The Legal Profession in A Tale of Two Cities

In the novel A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens provides an account of London, England and Paris during the French Revolution. Part of the novel shows the inhumane oppression visited on the French people by the ruling aristocracy, while the other part is devoted to showing the inhumane response of the people toward the former aristocrats after the Revolution. Throughout these events, we follow the fate of Sydney Carton, an English lawyer whose spirit is abandoned before he redeems himself through his sacrifice and love for Lucie Manette, the wife of the virtuous aristocrat Charles Darnay. Dickens uses the legal profession to which Carton belongs as a symbol for Carton's loss of spirit and ultimate rebirth, by showing how Carton must correct the injustices of the legal system to advance social justice and save his soul. A conclusion will address why Dickens might have used the law to symbolize Carton's rebirth.

In A Tale of Two Cities, the law is a social institution that is pervasive before, during, and after the Revolution. Dickens provides lawyers like Mr. Stryver, someone who uses the legal profession to advance his own ambitions and interests. He cares only about the law as a means of getting him the kind of material and professional success he desires in society: "His reputation as a perfect gentleman, would seem, in these days, a ridiculous exaggeration. The learned profession of the Law was certainly not

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r symbol of hope to the living because of his noble course of action. Once Carton recognizes his love for Lucy and his desire to save her husband for her sake, he tries to redress the errors of the legal system. In offering himself as a sacrifice for an unjustly condemned man, Carton tries to advance social justice by correcting the errors of the legal system. It is an ironic comment on the legal profession that to achieve this correction he must disguise himself as another and perjure himself to authorities to replace Darnay on death row. It is difficult to imagine a harsher criticism of the legal system than a lawyer having to sacrifice his own life to spare a wrongly convicted man from the inadequacies of the system. The abuses of the aristocracy may have been harsh, but the rule of the mob and vigilante justice provides no better for society in Carton's or Dickens' view. Dickens (272) provides a blood-thirsty and animalistic depiction of the proletariat as they re-sharpen the knives of revolution on the grindstone, "The eye could not detect one creature in the group, free from the smear of blood...Hatchets, knives, bayonets, swords, all brought to be sharpened, were all red with it... [their] faces...were more h

Category: Literature - T