As a result of his fourteen years in captivity, Dr.
Manette has, indeed, aged. In addition, he has also developed a certain disorientation
with time and circumstance. For instance, when Mr. Lorry and Lucie Manette arrive, he
does not comprehend that he "has a visitor." He looks up momentarily, then resumes his
habitual action of shoemaking. Dickens writes,
The task of recalling him from the vacancy into
which he always sank when he had spoken, was like recalling some very weak person from a
swoon, or endeavouring, in the hope of some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a
fast-dying man.
When Manette
does commit some action, in the "midst of the action he went astray." His mind wanders
into the vacancy in which it has been kept so long. After he is brought back to London
and lives with his loving daughter, Charles Darnay wishes to ask permission to marry
Lucie. In an attempt to be forthright Darnay begins to reveal his true identity, but
Manette stays him, telling Darnay to reveal his secret on the wedding day. When Darnay
does so, poor Dr. Manette pulls out the shoemaking tools and recommences his habitual
task. As he does so, he again becomes disorientated, losing a sense of
time:
He had
laid aside his coat and wastcoat; his shirt was open at the throat...and even the old
haggard, faded surface of face had come back to
him.
When Mr. Lorry tries to
pull him back to reality, asking him to look at him, Manette does so,
but
in the old
mechanically submissive manner, without pausing in his
work.
Manette continues
working on the shoe that, he says, "ought to have been finished long ago." Even later
in the narrative, when Manette gets better and bravely travels to London to plea on
behalf of his son-in-law, Charles Evremonde, he does not grasp the true nature of the
situation in Paris. Truly, Dr. Manette's experience of being imprisoned for fourteen
years has left its mark upon him in A Tale of Two
Cities.
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