Jerry+Cruncher

Tyler Levins A Tale of Two Cities

In the Tale of Two Cities their are a lot of important characters to the story. None is as important as Jerry Cruncher. Jerry is the base of the story line and improves as a character as the book moves into more depth. Cruncher is a calm guy who works at Telsons bank as a porter. This means he delivers mail. Besides this he gets to know everyone around town and also gets to know their personal lives as well. Dickens refers to him as "an odd-job man" (58) because of his second job as a grave robber. This means he buries the dead. This is important because later in the story he helps fake Roger Cly's death. Without a man who will do "an odd-man job" their would be no faking of deaths and changing of the plot. Even though he is on the poorer end of the middle class he doesn't let that get him down. He tries to make things work between him, work, and his wife but it doesn't happen. Him and his wife don't get along. He is verbally abusive to her because he is angry with his job and wants to please her. As the book goes on he becomes closer with the main character Darnay and Sydney. Cruncher was in on a plan to have a fake burial for Roger Cly to frame Carton. Roger Cly faked his death to avoid persecution and then fled to France. Once Carton goes to Cruncher and Cruncher tells him it was fake and this plays a major role in the saving of Darnay's life. With this information Carton is able to blackmail John Barsad into helping him in his final scheme of killing himself to save Darnay. This would have never happened if Jerry Cruncher never told Carton that Roger Cly's death was fake. He told Sydney this because he is "an honest tradesman" (17), as dickens refers to him as and doesn't like to lie to anyone. This is an important trait because it helped save Darnays life and if he would of kept this a secret, Lucie would have been hurt and Darnay killed. He could also be known as “resurrection man” (43) as his son says but in a different way. He revives the life of Darnay by helping save it from the guillotine. Without any of this information or helping from Cruncher the book would have ended in a completely different way with Darnay dieing. Overall Cruncher is one of the most important characters because of this.