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    A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities
    Ebook591 pages10 hours

    A Tale of Two Cities

    By Charles Dickens

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    About this ebook

    A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens’ greatest historical novel, traces the private lives of a group of people caught up in the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the Terror. Dickens based his historical detail on Carlyle’s great work – The French Revolution.

    ‘The best story I have written’ was Dickens’ own verdict on A Tale of Two Cities, and the reader is unlikely to disagree with this judgement of a story which combines historical fact with the author’s unsurpassed genius for poignant tales of human suffering, self-sacrifice, and redemption.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordsworth Editions
    Release dateOct 1, 2011
    ISBN9781848703940
    Author

    Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens was born in 1812 and grew up in poverty. This experience influenced ‘Oliver Twist’, the second of his fourteen major novels, which first appeared in 1837. When he died in 1870, he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey as an indication of his huge popularity as a novelist, which endures to this day.

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    Reviews for A Tale of Two Cities

    4/5

    6,705 ratings190 reviews

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    • 4/5
      It was my first Dickens, it was not my last. It was summer in Chicago and I was surrounded by lovely albeit unruly children. Oh dear, it was a struggle at times, watching three kids while my wife and their mother were in the city. Still I finished the novel over a long afternoon without drugging my charges.

      It is a story of sacrifice, maybe of redemption. I felt for everyone, zealots and drunkards alike. The concluding scaffold scene engendered tears, it has to be admitted. Is there a better novel about the French Revolution, its aspirations and its contradictions?
    • 5/5
      Suuuuuper glad I read this as an adult. I'm sure I appreciated it a lot more than I would have at 15. Not sure if it was reading via audiobook (Dickens' writing is incredibly lyrical), but I really enjoyed this book.
    • 2/5
      over rated
    • 2/5
      The French Revolution takes an interest in a family of expatriates.2/4 (Indifferent).There are some good characters (and also some terrible ones who exist purely to be noble or evil). About half the book is spent dwelling on Big Important Historical Tragedy in a way that guarantees the book is regarded as a Big Important Historical Work. A Tale of Two Cities is to Charles Dickens what Schindler's List is to Steven Spielberg.
    • 5/5
      A Tale of Two Cities with David Copperfield & Great Expectations acclaimed by some as one of the finest of Dickens many superb novels, however, other critics have been much less positive: It really does depend on the reader's viewpoint of Dicken's blend of historical-fiction with very well known events & and cities. It is a story that evokes the thrilling excitement and ghastly butchery of the French Revolution & all the social emotional explosion surrounding it told through the life, love and experiences of French Dr. Manette in Paris, & his daughter Lucie in London. Every student or lover of literature should have read it.
    • 4/5
      A family is caught up in the drama and terror of the French Revolution.Often I can summarize the plot of a classic, even one I have not read, because it's such a touchstone in the general culture. Not so this book. I knew the first line and the last line, but not much about what happened in between (just, blah, blah, blah, French Revolution, blah, blah, blah...). Now, having read it, I still find it a little difficult to summarize. It's a great story, full of love and sacrifice, high ideals and Revolutionary fervor. As with all of the classics I've tackled this year, I'm glad I read it -- and (which is not the case with all the classics I read this year), I'm keeping it on my shelf against the possibility of future rereadings.
    • 5/5
      It's been so long since I read this intense love story that much of it seemed new to me when I read it again. That's not bad. I am always attracted to Dickens' dialogue. His characters feel what they say and they distinctly say what they mean. Sydney Carton, of course, is the protagonist, he does the 18th century version of singing the blues and he's a laid back superhero. I don't mean to disdain his performance; Carton perfects his moral life in a bravely spectacular way, and the escape of Evremonde and his family really is one of literature's most unheralded anticlimaxes.For my money, Miss Pross is the heroine, a classic Dickens supporting character, so haughty, so tenderly solicitous of her Miss Lucie, so contentedly secondary, with such genius of physical and moral courage. Madame Defarge never had a chance when she went up against that pride of the English nation.A reading of Dickens is a swirl of characters you'd really like to meet.Read more on my blog: Barley Literate by Rick
    • 5/5
      Read this book now.
    • 2/5
      Documentair zeker waardevol, maar als roman echt mislukt.Geen doorlopende verhaallijn: de stukjes lijken nergens naar toe te voeren.Stilistisch: soms opflakkerend, maar over het algemeen flauw; overdreven toepassing van de spiegelingstechniek (Londen-Parijs, Darnay-Carton)nogal doorzichtig-sociaal gedreven
    • 4/5
      My favorite Dickens book!
    • 5/5
      "... all through it, I have known myself to be quite undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire..."

