Capital punishment looms large in A Tale of Two Cities, voicing a fear of the arbitrariness inherent in the contemporary execution of the law in both England and France. Dickens brings the novel’s symmetry to its epitome through the indistinguishability between Carton and Darnay in order to emphasize how easily the wrong defendant may be unjustly killed. In order to criticize the system’s power over the paralysed individual, who is deprived of his own agency in view of the fact that he has no right to prisoners’ counsel, Dickens anonymizes the central players in the novel’s two trials and places an implicit emphasis on the lawyer’s responsibility in the figure of Sydney Carton.