Watch
this and try to stay awake. Watch the movie and you want to buy the book.
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Originally Posted by Dr Tony Williams
Sydney Carton is a particularly interesting piece of character creation: the talented wastrel who sacrifices himself for love, so that the woman he wants may live her life happily with her husband. Dickens wrote 'I must say I like my Carton. And I have a faint idea sometimes, that if I acted him, I could have done something with his life and death.' When planning the novel and naming the characters, he originally thought of naming Carton Dick rather than Sydney. Dick would be an echo of Richard Wardour in The Frozen Deep, of course, and the parallelism in the sets of initials (Charles Darnay and Dick Carton: CD - DC) would have further underlined the 'doubleness' in the two male leads of the novel. 'Doubleness' is a massive issue for him at this time. But the initials are his own, of course, and perhaps he felt that this was all coming rather too close to home, at this point of great crisis for him.
It will be helpful to recall the events in Dickens's life at this time...
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