Voices        

          In Chapter 6 of A Tale of Two Cities, we are finally introduced to Doctor Manette, the father of Lucy. At this point of time in the book, the reader is told that Lucies father had been hidden for about 18 years and we find out that he has been hiding in the DeFarge's wine shop. Dickens does a great job portraying Doctor Manette's character as being very dreadful and hopeless by using powerful language. The description of Doctor Manette's character is shown in its own paragraph, strictly talking about his voice. Here is the paragraph describing the voice of the shoemaker:

       "The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago. So entirely had it lost the life and resonance of the human voice, that it affected the senses like a once beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak stain. So sunken and suppressed it was, that it was like a voice underground. So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would have remembered home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die" (42).

                            

      This passage is very powerful because it describes the character by just mentioning the tone of his voice. This description is also placed in its own paragraph which emphasizes its importance. It is very unusual to find this lengthy of a paragraph strictly describing a characters voice and Dickens does a great job grabbing both the readers attention and sympathy by uniquely describing Doctor Manettes voice. Dickens uses words such as: dreadful, faintness, sunken, poor, weak, and hopeless to depict the emotions of this character. 




Picture: http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/barnard/ttc/5.html