The seamstress (A Tale of Two Cities) The seamstress (A Tale of Two Cities) The seamstress is a fictional character in Charles Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities." The seamstress is an unnamed twenty-year-old woman featured as a desperately poor peasant accused of plotting against the French Republic by Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety during the Terror of the French Revolution in 1793. Found guilty of this imaginary crime, she was condemned to death by beheading. She became acquainted with Charles Darnay during their imprisonments in La Force Prison, and was the only person to recognize Sydney Carton as an impostor as the two of them rode
A Tale of Two Cities true story related by Voltaire in a famous pamphlet, "An Account of the Death of the Chevalier de la Barre".) So riled is Dickens at the brutality of English law that he depicts some of its punishments with sarcasm: "the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action". He faults the law for not seeking reform: "Whatever is, is right" is the dictum of the Old Bailey. The gruesome portrayal of quartering highlights its atrocity. Dickens wants his readers to be careful that the same revolution that so damaged France will not happen in Britain,