John Barsad (Solomon Pross)

John Barsad's real name is Solomon Pross, the long-lost brother of Miss Pross. He conceals his true identity beneath the alias "Barsad" to ensure self-preservation and profit. Operating as a spy and false witness, a known name would be a liability; the alias allows him to serve the English Crown and, later, the French Republic without either master easily tracing his double-dealings.

Barsad is Miss Pross's brother — a relationship he has long since abandoned and exploited. She once gave him money he squandered, and he repaid her loyalty with neglect and shame. Dickens uses this sibling bond as one of his sharpest ironies: Miss Pross, whose fierce, selfless devotion culminates in her struggle with Madame Defarge, shares blood with a man defined by calculating treachery and moral vacancy.

Barsad appears as a Crown informer and gives false, damaging testimony against Darnay at the Old Bailey trial in Book Two, Chapter Three. Presenting himself as a patriotic gentleman acting out of civic duty, he claims intimate personal knowledge of Darnay's treasonous activities. His credibility is demolished when Sydney Carton and Mr. Stryver reveal that a witness so certain he could condemn a man to death failed to distinguish Darnay from Carton, who closely resembles him.

Carton spots Barsad in the Defarges' Paris wine-shop and methodically assembles what he calls his "hand at cards." He holds Barsad's spy status — dangerous to a man of English origins in revolutionary France — and, crucially, Jerry Cruncher's discovery that Roger Cly's coffin was empty, exposing the staged death of Barsad's fellow spy and co-witness. With each card narrowing Barsad's options, Carton leaves him no choice but to provide secret access to Darnay's cell in the Conciergerie.

Cly is Barsad's fellow spy and co-witness at Darnay's London trial, and his faked funeral becomes the decisive weapon Carton wields against Barsad. Jerry Cruncher, working as a resurrection-man, dug up Cly's coffin and found it empty. That discovery gives Carton proof of a fraud Barsad cannot afford to have exposed in Revolutionary Paris, making Cly's staged death — and Cruncher's graveyard activities — the direct mechanism of Barsad's coercion.

Barsad switches sides for purely mercenary reasons — he gravitates toward whoever controls imprisonment, punishment, and reward at any given moment. Dickens signals his moral vacancy through this very adaptability: Barsad does not change his nature between London and Paris, only his employer. His loyalties were never ideological, and his reappearance as a turnkey inside the Conciergerie simply reflects the Revolution reorganizing the market for men willing to trade in access and information.

Barsad faces no punishment whatsoever — he simply vanishes from the narrative, unpunished and unreformed. Dickens's choice to let him survive is itself a dark commentary: the spy's escape, rather than any death or reckoning, stands as the most damning indictment of opportunism. His continued existence highlights, by contrast, the moral stature of those around him — particularly Sydney Carton, whose selfless sacrifice Barsad unwillingly enables.

Barsad is less a villain with interiority than a hollow centre — a man whose defining characteristic is the complete absence of fixed principle. Dickens constructs him not as a scheming antagonist but as an opportunist moved by threat rather than conscience, coerced rather than converted. His role is largely functional: to serve as the instrument through which Carton's plan is executed, and to make the virtues of Miss Pross and Carton more legible by embodying their precise opposites.