Upon closer examination, one may find that the nature of a shadow shares a striking resemblance to the darker aspects of human emotions. Falling by day and omnipresent by night, as apprehension recedes from trust and thrives in ambiguity, shadows clearly display many symbolic characteristics of fear. In his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens visually illustrates this concept through numerous examples of his shadow motif. It draws on the prevalence of oppression vis-à-vis 18th-century France and its evidently dehumanizing effects on its victims, particularly Alexandre and Lucie Manette, as well as on the entire peasant class, to form the image of a fearsome target, often of faced with the shadow of his own repressed fears. As the evidence shows, Dickens appropriately uses visual imagery to describe how the pattern of shadows corresponds to apprehension and fear. To demonstrate the disturbing and terrible aspect of shadows, Dickens specifically uses Alexandre Manette's visual reactions to stimuli that remind him of his dark past. . At first sight of the French aristocrat Charles Darnay, Manette immediately responds with an expression of "antipathy and distrust, not even mingled with fear", as Darnay's resemblance to his sinful ancestors restores the painful memory of their involvement in the past captivity of Handcuffs. Dickens briefly explains how Manette rejects memory and “shakes off the shadow,” introducing the correlation between shadows and apprehension (Dickens 81). Here, Manette's past fears come flooding back to him in a way capable of only a fleeting shadow: sudden but subtle and entirely negligible. Later, however, following Darnay's revelation of his surname to Manette, who co... in the center of the sheet... the disturbing images of Ken's shadows clarify their connection and tendency to imitate the characteristics of Fear. Through Alexandre Manette's apprehensions regarding the inevitable horrors of his past imprisonment, we recognize the follower aspect of both fear and shadows. For shadows, this is literally true; for fears, however, describes the common truth that deeply held fears often stay with someone throughout their life, present but not always active. Through the experiences of Lucie Manette and the revolutionaries, the oppressive aspect of the shadows is revealed: symbolic of fear, the shadows cast themselves on others like tyrants, deprecating them and inducing terror in the process. It goes without saying that Charles Dickens' use of visual imagery builds a strong and solid connection between the concepts of shadows and inherent fear..