illustration of a guillotine

A Tale of Two Cities

by Charles Dickens

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Student Question

What does the behavior of Saint Antoine's residents in Chapter 5, Book 1, suggest about them?

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The behavior of Saint Antoine's residents in Chapter 5, Book 1 of A Tale of Two Cities suggests their desperation and foreshadows the mob hysteria of the French Revolution. Their frantic efforts to collect spilled wine highlight their starvation and unity against the aristocracy. Descriptions of "cadaverous faces" and "playfulness" hint at the impending violence and cruelty of the Revolution, emphasizing the novel's theme of mob power and collective action.

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In much the same manner as John Steinbeck uses intercalary chapters in The Grapes of Wrath, Charles Dickens employs Chapter V of Book the First of A Tale of Two Cities almost as an intercalary chapter. For, in this chapter Charles Dickens employs rhetorical and figurative devices in order to presage the bloodshed to come with the French Revolution.  And, just as Leo Tolstoy examines how certain forces come together to influence history, Dickens suggests that the forces of oppression and poverty and want will soon issue action.

The desperate scurrying of the residents of Saint-Antoine to absorb even the smallest drop of wine, suspending all their other actions, suggests, not only the hunger, but also the mob hysteria to come in the French Revolution. This mob action is also described as "a special companionship," a phrase that, too, presages the unity of hatred of the aristocracy which characterizes all the revolutionaries, the "Jacques." Their "cadaverous faces" denotes the people's starvation, while at the same time this description connotes the death faces of those who will be guillotined during the revolution and the Reign of Terror.  Dickens's mention of the "little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness" also foreshadows the cruelty in which the masses will soon engage and revel in as they cheer when he heads of the aristocrats fall into the baskets beneath the blade of the guillotine. Above all, with the unified and cruelly delighted action of the residents, the power of the mob is introduced as a motif that prevails throughout Dickens's novel.

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