      [sigh]

      My love of books began with this novel. When I think about A Tale of Two Cities, and Sydney Carton in particular, I feel the same ache in my chest that I feel when I think about real people I love.

      Dickens had such a brilliant mind. Even his non-fiction work captivates me. Read his "A Visit to Newgate" if you don't know what I'm talking about, and this novel, well there's simply none better.

    • 4/5
      This is book number 22 of the Kings Treasuries of Literature Series. Beside the text of the story itself, the book contains commentaries on: The structure of the story, the historical basis of the story, a memoir of Dickens and some notes and suggestions for student readers. As with all of these little books, it is a pleasure to hold, to see on your shelf and to read.
    • 2/5
       Just okay. I thought it was mostly boring with a few interesting parts thrown in. Glad I listened to the audiobook rather than read it because I don't think I would have been able to finish it otherwise.
    • 2/5
      Story:
      Okay, so, to be entirely affair, I confess that, for reasons I will go into greater detail about later, I did not manage to pay too much attention to this audiobook. The result of which is that I have only a vague idea of what happened. I mean, I think I have the overarching plot pretty firm in my mind, but if there were subtle beauties here, they were lost to me.

      From what I did gather, A Tale of Two Cities is never going to be a favorite Dickens novel for me. Really, it was going to be either his best, most original work or his least good, failed attempt at novelty. His bread and butter was writing about those suffering in England, the poverty, the terrible schools, the diseases, the hypocrisy. Here, he is tackling the French Revolution, which is something rather different.

      My biggest problem, as with so many of the books I do not like, is that I did not connect with any of the characters. The narrative does not really focus on anyone in particular. The omniscient narrator is definitely high above everyone looking down, and, to me, no one looks all that interesting. The bad guys, the good guys...all of them struck me as really blah.

      Sydney Carton is the one I think I'm supposed to sympathize or empathize with. I mean, what could be more romantic than giving up your life so that the woman you love can be happy. Umm, how about you both loving each other and getting to be together? Is that just me? I have never thought tragic, doomed, unrequited, etc. romances were romantic. Romeo and Juliet does not thrill me either. And, really, the reason Sydney doesn't get the girl is that he's kind of an ass. Just sayin'. Also, I really don't get his noble sacrifice. In the real world, would he ever have been able to swap himself in for the guillotine? Because I doubt it.

      From my imperfect trip through this novel, I would recommend going back and watching the Wishbone episode instead of reading it, but, again, I may be wrong.
      Performance:
      Now, you may be wondering how on earth I spent over 14 hours of my life listening to a novel and end up having very little idea of most of what happened within that book. Well, here's how. Simon Prebble has narrated a lot of things, which must mean a lot of people think he's a really great narrator. I do not however.

      Prebble seems to have just the wrong voice for me. I don't know if I'm unique in this or not, but I literally cannot pay attention to his voice. Part of the joy of audiobooks is that you can read and do other things (laundry, your dishes, pet the cat, rake the lawn, grocery shopping, drive, etc.). I have done so with all of the ones I have listened to. With this one, though, I could not pay attention. Desperate, I tried reading along with the audiobook. Even then, it took every bit of brain power for me to focus on this man.

