A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens' novel, A Tale of Two Cities is a historical fiction novel about the struggle of the French during the revolution and the injustice that prevailed during the so-called liberators' reign. The plot follows characters from London and a few in Paris that all face the bitter retribution of the Revolution, including accusing a nephew of his uncles' crimes and seeking revenge through the sweeping executions by guillotine.

Throughout the novel, wine is used as a symbol, a symbol for the bloody revolution to come and as a symbol for the people's hunger for something new and more than the meager existence prior to the revolution. During one scene in the novel a cask of wine falls and splits open in the street and the beleaguered, malnourished people scramble like so many rats to spilling wine, and drink it up. Dickens uses this symbol in order to show the people's thirst for blood, their thirst for vengeance on the aristocracy, a burning desire for the bloody justice owed them for the terrible crimes inflicted upon them. The wine shop itself is the headquarters of the revolutionaries, wherein Madame Defarge plots against those who've wronged her family in the past, such as Darnay and Lucie both of which she attempts to have executed. Wine, in this novel, is the essence of revenge, the lifeblood of the revolution and is used to show how depraved the masses of France had become in order to begin executing any and all the nobles who dared cross their paths.

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this."
This passage from A Tale of Two Cities gives an accurate air of the suppressed feelings the lower classes had leading up to the bloody Revolution. The passage gives readers a sense that all the people of the lower classes had been feeling the same thing, they were a singly minded organism, breathing and building up their hatred together while not acting on their thoughts. The people, prior to the Revolution, were all equally subjugated by the small class of people, all of them being held in contempt by the wealthy and their so-called 'betters.'
In my opinion, this is a good novel, however, Dickens' style is very particular and unfit for contemporary readers, in a sense. The complications of such a descriptive book can be a challenge for modern readers to grasp. The underlying meaning and symbolic nature of the book can be clearly seen once the description and metaphor is stripped away. On the whole, though, it is a good book and a very good example of metaphor and symbolism.