A Tale of Two Cities my wife? ---Here you see me." The Penguin Classics edition of the novel notes that "Not all readers have regarded the experiment as a success." J. L. Borges quipped: "Dickens lived in London. In his book "A Tale of Two Cities", based on the French Revolution, we see that he really could not write a tale of two cities. He was a resident of just one city: London." In Dickens' England, resurrection always sat firmly in a Christian context. Most broadly, Sydney Carton is resurrected in spirit at the novel's close (even as he, paradoxically, gives up his physical life
A Tale of Two Cities bodies to sell to medical men (there was no legal way to procure cadavers for study at that time). The opposite of resurrection is of course death. Death and resurrection appear often in the novel. Dickens is angered that in France and England, courts hand out death sentences for insignificant crimes. In France, peasants had formerly been put to death without any trial, at the whim of a noble. The Marquis tells Darnay with pleasure that "[I]n the next room (my bedroom), one fellow ... was poniarded on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter—"his" daughter!" The