Do You Hear The People Sing? — The Thundering Revolt

“‘There is a great crowd coming one day into our lives, if that be so,’ Sydney Carton struck in, in his moody way. The footsteps were incessant, and the hurry of them became more and more rapid. The corner echoed and re-echoed with the tread of feet; some, as it seemed, under the windows; some, as it seemed, in the room; some coming, some going, some breaking off, some stopping altogether; all in the distant streets, and not one within sight.” (Dickens, 98)

These ghostly footsteps seem to be a heavily recurring theme in Dickens’ writing, as they keep popping up all over the place. The characters seem to have different beliefs as to what these footsteps mean: Lucie believes they are the temporal echoes of people who have yet to enter her and her father’s lives, and so she harbors a benevolent attitude towards them; Charles Darnay seems to have a bit of a more snarky attitude towards them, not really believing that they are anything in particular, as evident in the way that he almost teases Lucie about them (being that he doesn’t seem to be able to hear them); but Sydney Carton has a more braced and paranoid attitude towards these footsteps, believing them to be of some great crowd that will crush them all beneath its feet.

“And I hear them!…Here they come, fast, fierce, furious!” (Dickens, 98). As Carton exclaims these words, Dickens attributes it all to him actually just mistaking the approaching storm for the sound of thundering footsteps. But what if this is just Dickens’ own verbal subtlety at its finest? He claims that Carton is actually hearing just a normal storm, but what if Dickens is implying that the footsteps are the storm? Carton may be the most correct one out of the three in regards to what the footsteps actually mean. The story, at this time, takes place in the calm before the storm, the years building up to the French Revolution. And, (spoiler alert), the latter part of the story will take place during the actual revolution. The footsteps that Carton hears, then, are in all likelihood the thundering approach of these revolutionaries, who are about to enter their lives in a big way.

This is not the only time that Dickens alludes to an eventual uprising of the people: when Madame DeFarge looks into the Marquis’s eyes, when the Marquis is killed, when there are multiple Jacques’s who could have killed the Marquis, and all of them are suspects, when the commoners attack the vehicles said to hold spies (this also contains a very foreshadow-y and relevant quote: “…for a crowd in those times stopped at nothing, and was a monster much dreaded.” (Dickens, 150)), etc. These commoners, Madame DeFarge, and countless other people are alluded to no doubt be a part of the thundering footsteps that belong to an enormous, bloodthirsty crowd who will eventually fall upon Lucie, Darnay, and Carton…and may claim one of their lives in the process.