with commentary by Margaret Atwood
A Tale of Two Cities has an official hero and a real one. The official hero is Charles Darnay: reformed French aristocrat, devoted husband, man of unimpeachable principle. The real one is Sydney Carton: drunken, self-loathing, brilliant, and in love with a woman he will never have. Charles Dickens knew which one he was actually writing. So did Ronald Colman, who took the lead in the 1935 film and made it about Carton from the first scene.
“The real hero of A Tale of Two Cities is Sydney Carton,” Margaret Atwood says in her Rebind commentary on the novel. “We feel for him. We know he’s not a hero. We understand him better than we understand Charles Darnay, who comes across as somewhat wooden.” The misreading of Carton, as a simple sacrificial figure, a sentimental Victorian redemption story, misses what Dickens was building from the novel’s first page.
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