One Night

1. Book 2 Chapter 17 One Night Katie Ross

2. Characters • Lucie • Doctor Manette • Charles Darnay (mentioned) • Mr. Lorry (mentioned briefly) • Miss Pross (mentioned briefly)

3. Summary • It is the night before Lucie’s wedding to Darnay. She saved this time to spend with her father. • They are discussing how her father feels about the marriage to which he insists he is happy. • Lucie tells him that she would be upset if the events to come would separate her from him. • Doctor Manette tells Lucie that nothing can come between them completely. He says that he doesn’t want to come between her and how her life should naturally progress and that he can only be happy if she is. • Doctor Manette begins to talk about his imprisonment for the first time since Darnay’s trial. • He describes how on many nights that he spent in prison he would look at the moon and consider the possibilities of what was outside his cell.

4. Summary Continued • He considered what children he could actually have had during this time. • One of the possibilities he describes is a daughter that knows nothing about him. • He also describes a daughter who comes and takes him out of prison to see her family and home and taught her children to pity him and then returned him to prison, a daughter who prayed for him. • Lucie expresses that she wishes that she is that daughter but doesn’t feel she is as good. • Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross were the only ones invited to the wedding. Also, Charles and Lucie plan to keep living in the same house. • Lucie sneaks down to her father’s room and notes how prison has changed his face and then prays that she can be as good of a child as he has envisioned.

5. Literary Devices • Imagery: “Never did the sun go down with a brighter glory on the quite corner in Soho, than the one memorable evening when the Doctor and his daughter sat under the plane-tree together” (194) • Personification : “’I have looked at her, when it has been such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I had lost, that I have beaten my head against my prison walls.’”(196) • Verbal Irony:”’If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been quite happy with you.’” (195)

6. Essential Quote “’Lucie, I recal these old troubles in the reason that I have to-night for loving you better than words can tell, and thanking God for my great happiness. My thoughts, when they were wildest, never rose near the happiness that I have known with you, and that we have before us’” (198)