Quel dommage: Class struggle v jingoism in Tale of Two Cities

So...I'm not crazy. After struggling to remember the plot elements and characters in the first two sections of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and writing them down as best as I could in yesterday's post, even though some of the elements did not seem to tie together and made very little sense to me - I did read a plot synopsis, two actually, and found that my recollections were accurate. Which leads me to conclude that Dickens constructed his plots in very odd ways, which he pushed to the extreme in Tale (and maybe also in his last novel, Our Mutual Friend). No doubt because his style was based on serial publication and depending on grabbing and holding interest immediately and on cliffhanger endings, he not only could not indulge in slow, gradual accrual of character traits and plot details, he had to eschew plot logic at times and build suspense and ambiguity: so in the first section of the book we have a man freed from prison after 18 years (we don't know why), another man on trial for spying against England (we don't know who he is), a lawyer and his sidekick who got the spy acquitted but perhaps through chicanery (we don't know how exactly), and the nasty sidekick bears an uncanny resemblance to the accused (we don't know what that signifies). But we put a lot of faith in Dickens as a great storyteller and plot architect and move along - knowing of course that everything will tie together, even if that entails unlikely coincidences and melodramatic confrontations. And some of this begins to unfold in the third section, where attention shifts back to France and we see the accused and acquitted spy in confrontation with his father?, uncle, a member of the French nobility - renouncing his heritage and denouncing the uncle's entire way of life. Dickens is at his most vitriolic in his portrait of the French nobility - a scene in which the count's carriage strikes and kills a child, to which the count is colossally indifferent and contemptuous, is among the most vivid in the novel - an admirable class sensibility on Dickens's part, but too bad he lets the English nobility off the hook: what could be a novel of class struggle (a la Zola, e.g.) veers toward jingoism. Quel dommage.