Man 's Inhumanity Towards Fellow Man

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, narrates the frustrations of the common people toward Foulon, a French magistrate. The people rejoice when Foulon is imprisoned since he treated them awfully. The nature of the French Revolution is the common people’s elation at the downfall of the aristocracy. Dickens utilizes personification, motif, and symbolism to describe the relationship between the common people and Foulon.

Juxtaposition is also used to further stress the socioeconomic disparities during the French Revolution by comparing the anguish of peasants and the excessiveness of the aristocrats in an even more extreme light. In Book the First, chapter five, Dickens writes, “All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine…Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths” (27). This description of the broken wine cask in front of the wine shop is meant to illustrate the true hunger and squalid living conditions of the peasants, who are so desperate for nourishment that they will feed their babies vile wine through dirty rags. This scene was juxtaposed with a description from Book the Second, chapter seven. In this chapter, the hot chocolate drinking process of a noble is described and “It took four men, all four a-blaze with gorgeous decoration, and the chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur’s lips” (109). This over

Today many violent scenes are used for their shock value and for the sake of including violence. However, A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, has violent scenes to illustrate the time period of the French Revolution. Scenes such as Foulon being paraded through the city and murdered, the Storming of the Bastille, and the fight between Miss Pross and Madame Defarge emphasize the violence of the time through graphic detail and imagery. These scenes add to the novel’s legitimacy by expressing the immense violence of the time and truly showing the horrors of the revolution.

Social class systems in the nineteenth century were comprised of the upper class, the middle class, the working class, and the underclass. The different social classes can be “distinguished by inequalities in such areas as power, authority, wealth, working and living conditions, life-styles, life-span, education, religion, and culture” (Cody). The poor, also known as peasants, were usually mistreated and segregated from the wealthy, or those of higher class. During his time, Charles Dickens “seen as a champion of “the poor” by some of the poor themselves” (“What was”). It is said that one of his greatest achievements “was to bring the problem of poverty to the attention of his readers through introducing varieties of poor persons into almost all of his novels, and showing the “deserving” majority of the poor, bravely struggling against the forces arrayed against them” (“What was”). This is clearly evident in A Tale of Two Cities. During the nineteenth century Victorian era, social class systems were a common excuse for the division and mistreatment of many individuals, as evidenced in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

The novel “Night” shows that there is great inhumanity and cruelty displayed from this personal journey of Elie Wiesel. The Nazi are the ringleaders behind it all gradually making the Jews feel like nothing and only pawns for work. The Germans strip the Jews to nothing and take away everything close to them, separation from loved ones, isolation, transportation and the ruthless, cold actions towards them in the camps such as starvation, selections of the fittest and the struggle of survival becomes essential for their own self. However there are humane acts within the book which help Elie overcome some struggles and survive the brutality of the camps and war.

Humanity is a spectrum. There is no one person who is unequivocally bad or good. Every individual is ambiguous, and merely has the strength of their character and the choices they make. In some cases, these choices are influences by external factors that push fundamentally good individuals to commit deplorable acts. One of the most interesting of these factors is the concept of revenge, and the lengths to which humans will go in its pursuit. Throughout A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens is deliberate in his portrayal of the deleterious effect that a desire for revenge can have on even the most unimpeachable of characters, especially in the lives of Dr. Manette, Madam Defarge, and Gaspard.

Charles Dickens focuses on the revenge that put the bloody French Revolution in motion in his suspenseful story A Tale of Two Cities. The French Revolution was a revolt instigated by the peasants, who attacked the nobles with vengeful hearts starting in the year 1789, and going on until the year 1799. The settings of the book took place in both London and England, two parallels in novel, two cities where the plotting of the Revolution went into affect. Although the reasons behind the different examples of revenge are exposed, the actions taken with revenge in mind are inexcusable and not justifiable. Dickens portrays the theme of revenge successfully through the joker Gaspard, the brave younger brother who sacrificed himself to protect his

The oppressed peasants of the French society change their environment to benefit their own needs through the Revolution, mercilessly murdering their oppressors, the aristocracy. Although the peasants were successful in their revolution, they did not consider the consequences of their own actions. An overlooked connection about the peasants, now recognized as patriots, is how they became the oppressors of their fellow man. Dickens’ attitude towards the peasants’ revolution is one built on reasoning and understanding of the social systems of the French. The peasants rose up and revolted against their oppressors after much disdain with their living current living conditions and the aristocracy was met with the treatment they had given to the peasants.

