Mob Mentality in a Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Mob mentality is the idea that when a big group of people are together they loose their sense of individualism and moral constraints to follow blindly what they are told. During the French Revolution mobs were highly prevalent as many of the population were starving, poor, and angry. In A Tale of Two Cities the author, Charles Dickens criticizes mobs by showing how dangerous they can be in many scenes.

The first instance of a mob like scene in A Tale of Two Cities is on pages 41-43 when the wine casket is broken on the ground showing the animalistic nature of the crowd. People stopped what they were doing and rushed to the wine to get as much as they could from the ground. Dickens notes that the wine “had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet” (42). This shows the animalistic nature of the mob with the red smeared over their bodies like blood. Here Dickens also shows how dangerous mobs are by the fact that after all of the wine has been soaked up the “demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out” (42). This shows how quickly the mass of people can...