Although critics have seen Dickens as having emphasized the individual and domestic life at the expense of politics in A Tale of Two Cities, the novel offers reasons for thinking that Dickens was using it as an occasion for reevaluating our understanding of moral agency in modernity. In emphasizing resemblances that seem to blur the boundaries between individuals, Dickens calls attention to the ways in which we are not morally autonomous, in which our abilities to act are conditioned by our sometimes being taken for others. While that predicament might seem lamentable, Dickens concludes the novel by presenting Sydney Carton as a character who recognizes it well enough to see it as a riddle, and a riddle to be solved.

The essay studies the scene of recognition in four novels by Dickens -- Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and A Tale of Two Cities. It argues that Dickens’s use of the topos of recognition is linked to a specific view of social reality centered on the belief that the legitimacy of the social order and the place of individuals within it are predicated on continuity. The variations that the four novels offer on this topos should be understood as the means by which Dickens attempts to work out a persuasive way of promoting and protecting this view of social reality in spite of the contradictions and impasses it entails.