SOURCE: “Alternatives to Bourgeois Individualism in A Tale of Two Cities,” in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 30, No. 4, Autumn, 1990, pp. 633-54.
In the following essay, Baldridge explores an aspect of the French Revolution depicted in A Tale of Two Cities that he claims has been neglected by critics: the assertion that “the group, the class, the Republic—and not the individual—comprise, or should comprise, the basic unit of society.”