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Sydney Carton Hero

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The ideas of heroism in a Victorian sense are very different than those ideas of a hero in Anglo-Saxon literature. The most obvious hero in A Tale of Two Cities is Sydney Carton, but he emerges very differently than Beowulf. It was never clearly mentioned in the novel that Carton was a hero, so Dickens expected the reader to infer that that was so. It also wasn’t until book three that Carton became a truly dynamic character and ultimately became the hero he sought to be. “Careless and slovenly if not debauched” (Dickens 55) was how Dickens described Carton’s character in book one. He is merely a man, and a flawed man at the beginning of the novel. Carton’s imperfections and impurities set the stage for his later actions that will prove him a hero and also …show more content…

After Darnay is convicted, Lucie falls into a faint, and, Carton is there to assist her, coming to her aid from “the obscure corner from which he had never moved” (Dickens 260). Though Carton never received recompense, he is always prepared to assist the Manettes. When Carton returns Lucie safely to her room, her child cries out to him, “I think you will do something to help mamma, something to save papa … can you, of all the people who love her, bear to see her so?” As Carton leaves, he murmurs a few significant words under his breath: “A life you love” (Dickens 260). Finally, Carton sacrifices his own self to the Guillotine and ultimately the revolution in place of Darnay, again, out of his love and compassion for Lucie. His final thoughts are some of the most famous lines in the entire novel, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go than I have ever known” (Dickens 293). This was the end destined for Sydney Carton. He has grown in courage and valor, from a drunk, dissatisfied, and insignificant man to a hero who found his calling in sacrificing himself for the love he would never

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