      You may think I'm exaggerating, but I'm really not. Something about Prebble's voice made me tune out, and tuning back in was pretty much impossible. This was just the strangest and most unfortunate experience. There are narrators I've hated more, but I missed nothing. How is that possible?
    • 5/5
      A Tale of Two Cities is at once a factual horror story and a fictional romance.Set in both London and Paris at the time of The French Revolution, it offers a terrifying portrayalof the descent of human beings, both aristocrats and peasants, into murderous anarchy.That Sydney Carton, whose full story we never learn, makes the ultimate sacrifice does not balance or redeem the sheer horror of what Dickens has described.And what of Charles Darnay? - whose reckless trip plunged his family and friends into a blood soaked city - how will he face the days of his life knowing that his stupidity cost his friend his life?Charles Dickens gives us a masterful skewing of the governments of both France and England,as well as toppling their religious leaders.
    • 2/5
      Okay, so technically I haven't finished reading it but as far as I am concerned I have. Let's not be pedantic about this - I read over half and found it so excruciatingly tiresome that I couldn't force myself through the remaining pages. I looked up what happened next on wikipedia and concluded that nothing much happened next that would validate me wasting more hours or days dragging myself through a book I did not like.For a book that is "One of the most beloved of Dickens' stories" according to the quote on the front cover or "The greatest of his historical novels" I feel very cheated and rather sad too.This book starts with the famous opener: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."That is fantastic! Reading that I thought I was going to be onto a good 'un! However, just shows that you can't judge a book by its opening paragraph.I have loved Bleak House, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol so it's a shame I find myself giving two stars to an author I have loved in the past. I'm glad this was not my first Dickens as I do not think I would have read any others. I am very disappointed in this book as well as in part, myself for not finishing it. This would have made a much better short story I believe. There was not a plot worth speaking of and the characters were all very thin and one dimensional. Much of the French revolution was described in metaphors and complex symbolism unravelling it all was a bit like trying to find your way through a maze.I have loved Dicken's writing style, it is beautiful, humorous and full of heart, soul and humanity. However, this time it felt like digging my way through a lot of surplus words which had lost their effect long before I could appreciate them. I don't know what got into Dickens when writing this book. It felt very empty and devoid of his usual humour and interesting characters. I can't wait to read another one of his and put this one firmly at the back of my memory so that I can once again hold a high opinion of Charles Dickens.
    • 4/5
      A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens is an interesting book with defined characters, nice use of dialect, good setting descriptions when it can, and (most important of all) a vigorous story that taps into a well of raw emotion; rage against wrongful injustices and empathy for the noble characters who never rest in their battles.We start the story slowly, with a few characters: A banker by the name of Jarvis Lorry, his assistant Jerry Cruncher, a young Frenchman known as Charles Darnay, a scarred doctor named Alexandre Manette, his daughter Lucy, her friend Miss Pross, and an attorney’s assistant named Sidney Carton. Sidney and Darnay are unconnected with the others’ social group until both fall in love with the fair Lucy. Lucy chooses to marry Charles, but Sidney stays by her side, friend-zoned until the end of his days. Soon after, Charles receives a letter from an old friend named Gabelle, who has been captured by revolutionaries (Charles & the gang were in England, but during this time the French Revolution had broken out and the normal people were taking over France from the aristocrats) and needs Charles to come right now to bail him out by saying he’s a good guy and shouldn’t be executed. Because in the French revolution, the rebels executed everybody for every crime, even if they had made it up themselves just to get more people to kill, and they did that a lot too. Up to 40 people a day, I think, were fed to the Guillotine (referred to as the “Barber”). And so Charles went on his way, but even Admiral Ackbar couldn’t have saved him, as IT’S A TRAP! Yes, Charles Darnay came into France, was taken to a town, forced to pay for “escorts”, and was “escorted” to La Force prison. The family came out and tried to help him, the doctor being especially persuasive as he was a Bastille prisoner (and was therefore wronged by the rich), but there was no way out. Charles was to be executed the next day. But then Sidney showed up and made an incredibly heroic (though a bit predictable) move for love. And that’s pretty much it.In my personal opinion it was interesting as I’ve already said. I noticed a few pages written in first person as opposed to 3rd person. Not to mention almost the whole last chapter being written in present tense and not past-tense. There was no defined main character. There was a doctor who wanted to be a shoemaker for no apparent reason. London (one of the 2 cities, the other being Paris) was hardly part of the story. And in the first few chapters, it features normal people doing normal things, such as reading the paper, drinking coffee, taking a walk or even talking about the weather. Those are the things that annoy me about it, setting the otherwise spectacular writing back a few steps. But I feel generous. I’ll say 4 out of 5 stars to A Tale of Two Cities
    • 3/5
      I'm not really sure what to say about this; parts of it were really good, but huge chunks felt like filler. It's rather obvious that this was published as a serial; a substantial amount of it has the feelings of a "penny a page" hack type work. The overall story was good, but just so.much.crap in the middle of it.
    • 4/5
