In the novel, Charles Dickens depicts the crowds as heinous with mob mentality. Several scenes, including those instances where Charles Darnay is going through his trail, Roger Cly’s funeral procession, and the storming of the Bastille, the crowds are shown as being a hateful group of individuals. The first look of a mob that Dickens gives the book is in the fifth chapter of the first book where the wine casket breaks. Though the crowd was not truly aggressive then, a reader can see the foreshadowing for what is to come. The nature of crowds and mobs is a significant theme throughout A Tale of Two Cities.
During the scene of Darnay’s trial, Dickens shows that the crowd is disappointed in his acquittal because they had come to see an execution. “Making his way through the tainted crowd…” (pg. 45) is how Dickens depicts the crowd at that particular…show more content… “As the whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled round Defarge’s wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron had the tendency to be sucked toward the vortex,” (pg. 165) shows that just before the storming of the Bastille, the, so-called, whirlpool grew even more massive. “The loving sea rose, wave on wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that point,” (pg. 166). This metaphor of the mob being a sea illustrates how wild, vicious, and careless this mob is. They do not care who are what is in their way for they will overpower it and take over just as that quotation shows. Dickens continues his metaphor throughout the novel saying, “But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression was in vivid life, there were two groups of faces…” (pg. 170) which is speaking of, not only those who stormed the Bastille, but also of the prisoners. This scene in particular, demonstrates how enormous a mob can grow and just how much damage it can actually