Dicken's Tale of Two Cities deals extensively with the tragedies and
             excesses of the French Revolution, in which the peasantry arose against the
             aristocracy. Because the revolution was a war between a farming class and
             the upper class, Dickens acquaints its work with the work of farming.
             Throughout the book he uses farming imagery to describe the work of the
             guillotine and the appearance of the revolutionaries.
             At the beginning of the book, Dickens describes the revolution as the
             Farmer Death. He speaks throughout the book about the inevitability of the
             revolution, and the way it had been gestating and taking seed in the land
             and in the hearts of the people long before it came to fruit. In Chapter
             One he writes: "It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some
             tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the
             weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed
             about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death,had
             already set apart to be his tumbrels of the Revolution." (ch 1)
             He consistently describes the revolutionaries themselves as
             scarecrows. He explains his reasoning behind the metaphor himself,
             suggesting that the revolutionaries are scarecrows and that the aristocrats
             are the birds that should have learned their lesson and fly away. "Every
             wind that blew over France shook the rags of the scarecrows in vain, for
             the birds, fine of song and feather, took no warning." (ch. 5) Sure
             enough, by the end of the book the scarecrows have risen up and started
             killing the birds. " a vast dusky mass of scarecrows heaving to and fro,
             with frequent gleams of light above the billowy heads, where steel blades
             and bayonets shone in the sun." (ch. 21)
             Rather than take a sheerly sympathetic view towards the farmers or
             their victims, Dickens seems to keep a certain degree of balance between
             them. The f...