My sophomore class has finally gotten to the final book in Charles Dickens’s famous novel, A Tale of Two Cities, and it’s a bit unfortunate to say, but I’m quite disappointed. One of my favorite aspects of storytelling is how the characters are written and developed. A good character not only should help convey the author’s theme or purpose but should also connect to the reader on a personal level and have a personality of their own. While I think Charles Dickens got the first part down, this novel lacks in the latter.

A big part of this problem stems from how the novel is structured. The story was written in the form of installments, meaning it was broken up into many parts that were to be published weekly. This type of overarching story with many installments can be done right, as is the case with TV shows today like Breaking Bad; however, in this case, the focus is constantly being shifted from character to character and location to location. Part of what makes shows like the Breaking Bad series work in terms of its characters is how the focus is always set on the two main protagonists, Jesse Pinkman and Walter White. We can see exactly how Walter White’s motivations slowly morph from trying to help out his family to pure greed and lust for power. Because of the tight focus on the main characters throughout this story, we are able to connect with them on a deeper level, and this allows us to feel empathy for the loss of the man Walter White once was. With A Tale of Two Cities, however, there isn’t really a focus on a specific set of characters. You’ll be jumping from characters like Sydney Carton to Lucie Manette and her father to Charles Darnay, and we never seem to get enough time with these characters to connect and understand them. When a character gets brought up again later in the novel, you’ll often find yourself saying, “Oh yeah, I forgot about him,” and that is really sad. When reading a book, it’s important that the connection between me and the characters I read about feels real, but here, I just feel nothing towards any of the characters. This is probably because I can only point to one character trait about each of these characters, and I’m 255 pages into this 390-page novel. I’ve had almost no time to empathize with anyone because we always have to jump to the next location and the next event in the following chapter. If we were going to spend this long before the revolution began, Darwin should’ve taken more of this time to give a spotlight to a few of the most important characters rather than constantly jumping from one to the next.

The character I feel best demonstrates this problem is Sydney Carton. He is introduced about midway into the novel and seems like a good concept for a character, a miserable man “who cares for no one as no one cares for him.” When I first read this line, I started to get really invested in learning more about his pessimistic outlook on life, but of course, we moved on to a completely different event in the novel, and I almost forgot about Sydney Carton entirely. He shows up much later into the second book in which he professes his love for Lucie Manette. For one, I said to myself the same thing, “Oh yeah, I forgot about him,” and then I was just confused about where Sydney developed this sudden optimism and passion for Lucie. To me, it seemed like he never cared about anyone enough to fall in love, unless he went through some sort of emotional development we never got to see. It’s obvious that Sydney Carton is having some sort of character development, or he and Lucie have some sort of connection that is being built up, but because he only shows up about two times in the whole book so far, I have almost no investment in it and I probably won’t in the next book either. This is the main problem that I see so far reading A Tale of Two Cities. The characters certainly had good ideas and developments, but I find it hard to care about them when I hardly can remember who they are in the first place. Once again, this novel would’ve greatly benefitted from a stronger focus on a small handful of characters and the events that stem from them. This would certainly make me feel more connected to these characters, and in addition, it would also better sell the very themes Charles Dickens is trying to convey through pure empathy. I’ll have to see if Book 3 changes any of my opinions on this novel, but so far I couldn’t be too bothered to know what will happen next.