Few novels hand students as many concrete symbols as A Tale of Two Cities. The spilled wine cask, Madame Defarge's knitting, and the recurring image of footsteps and shoes all show up early and often, which makes them popular essay topics. The challenge for teachers is distinguishing essays that merely spot the symbol from essays that actually interpret it.

The wine cask scene in Book One is almost always cited, and for good reason, since Dickens explicitly connects the spilled wine to the blood that will later run through the streets during the Revolution. An essay that stops at noting this connection has done half the work; a stronger essay explains how the foreshadowing shapes the reader's sense of inevitability throughout the rest of the novel.

Madame Defarge's knitting offers a richer interpretive challenge, since it functions both as a literal registry of names marked for execution and as a symbol of fate being woven, thread by thread, without mercy. Essays that only describe the plot function of the knitting, without engaging with its symbolic register, are missing an opportunity for deeper analysis.

Footsteps and the idea of an approaching crowd echo throughout the novel as well, though this symbol is subtler and less frequently chosen by students. When an essay does take it on, it is worth rewarding the initiative even if the execution needs refinement, since it shows genuine engagement with the text beyond the most obvious symbols.

What Separates Identification From Interpretation

A sentence like "the wine represents blood" identifies a symbol. A sentence explaining why Dickens chooses wine specifically, given its associations with celebration and community, and how that irony deepens the horror of what follows, interprets it. That gap is often exactly where an essay grade should be decided.

• Names the symbol clearly and ties it to a specific passage
• Explains why the author chose that particular object or image
• Connects the symbol to the novel's larger themes, not just the immediate scene
• Tracks how the symbol's meaning develops or shifts across the novel
• Avoids treating symbolic meaning as fixed or singular when the text supports ambiguity

Common Weaknesses in Symbolism Essays

Students frequently treat symbolic meaning as static, arguing that a symbol means one thing throughout the entire novel. In Dickens's case, symbols like the knitting shift in intensity and meaning as the Revolution escalates, and essays that track that evolution demonstrate stronger analytical control.

Another common issue is essays that pile up multiple symbols without developing any of them fully. Encouraging students to go deep on one or two symbols rather than shallow on four or five tends to produce noticeably stronger writing.

Classroom Prep That Improves Essay Quality

Symbol-tracking charts, filled in as students read rather than after finishing the novel, tend to produce essays with more specific, well-placed textual evidence. Waiting until after the novel is finished to search for symbolic passages often leads to vaguer, less precise citations.

Class discussions that debate competing interpretations of a single symbol, rather than settling on one "correct" reading, also model the kind of interpretive flexibility that strong essays require.

Efficient Grading for Symbol-Based Prompts

Because symbolism essays often cluster around the same three or four objects, it helps to keep a short bank of strong and weak example interpretations on hand while grading, which speeds up consistency checks across a large stack of essays.

Flagging essays that rely entirely on summary of the symbol's plot appearances, without any interpretive claim at all, early in the grading process also saves time compared to catching the issue only at the end of a long essay.