The Business of the Barrister in A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities is the story of one lawyer, Sydney Carton, and his self-sacrificing love for one woman, in the context of his relations with several other professional men, at the time of the French Revolution. It is also the most problematic novel in the Dickens canon, primarily because of the elusiveness of its hero, the barrister Sydney Carton. We know, from what Dickens said about his own performance as Richard Wardour in Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep that Carton was central to the emotional genesis of A Tale of Two Cities, ¹ and most readers would agree with Richard M. Myers: "Carton is the pivotal figure in the Tale, not merely because of the central importance to the plot of his heroic suicide, but because he embodies all the disparate elements of the novel's moral-political drama." ² But there is little agreement about Carton's precise place in this drama. Those who read A Tale of Two Cities as an historical novel find Carton difficult to pin down because he is such an apparently ahistorical figure, ³ and feminist or gender-based criticism has subtended Carton's function to that of the female characters. Thus Hilary Schor dubs the novel "a Tale of two Daughters," and maintains that Carton functions for Lucie as "the guide to the erotic wanderings that mark (off) the adulterous path." ⁴ Other commentators have responded to his elusiveness by casting him in a variety of roles—Byronic hero, ⁵ Carlylean hero, ⁶ even as a clown in a harlequinade. ⁷ As Albert D. Hutter has said: "[Carton] suffers chronically from meaning too much in relation to too many other characters and themes." ⁸

Despite his centrality to the novel's plot, Carton is an "unsubstantial" (216) social presence, on the edge of groups to which he belongs only tangentially, and at home nowhere. In Darnay's first trial, before Carton's decisive intervention, his attention is "concentrated on the ceiling of the court" (64), and his torn gown and untidy wig (79) may—for all we know at this stage—suggest professional incompetence. The narrator handles Carton with figurative delicacy: after a night's work with Stryver, Carton is "rumoured to be seen at broad day, going home stealthily and unsteadily to his lodgings, like a dissipated cat" (90), a simile which intrigues because of the indirection with which it is approached ("rumoured to be seen"), and which tells precisely because Carton is not returning from a night on the tiles, but from a working night that has set his partner up for the day's legal battles, and which therefore hints at Carton's own problematic involvement with his work. As "the jackal" to Stryver's lion (II.v), Carton metaphorically provides his senior barrister with professional sustenance. But the jackal, in Darwin's words, is "an animal not destined by nature to exist[,] & carrying with it the provision for death." ⁹ Such a symbolically hybrid form perfectly captures Carton's morbid alienation, which drives him unpredictably between self-hatred and self-pity.

Fitzjames Stephen's celebrated trashing of this novel was prompted by a lawyer's anger at the novelist's misrepresentation of legal process, ¹⁰ but his hostility at least has the virtue of drawing attention to the centrality of law in Dickens's conception of his novel. At the opposite end of the critical spectrum perhaps only a lawyer might claim, as the barrister Edward Clarke did in 1914, that "The one great heroic character to be found in the works of Charles Dickens is Sydney Carton." ¹¹ These legal opinions chart the parameters of this essay, which explores the significance to the novel of Carton's status as a barrister. And, following critics who have looked beyond Carton's obvious doubling with Darnay to his more complex connections with his senior barrister Charles Stryver, with Alexander Manette, and with Jarvis Lorry...