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 distracted ... that the rivers of the South were encumbered with bodies of the violently drowned by night..." Later a crowd is "swelling and overflowing out into the adjacent streets ... the Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirled them away." During the fight with Miss Pross, Madame Defarge clings to her with "more than the hold of a drowning woman". Commentators on the novel have noted the irony that Madame Defarge is killed by her own gun, and perhaps Dickens means by the above quote to suggest that such vicious vengefulness as Madame Defarge's will eventually destroy even its