Tale of Two Cities

The year is 1775, Mr. Jarvis Lorry is traveling to Dover to meet Lucie Manette. Mr. Lorry tells Lucy that despite her belief, she is not an orphan as everyone has always told her. Lorry tells hers that he will travel with her to Paris to meet her father. Doctor Manette, Lucie's father who has just been released from prison, is housed in the Defarges' wine-shop and has lost his reason, but he starts to regain it when he meets his daughter and is transported back to London.

Five years later, Charles Darnay is tried in London on a charge of treason for providing English secrets to the French and Americans during the outbreak of the American Revolution. The of Mr. Sydney Carton who looks remarkably like him, precludes any positive identification and allows Darnay's acquittal. Darnay, Mr. Carton, and Mr. Stryver all fall in love with Lucie Manette, who was a tearful, unwilling witness for the prosecution. Although they all make an attempt to get her, she favors Charles Darnay and eventually marries him. Carton comes to her house alone and declares that while he expects no return of his love, he would do anything for her or for anyone whom she loves. Darnay has ominously hinted to Doctor Manette of his concealed identity, and he reveals to his father-in-law on the morning of his wedding that he is a French nobleman who has renounced his title.

In France, Darnay's uncle has been murdered in his bed for crimes he has committed against the French people. This means that Darnay is next in line to inherit the aristocratic title, but he tells no one but Doctor Manette. At the urgent request of Monsieur Gabelle, who has been imprisoned, Darnay returns to Paris. He is arrested as a nobleman and an emigrant and thrown into jail. A spy, John Barsad, drops into the Defarges' wine-shop to find out if they are revolutionaries. They reveal almost nothing, although Madame Defarge is knitting a list of those whom she and the other revolutionaries plan to kill at a later date.

Doctor Manette, Miss Pross, Lucie, and her small child follow Darnay to Paris, where the Doctor is almost successful in using his power among the revolutionaries as a former Bastille prisoner--like the people, he was oppressed by the ruling regime--to secure Darnay's release. But Darnay is once again denounced by the Defarges, a charge which is made even stronger by Monsieur Defarge's revelation of a paper document that he found in Doctor Manette's