      First of all, Dickens deserves some credit for creating the popular image of the French Revolution. Its portrayal in movies and other books such as The Scarlet Pimpernel series is based far more on A Tale of Two Cities than on reality. He also earns some points for the fact that, being Dickens, he shows remarkable sympathy for the poor in France leading up to the revolution. Even if once the revolution begins he tends to depict them as fiendish vultures and the the entire period of the republic as just as bloody as the most intense weeks of the Terror, he shows the justification for the revolution more than many of the authors who followed him did. The story itself is serial melodrama, but it's very good serial melodrama, and holds up to rereading.
    • 4/5
      Less flowing and coherent than I expected. Sections are good (and highly quotable) reads but the frequency of quotations from this isn't a reflection of the prose throughout - overall it is very uneven. Different for Dickens, in that it is historical, but the same in that his reliance on outrageous coincidence and the Victorian trademark sentimentality are strongly present. The city hopping makes it still more bitty.
    • 5/5
      Plenty has been written about A Tale of Two Cities so I’ll keep my synopsis short. The two cities are London and Paris during the French Revolution and we get wrapped up in the stories of sacrifice and redemption surrounding some extraordinary characters. During the first Book I was hesitant as to how much I would like A Tale of Two Cities, but it is now my favorite Dickens by far! There were a lot more characters introduced initially so it wasn’t clear who the protagonist was. This was also historical fiction, a departure from the Dickens I am fond of, and I felt a little lost with my lack of knowledge about the French Revolution. But I persevered and am so glad I did. The characters were remarkable and memorable, the prose was very atmospheric and beautiful, and there was adventure and twists and turns that I barely saw coming. I cringed, I cheered, I laughed, I cried.
    • 5/5
      One of my favourite Dickens novels, with a gripping plot and memorable characters, and an ending that will make the strongest man sob like a child.
    • 3/5
      Listened to this on CD. 20 CDs. I am a Dickens fan, but this one was too much for me. To romance-y and not hilarious like Pickwick, and often kind of stiffly moralistic and prune-faced. So far this is my least favorite Dickens, by about a mile. It's still better than 90% of everything else, of course. Dickens' characters are so rich, so real, and ultimately so believable.
    • 5/5
      A classic for all ages.
    • 5/5
      This book has one of the greatest opening statements and also one of the greatest closing statements in all of literature. I've read it more than once, and every time the ending leaves me in tears. Each time I read it, I discover something I overlooked in my previous readings. It hadn't sunk in until this time through how long a time span is covered in the book – from the American Revolution to the French Revolution, a period of 15-20 years. I always had a mental image of Lucy as a young woman, but she must be approaching middle age by the end of the book.I think Dickens' real genius is in his characters and the world they inhabit. Although the plot details grow fuzzy between readings, the characters remain alive: Dr. Manette and his shoe bench; Mrs. Cruncher and her floppin'; Madame Defarge and her knitting; Sidney Carton, ever conscious of his moral weakness, yet capable of one great act of courage and sacrifice. This novel is on my top ten list, and it's one that I think everyone should read at least once.
    • 4/5
      Though typically assigned as part of the curriculum in American high schools, most readers at this stage of their lives won't appreciate the spectacle and may walk away thinking they've learned a history lesson. However, Dickens was known to play fast and loose with historical facts, molding them as needed to suit his story, and what a story it is. France is boiling over, the common folk have been bled dry, financially, physically, politically, by the elite, aristocratic class. Owning no property, they can barely raise enough food to sustain themselves, and often, when the taxman cometh to claim the right of the landowners and obtain their due, the common folk may well starve. Conspiracies are hatched, freed prisoners are exploited, lists are kept.Against this backdrop, a Frenchman escaping his family's past marries a woman who has only recently found that her father is very much alive and did not perish in a political prison in France. Residing in England, the happy family should be able to escape the terribly bloodletting about to overwhelm the Gallic countryside. Alas, this is a Dickens tale, so contrivances and surprise, almost incredulous plot points are the rule and our heroes find themselves caught up in the Revolution and a possible date with the guillotine.Less socially critical than his earlier work, Dickens still manages to blame the Terror on the hubris of the wealthy elites; after all, you can only keep a populace oppressed for so long. Yet, the overexuberance of the reprisals and the score-settling of the tribunals and executioners is also cast in a murky light.Read it as the romantic adventure it was meant to be, not as the erroneous historical narrative which has assumed mythological proportions. Fun? Yes. Accurate? In a broad, overly generalized way. As a fine example of the cliffhanger storytelling which dominated mid 19th century English literature, it rightfully assumes its place amongst the classics.
    • 4/5
      Heart strings definitely pulled on this one. I never had to read this in high school, and I'm actually glad because I don't think I would have appreciated it as much. I enjoyed the blend of history, drama, and romance. The characters are all so richly developed, you really become vested in their respective journeys. I practically cried reading the last paragraph. Awesome.
    • 4/5
      It's good. Who knew?
    • 4/5
      The ending was the best!!! Of course it was a little predictable, but nevertheless beautifully written. However, the language doesn't have true a realism, I feel it is more a tale than a novel, hence the title.
    • 3/5
      Great ending... brings the French revolution alive...