First, in a scene in Saint Antoine, a large cask of wine was dropped and broken on the streets. Everybody stopped what they were doing and went to drink the wine on the ground. Peoples’ hands, clothes, and the roads were all stained. The word, “BLOOD,” was also written on a wall with wine (Dickens 20). The wine in this scene symbolizes the blood of the revolution and foreshadows the entrance of the revolution. While the cask spilled, happiness and the thought of change went through all the minds of the poor in Saint Antoine. The mob formation of all the peasants to get wine or, “blood,” shows us the hatred they have for the wealthy class and how much they want the revolution to come. Later on in the book, Dickens uses echoing footsteps to foreshadow the upcoming revolution. As Lucie sits in the corner of a parlor, as she had done for six years, she hears footsteps from people downstairs, but she also hears echoes coming from far away. She wonders if the echoes are about her or her family, but then she says, “There were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled menacingly in the corner all through this space of time. And it was now, about little Lucie's sixth birthday, that they began to have an awful sound, as of a great storm in France with a dreadful sea rising(Dickens 164).” Echoes of happiness and family were around; however, there were also

The novel’s opening words (Book 1, Chapter 1) “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity. . .” Provided, Dickens conveys the relationship between poverty and aristocracy through the use of parallelism, paradox, and other poetic techniques. In addition to, Dickens's technique functions not only to draw opposites, but to reveal hidden parallels.

7) Many characters within the book and the time period saw colored individuals as property and lesser beings. The overall and recurring theme of “man’s inhumanity to man” is in part shown by the hatred shown towards individuals who were seen as property. Characters like Pap believed that it was not right for a black man to be able to vote. He thought it was absurd that a free slave was “a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything” (Twain 39). By Twain illustrating the segregation between slaves and free men, it shows the large divide provided by man’s inhumanity to man. During the time period, slaves were seen as property, therefore money and a profit. Jim was seen as a big bag of money for his reward

Life seems to abide by equality, for every person with a trait, there is the a person with the opposite. Following this concept, A Tale of Two Cities, a historical novel by Charles Dickens set in both England and France, uses characters that are easily contrasted with one another in terms of characteristics. The Marquis St. Evremonde and Charles Darnay, although related, possess traits that completely oppose the other. Dickens is a strong believer in parallelism, uses his characters to contrast each other to emphasize their traits. The character foil of Charles Darnay and the Marquis St. Evremonde helps support the theme of parallelism and opposites in the novel itself.

Dickens’ novella has remained known for its fictional recreation of the French Revolution, a cataclysmic incident which saw the ousting of feudal privilege, with Dickens portraying a vivid portrayal of the citizens rising in a hunger driven mania. Purposely, Dickens uses this scene as the first time the reader is presented with the French citizenry, and thus is keen to emphasise their poverty and starvation. Dickens exemplifies this through his use of the rhetorical device anaphora to illustrate the dire poverty of the peasants with the ‘grown faces, ploughed into every furrow of age’ who desperately drink every drop of wine from the broken cask - presenting the metaphoric tableau of the bloodshed of the upcoming French Revolution with the symbolic breaking of the cask wine.

In the sociopolitical novel, A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens analyzes the events of one of the bloodiest revolutions in history, the French Revolution, characterized by its violence after no less than 40,000 people were sentenced to death. The violence of the revolution put irreversible change into motion, helping to bring greater equality between French citizens as a result of the upheaval, and causing political changes that affected millions. Through his changing tone, Dickens conveys that rebellion is necessary to amend the ever-growing divide between the social classes, but the mindless nature of the violence, as a result of mob mentality, is excessive, and blood is unnecessarily spilled.

It is this passion and drive of the people that Dickens expresses a veneration for. When Dickens first introduces the peasants, he compares them to scarecrows. Scarecrows are known for protecting the land and food from crows, and the peasants of Saint Antoine try to do just that from the nobles. Now, while there was still “a vast dusky mass of scarecrows heaving to and fro.. a tremendous roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine.”