorian novel — a silent death list growing row by row. Dickens wrote the novel in fascination with the French Revolution after reading Thomas Carlyle's history, and some critics note that he also used it to explore his own anxieties about impossible love and the desire to start anew.