    Book preview

    A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

    A Tale of Two Cities

    Charles Dickens

    with an Introduction and Notes

    by Peter Merchant

    WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

    A Tale of Two Cities first published by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 1993

    New introduction and notes added in 1999

    Introduction and notes © Peter Merchant 1999

    Published as an ePublication 2011

    ISBN 978 1 84870 394 0

    Wordsworth Editions Limited

    8B East Street, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 9HJ

    Wordsworth® is a registered trademark of

    Wordsworth Editions Limited

    All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

    Readers interested in other titles from Wordsworth Editions are invited to visit our website at

    www.wordsworth-editions.com

    For our latest list of printed books, and a full mail-order service contact

    Bibliophile Books, Unit 5 Datapoint,

    South Crescent, London E16 4TL

    Tel: +44 020 74 74 24 74

    Fax: +44 020 74 74 85 89

    orders@bibliophilebooks.com

    www.bibliophilebooks.com

    For my husband

    ANTHONY JOHN RANSON

    with love from your wife, the publisher

    Eternally grateful for your

    unconditional love

    Contents

    General Introduction

    Introduction

    Notes to the Introduction

    Further Reading

    A Tale of Two Cities

    Book the First: Recalled to Life

    1. The Period

    2. The Mail

    3. The Night Shadows

    4. The Preparation

    5. The Wine Shop

    6. The Shoemaker

    Book the Second: The Golden Thread

    1. Five Years Later

    2. A Sight

    3. A Disappointment

    4. Congratulatory

    5. The Jackal

    6. Hundreds of People

    7. Monseigneur in Town

    8. Monseigneur in the Country

    9. The Gorgon’s Head

    10. Two Promises

    11. A Companion Picture

    12. The Fellow of Delicacy

    13. The Fellow of No Delicacy

    14. The Honest Tradesman

    15. Knitting

    16. Still Knitting

    17. One Night

    18. Nine Days

    19. An Opinion

    20. A Plea

    21. Echoing Footsteps

    22. The Sea Still Rises

    23. Fire Rises

    24. Drawn to the Loadstone Rock

    Book the Third: The Track of a Storm

    1. In Secret

    2. The Grindstone

    3. The Shadow

    4. Calm in Storm

    5. The Wood-sawyer

    6. Triumph

    7. A Knock at the Door

    8. A Hand of Cards

    9. The Game Made

    10. The Substance of the Shadow

    11. Dusk

    12. Darkness

    13. Fifty-two

    14. The Knitting Done

    15. The Footsteps Die Out For Ever

    Notes

    General Introduction

    Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

    General Adviser

    Keith Carabine

    Rutherford College

    University of Kent at Canterbury

    Introduction

    After some procrastination Charles Dickens, who had long known that he wanted to compose such a story, started planning and writing A Tale of Two Cities in early 1859. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of seismology. Or at least, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the vocabulary was taking shape. ‘Seismic’ and ‘seismically,’ ‘seismograph’ and ‘seismographic,’ ‘seismometry’ and ‘seismometric,’ as well as ‘seismology’ itself, had all entered the language within the past twelve months. Halfway through Dickens’s novel, in Chapter xvi of Book the Second, Madame Defarge duly comes forward as a seismologist avant la lettre, using the example of an earthquake to suggest both how suddenly momentous events can occur and how long and how slow, in that case, the growth towards them is likely to have been. A Tale of Two Cities would in fact rumble on for a further sixteen weeks, serialised in Dickens’s own new magazine All the Year Round; but, for a book whose historical subject plainly demanded extensive preparation, the interval of growing and gathering between Dickens’s decision to proceed with the novel and its published conclusion was still peculiarly short. Within the same year that had seen work upon the project begin, the novelist was able to lead his readers – and his hero, Sydney Carton – proudly up to the most emphatic ending in the Dickens canon.

