Finding a Long Lost Father and a Bad Socioeconomic System

The First book of A Tale of Two Cities begins by introducing Mr. Jarvis Lorry, a banker man from England who travels to Paris. The opening pages of the book describe Mr. Jarvis Lorry on his journey from England to France in the mid 1800s along with the postal carriage. During these first pages, Dickens sets up the background for the time period and setting of the story, and describes the two cities and their people as rather dismal and poverty stricken. When Mr. Jarvis Lorry reaches Paris, he meets a 16 year old woman named Miss Manette, and explains to her his purpose of arranging their meeting: Mr. Lorry was an old friend of Miss Manette’s lost father, and had just discovered that Mr. Manette was, contrary to popular belief, still alive. In these chapters Dickens keeps how Mr. Manette disappeared in the first place a mystery, but does suggest that he left Miss Manette and her mother shortly after his daughter was born, perhaps to go to prison.

In the 5^th and 6^th chapters, Mr. Manette leads Miss Manette to a bar where the barkeeper Mr. Defarge was keeping Miss Manette’s father. When Miss Manette enters the room where her estranged father was kept, she walks in on an old man making shoes. It turns out that in the 15 years since Mr. Manette disappeared, he lost some of his sanity, and does not remember either who he or any of his old friends are. Dickens ends book one with the scene of Miss Manette escorting her new found father to a carriage waiting to take them home to England.

My first reaction to reading this story was, as I mentioned in my last post, that Dickens is a verbose writer. However, the more I have read, the more easily his writing and story flows. Though the writing can, at times, be loquacious or lackluster, it is chalk full of metaphors and symbols that foreshadow that the main plot of the story is more of a social commentary than a purely fictional work. For example, a passage of anaphora in the 5^th chapter repeats the word “hunger” at the beginning of each consecutive sentence when describing the poverty of the citizens of France. Such descriptions remind me of Angela’s Ashes, a memoir by Frank McCourt. They also set a serious tone for the book, and suggest that the story could be a commentary on the modern cultural or socioeconomic situation when Charles Dickens wrote the book.