Charles Darnay

No man's life was safe.

Among the prisoners awaiting death in the Conciergerie was Charles Darnay, the husband of her whom Sydney himself had loved with so much devotion but so little hope.

Oh, Miss Minette, he had said on the only occasion on which he had revealed his passion, when, in the days to come, you see your own bright beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that there is a man who would give his life to keep a life you love beside you.

And now that hour had come.

It happened that Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton were, in form and feature, extraordinarily alike.

Darnay was doomed to die on the guillotine.

Carton was free.

Yeah, this trial scene is intense.

A young, handsome, well-dressed gentleman named Charles Darnay is on trial for high treason against the king.

The punishment for treason is drawing and quartering, and the spectators in the gallery are absolutely salivating at the prospect.

Dickens explicitly compares the crowd in the courtroom to a swarm of blue flies buzzing around Carrion, just waiting for the corpse to drop.

It is grotesque anatomical public theater.

It really is.

If Darnay is convicted, he will be dragged by a horse to the gallows.

He will be hanged by the neck, but cut down while he is still fully conscious and choking.

Perhaps the most explicit presentation of the gospel truth in all of 19th century literature anywhere appears in the climax to his novel A Tale of Two Cities.

Set against the blood-soaked backdrop of the French Revolution and what was called the Reign of Terror, the story centres on two men, Charles Darnay, an honourable French aristocrat condemned to the guillotine simply because of his bloodline, and Sidney Carton, a cynical, delusioned English barrister whose life has been wasted in drunkenness and despair.

Carton is a man who feels he is utterly beyond redemption.

Yet, in an unselfish sacrificial love for Lucy Manette, who is Darnay's wife, Carton uses a secret switch to take Darnay's place in the dark Parisian prison cell on the very eve of his execution.

Like...

Darnay and Lucy in the books really aren't as interesting as Sydney Carton.

Sydney Carton's the character that's the most interesting.

I've said this a few times, but I think the reason for that is that Dickens was having an affair with a younger woman at the time of writing it.

The version that he feels, which is Sidney, who's riddled with guilt and shame and is sort of nihilistic.

And then this heroic aristocratic French version.

And he wants to be Darnay, but really he's Sidney.

Yeah.

decades on.

Now we've got London and Paris sorted, let's talk about the two of the men actually walking around in them, Sidney Carton and Charles Darnay.

We touched on this before, but Sidney Carton is basically Dickens in disguise.

Remember that play, The Frozen Deep? Well, Dickens wrote Carton right after playing that exact role himself, a man who sacrifices himself so his romantic rival can be happy.

And what are Charles Dickens' initials? C and D.

So DC is just the thinly veiled reference to himself.

And then what about the not so thinly veiled reference? Charles Darnay not only has the initials CD as well, but he also shares Dickens' own first name.

Scholars believe that Dickens deliberately did this to show that the two of them are basically just two halves of himself.