    Few other novelists have managed, or even attempted, to match the energy and enterprise which in 1859 enabled Charles Dickens so to compress the processes of reading, research and writing as to turn A Tale of Two Cities into the labour of less than a year. Even at the height of his fame, his ambition evidently burned as fiercely as before, and the pace at which he worked was unrelenting. In the terms of the Tale, he remained a Stryver – thrusting tirelessly forward into new areas and fresh ventures with which, both as writer and as public figure, he might consolidate his position in the front rank. In particular, in a thrilling move for the literary lion that Dickens incontestably now was, he had just entered upon a lucrative additional career giving public readings of excerpts from his works. The success of Dickens’s first professional tour in 1858 ensured that he would resume these solo recitals as soon as other commitments allowed. In the meantime Dickens carried over into A Tale of Two Cities his past year’s habit of intensifying his effects to suit the presence of an audience and the conditions of a platform performance. The prose, therefore, is marked by much rhetorical heightening; and stagy patterns both of dialogue and of gesture become the novel’s Loadstone Rock, to which its author is irresistibly drawn. All of this would soon have jarred, perhaps, but for its appropriateness to a subject – revolutionary France – which, in so far as it involved a parading of politics in the public space of streets and squares, was already inherently theatrical. Dickens pressed home that initial advantage decisively enough to make the Tale a compelling vindication of the histrionic manner in prose fiction.

    It was an arduous undertaking, however, and beset with uncertainties. For A Tale of Two Cities emerges out of a rapidly ramifying crisis in Dickens’s life. Never in his career as a novelist had he had to sustain his striving against so dark a background. He recognised that he was taking a major step into the unknown with his public readings, which as well as taxing his stamina would put his popularity to the test night after night. He had just separated from his wife Catherine after twenty-two years of marriage, and had ended his fourteen-year association with the publishers Bradbury and Evans. Everything apparently conspired to make this a time of unprecedented rupture and upheaval, both professionally and personally; and the consequences could hardly fail to invade Dickens’s imaginative life. Even the sternest of minds might have hankered achingly after the salve of a stable home, and felt a certain wistfulness about the evaporated promise of family togetherness and conjugal love. Thomas Malthus himself – represented by Dickens as the very type of the unfeeling economist – had memorably affirmed that, once a man has glimpsed such fulfilment, he looks back upon it ‘as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves to bask’. [1]

    A Tale of Two Cities has a sunny spot of its own, sure enough, which is vividly described by Dickens. Just as One Hundred and Five, North Tower, is the dark part of Doctor Manette’s life (p. 152), so the quiet corner in Soho is the ‘sunny’ part of Jarvis Lorry’s (p. 73) – and not merely because he visits it on Sundays. It is here that the Manettes have taken their London lodgings, and here, therefore, that Mr Lorry can observe primary human relationships (father and child, and later wife and husband) which are purely satisfying. The house not only shelters some of those requiring a physical ‘Refuge’ (p. 101) but stands as an image of the comfort that might be sought by an emotional refugee, from domestic discord and marital failure. Small wonder that the imagination of the novelist loves to bask there, returning at critical moments throughout Book the Second. Both for the convalescing Doctor Manette himself and more generally for the institution of the family, menaced and mangled everywhere else in the novel, the Soho street-corner becomes a place of tranquil restoration. Dickens calls it ‘an anchorage’ (p. 74), making it both a precious port in a storm – to set against the metaphors of swollen seas and shipwreck which will herald the ‘raging Revolution’ – and a hermit’s, or anchorite’s, retreat.

