An Assessment of Sydney Carton

Warning: If you have never read A Tale of Two Cities or watched a movie version and don't want to know how it ends, don't read this.
Reading A Tale of Two Cities never fails to make me weep with a sort of despair and true compassion for Sydney Carton, rather as Lucie Manette does in chapter 3. And also for the heart-rending beauty of the sacrifice with which he redeemed himself in his own eyes. This is one of the most wonderful characters in literature, I think. Here is a man who might, under different circumstances, have made a name for himself and done wonderful work, a brilliant man with an amazing mind for his work and a true sense of delicacy and honor and heroism. If Dickens had written him differently, he would have been one of those characters who worked strongly through the law or other means for the rights of the poor, something Dickens was very concerned with. But instead Dickens chose to make him hide his real character under apathy, drunkenness, sarcasm. What brought him to where he was for most of the story, his genius hidden and unacknowledged even by the friend who unashamedly used him for his own advancement? And even worse than the waste of his genius, his true nobility of character hidden, unacknowledged even by himself. Lucie says to Darnay, “Believe that he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals and that there are deep wounds in it. My dear, I have seen it bleeding.” I wonder if he was manic-depressive. Probably just depressive—melancholic and too phlegmatic to bestir himself and make something of his life. Here’s a man to whom life has been a complete waste. He’s done nothing with his God-given intellect and nobility of character, and he knows it, and he’s man enough to regret it but too phlegmatic to do anything about it. Perhaps believing he’s too far gone to change and feeling the pain and regret of it is easier and more enjoyable than doing something about it.
And yet here’s what he says to Lucie that makes me first begin to feel the unutterable tragedy of his wasted potential: “For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything […] I would embrace any sacrifice for you and those dear to you. […] There is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!” And this when he has realized that he loves her and that she will probably marry his noble look-alike, Charles Darnay, and that even if she returned his love, he would never marry her, for he would only make her life miserable. “It was sad to think how much he had thrown away and how much he every day kept down and perverted.”
And then the end, the glorious end! When Darnay, now married to Lucie some years, is condemned to death at the guillotine, Sydney acts, seemingly without hesitation, sneaking himself into Darnay’s place and Darnay out to safety. And it’s as if he redeems himself—not necessarily in a spiritual sense, though perhaps partly. But suddenly the life he’s always seen as worthless now has worth only as it is interposed in another’s place. He suddenly understands what sacrifice is, the gloriousness of self-sacrifice. And only then does he understand the sacrifice Christ made and the way to God that is open to him that he always thought closed to such a prolifigate. For he goes to his death thinking, “I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me, shall never die!” And perhaps it was only his sacrifice that could have led to his redemption, for without it he would never have turned toward God. He goes to his death—Darnay’s death—with far greater peace than he ever would have faced his own death. “They said of him, about the city that night, that it was the peacefullest man’s face ever beheld there. Many added that he looked sublime and prophetic.” And his last thoughts are, “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 to, than I have ever had.” He was dead all his life, and it was only in his death that he lived.