Sydney Carton’s Other Doubles

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a novel almost obsessed with doubles and doubling. Dickens’s rhetoric in the novel is full of doubles, as is his imagery: mirrors, reflections, and echoes pervade the novel. The most obvious doubling—and perhaps the most important doubling in terms of plot—is the doubling of the central characters Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay. The physical similarity between these two young men allows Darnay to be released from mortal jeopardy in each of the two cities mentioned in Dickens’s title, most thrillingly in the novel’s final chapters. But my concern here is not with Darnay, but with Sydney Carton’s other doubles in A Tale of Two Cities. Utilizing close examination of the revisions in Dickens’s remarkable manuscript of the novel (now in the Forster Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London), I consider several other figures that double Carton: Mr. Stryver, the ‘lion’ to Sydney’s ‘jackal’; Charles Dickens, Carton’s own creator; the innocent young seamstress who shares his fate at the guillotine in the final chapter; and finally—and perhaps most revealingly—Sydney Carton himself.