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fortune, which occur when Charles Darnay returns to France in an effort to secure the release of his family estate’s caretaker, and then is imprisoned himself, but later freed through the intervention of Dr. Manette, who has become a revolutionary hero because of his years in the Bastille. In a dark turn of events, Darnay is re-arrested on the basis of new documentary evidence surfacing—another common melodramatic trope. Ernest Defarge produces in court Manette’s prison letter that will condemn Darnay. Dr. Manette also experiences a reversal when the Revolution, which first frees him from the Bastille, ironically then threatens to destroy his family. The set of narrow escapes by the English characters toward the end of the novel is another common trope of melodrama.

The stage adaptation of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (adapted by Fox Cooper and produced by Tom Taylor) rewrites Dickens’s bittersweet ending. The play fully exploits the poetic justice so familiar to melodrama, but which the novel only invokes partially. In the stage version, after saving Darnay, Sydney Carton manages to switch clothes with Ernest Defarge, so that Defarge, not Carton, falls victim to the guillotine in place of Darnay. An illustration of the fight scene between Miss Pross and Therese Defarge depicts, as in the novel, the Frenchwoman with pistol in hand. When it discharges during the struggle to determine whether or not Lucie has fled, which Miss Pross desires to thwart, the revolutionary is killed by her own hand. With both the villains vanquished, the play heightens the melodramatic effect of good triumphing over evil, without requiring the sacrifice of Carton’s life.

Dickens and Alcohol

“Those were drinking days, and most men drank hard,” the narrator remarks after the closing depiction in the previous chapter of Sydney Carton falling drunk asleep on his dinner table. Carton’s dissolute behavior contributes to the reader’s sense of his being irredeemable. Although Dickens claims that “Time” has “improved [men’s] habits” of alcohol consumption, many nineteenth-century social reformers disagreed. These reformers focused on alcohol as a major cause of the underclass in Britain. What became known as the Temperance Movement had roots in Evangelical religion and Utilitarian philosophy, both of which valued middle-class ideals such as thrift, self-improvement, and self-restraint. Temperance reformers disdained leisure and championed self-control, to which alcohol was seen as a detriment.

On the other hand, many working-class people viewed debates about alcohol use as diverting political attention from the real problems facing the poor—inadequate sanitation, overcrowded slums, as well as exploitative labor practices. Some working-class-affiliated reformers formed the “teetotalers” movement, which encouraged members to pledge total abstinence from alcohol. Yet they were a minority voice among the majority’s resistance to middle-class social control. Dickens certainly espoused the values of hard work and self-improvement, and his letters show some sympathy for the work of temperance reformers. However, Dickens never aligned himself with the teetotalers and temperance movements. He felt that working people needed outlets for leisure, including the “cheering” effects of moderate alcohol consumption. This makes his depiction of Carton all the more interesting. For in Sydney Dickens reveals a man whose self-destructiveness is fueled by heavy drinking. There is certainly a parallel in the novel to the French revolutionaries, the Defarges, who are wine merchants, and the symbolism of wine and blood flowing simultaneously is suggestive of the danger that intoxication contributes to a rioting crowd’s heedless violence.

Dickens and Prisons

The nineteenth century could be called the century of the penitentiary. Reformers worked to end public physical punishments—from whippings to hangings; they objected to the spectacle of violence. When Dickens’s contemporary, William Makepeace Thackeray, wrote about his witnessing of a hanging, he expressed