    In any case, the Soho to which the Manettes have come contrasts tellingly with that ‘most violent Quarter’ of revolutionary Paris (p. 215), Saint Antoine. The house in Soho, where ‘country airs circulated . . . with vigorous freedom’ (p. 73), is Lucie’s sanatorium for loving ‘back to life and hope’ (p. 35) all those in need of these things from such a ‘gentle angel’ (p. 37) as she is. The Paris suburb, on the other hand, has Thérèse Defarge – the remorseless recording angel of the ‘corner shop’ (p. 26) – and her ever-expanding list of those marked down for death. It is to these two locations, furthermore, that Dickens assigns the two main movements – simultaneous yet opposed – of the novel’s plot. In Soho begins a golden thread connecting one good deed to another ‘far, far better’. Lucie, the angel in the house of Doctor Manette, first effects the moral rescue of Sydney Carton: instilling a new sense of purpose into a man both ‘irresolute’ (p. 120) and ‘dissolute’ (p. 168); encouraging him, he says, to shake off sensuality and sloth (p. 122); pointing him toward ‘the best part’ of his life (p. 121) and ‘the better side’ (p. 252) of himself. And Carton ultimately reciprocates with nothing less than the physical rescue of Lucie’s husband, laying down his own life in order that those he values more than himself might still have theirs. Saint Antoine, contrariwise, becomes the site of a bloody spiral of revenge in which present evil answers past evil. For Madame Defarge, here, reciprocation works in the reverse direction. We learn from a paper concealed by Doctor Manette inside a prison chimney (and by Dickens inside his sixth last chapter) that years ago she suffered a very great wrong; and now she plans to return it with interest. Not even the guillotine itself is a more terrible ‘retributive instrument’ (p. 306) than Madame Defarge, making the destruction of her own family a reason for slaughtering everyone descended from the destroyers: ‘ . . . the Evrémonde people are to be exterminated, and the wife and child must follow the husband and father’ (p. 293). Intent upon that mission of extermination, she is as implacable as ‘a tigress’ (p. 295) and just as difficult to balk of her prey.

    The progressively developing contrast between the angelic Lucie and the demonic Madame Defarge (with Miss Pross, paralleled to some extent with them both, in an intermediate position) has been variously analysed. Where it is informed by recent work on Victorian ideas of the feminine, analysis tends to collapse the opposition into a paradoxical identity; the repressive sentimentalisation which produces gentle angels such as Lucie leaves them – it is argued – convertible into so many Thérèse Defarges, as ‘the angel’s otherworldly power translates itself imperceptibly into a demonism that destroys all families and all houses’ (Auerbach, p. 4). [2] But equally, in A Tale of Two Cities, this opposition translates itself into oppositions of other kinds, which interlock with it and repeatedly redetermine its value. Dickens directs the reader’s attention as much to contrasts of setting as to contrasts of character, proposing Saint Antoine and Soho as diametrically different neighbourhoods in the apparently dissimilar capitals of unlike nations; or, in a subtle variation, the contrarieties of good and bad that either type of pairing presents are incarnated in specific single individuals. The figure most prone to such internal division, because his status as the ‘middling hero’ which historical fiction has been described as demanding [3] must result from a hard-won equilibrium of opposed forces, is Sydney Carton. Morally, as well as temperamentally, he is ‘seesaw Sydney’ (p. 71) – burdened with vices liable at any moment to make him ‘sink lower’ (p. 121) but exhibiting at the same time a preparedness to be ‘changed and raised’ (p. 243). He is, Lucie insists, ‘capable of good things, gentle things, even magnanimous things’ (p. 169).

    Mr Stryver’s ‘seesaw Sydney’ is also self-isolating Sydney, positive that there is ‘no man on earth’ for whom he cares or who cares for him (p. 67). And yet, precisely because of his bewilderingly variable moral capacities, he can be seen as representing the condition of humanity en masse. The novel makes that seesawing instability of Carton’s perfectly congruent, in several key scenes, with the volatile behaviour of large crowds. All that is needed to transform a generous and merciful multitude into a vicious rabble, Dickens suggests, is that it should be ‘carried by another current’ (p. 233). And the same crowd which collectively sinks to appalling acts of savagery will have acted just beforehand ‘with the gentlest solicitude’ (p. 220). A Tale of Two Cities accordingly becomes a register into which are knitted, alongside outrages cruel enough for the Ogreish tastes of any Old Bailey spectator (pp. 49–50), very many good and gentle and magnanimous acts, performed by people who (to use two of the novel’s key adjectives) are ‘faithful’ and ‘serviceable’. Dickens assembles a sizeable saving remnant of such people. There is Doctor Manette, ‘silent, humane, indispensable’ (p. 223) and ‘faithful to all men’ (p. 306); there is ‘the ever zealous and faithful Pross’ (p. 234), who embodies ‘the vigorous tenacity of love’ (p. 300); there is the ‘fidelity’ of Monsieur Gabelle (p. 196) and of Jarvis Lorry (p. 211), whose desire ‘to do [his] part faithfully’ (p. 282) is shared by all of these characters. Their fidelity is calculated to counteract that ‘infidelity,’ in the religious sense, which Dickens sees as a root cause of the troubles in France. He indicates, at least, that the Cross was discarded and denied in revolutionary Paris (p. 223), where before there had been too much indulgence of ‘Unbelieving Philosophers remodelling the world with words’ (p. 85). Even as Dickens wrote this, the Victorians were themselves battling unbelief (and the first few chapters of The Origin of Species were already in the hands of Charles Darwin’s publishers); so any warning about the dangers of atheism might well take on an urgent topicality. Topical or not, the assumption steering A Tale of Two Cities is that – in the words which, once remembered (or ‘recalled to life’) by Sydney Carton, become the refrain of Book the Third – salvation belongs to ‘whosoever . . . believeth’ (pp. 256, 306); and faithfulness is as much the corollary of faith as La Guillotine is the opposite of the Cross. Carton’s own moral salvation stems, therefore, from the ‘rugged air of fidelity’ (p. 166) with which Lucie’s influence endues him. The example of a woman known to be ‘brave and serviceable’ (p. 212), ‘quietly loyal and good’ (p. 224) and true to her father ‘with all [her] duty and with all [her] faithful service’ (p. 37) is ideal incitement to those ‘little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love’ which Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey’ had characterised as the ‘best portion of a good man’s life’.

