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A Tale of Two Cities | A Tale of Two Characters: A Study in Multiple Projection

In the following excerpt, Leonard Manheim uses Lucy and Dr. Manette as examples of roles female and male characters play in A Tale of Two Cities.

Lucie is basically only one more in the line of Dickensian virgin-heroines whom the critic Edwin Pugh [in The Charles Dickens Originals, 1925] felicitously called "feminanities." Yet, as Professor Edgar Johnson clearly saw [in his book Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, Vol. II, 1952], there was a subtle distinction.

Lucie … is given hardly any individual traits at all, although her appearance, as Dickens describes it, is like that of Ellen, "a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes," and it...

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