    As ‘best’ surpasses ‘good’, so Carton surpasses himself in Paris. And he does it so spectacularly that neither the deed nor the doer can possibly remain ‘nameless, unremembered’. The combined efforts of Lucie’s surviving son and of Dickens himself ensure, indeed, that his name is ‘made illustrious’ (p. 307). A man who hitherto has ‘done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by’ (p. 253) is redeemed not by numerous little acts of kindness and of love, but by a single act so large as to outweigh everything. By any standards, and certainly if the principle is maintained that ‘there is nothing . . . better than the faithful service of the heart’ (pp. 76–7), Carton ends by doing ‘a far, far better thing’ (p. 307) than he has ever done. There is, at last, a real sense of light piercing cloud (p. 120); and this is all the stronger because Dickens places the act amid an atmosphere of palpable horror and increasing brutality. He subscribes, it appears, to the view subsequently expressed – in ‘In Tenebris II’ – by Thomas Hardy: ‘if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.’ A novel which defines the general condition of humankind as continually composed of giddying fluctuations is in any case committed to an unblinking and unflinching look at the worst, as well as at the best. Its first dozen words, with ‘the best’ and ‘the worst’ already placed by Dickens in syntactically parallel positions, set the pattern. The remainder of the opening chapter conforms, offering by way of prologue a vision of a seesaw world in which City tradesmen intermingle with highwaymen and wretched pilferers are the near neighbours of atrocious murderers.

    This opening chapter of A Tale of Two Cities is the shortest chapter of all. So it is doubly remarkable that Dickens should make it suffice for his reader’s initiation into a particular way of organising experience, as well as a particular set of prose rhythms, through which the novel’s chief structural strategies (the contrasted settings, the insinuation of contrasts within or between certain characters) are themselves proleptically revealed. For the Tale’s original readers, following its successive instalments in All the Year Round, the chapter’s value was indeed as a compact epitome of what would fill the next seven months. The balanced sentences of the opening – where phrase is pitched against phrase, clause answers clause, and almost every mark of punctuation seems the fulcrum upon which some stylistic seesaw moves – announce in advance the larger divisions of the narrative. Dickens’s sequencing ensures that the Two Cities of his title will be as effectively balanced and ‘blended’ for us as for little Lucie (pp. 170–1); we will move from country to country more frequently than even the most mobile characters in the cast. And even as we begin to read we are being given notice that this alternation will always contain an implicit cross-comparison. For, the novel’s first sentence having put ‘the best’ and ‘the worst’ in parallel positions, the next sentence does the same with ‘England’ and ‘France’.

    Critics cannot agree, however, about either the rationale or the upshot of the novel’s measurement of England against France. The Bibliography appended to this Introduction includes different and often contradictory views. [4] Nicholas Rance, for instance, makes the suggestion that A Tale of Two Cities begins by seeing revolutionary France as an example to Victorian England, and England as a potential France. Whereas Darnay shows Carton what he has ‘fallen away from’ (p. 68), France shows England what it could fall into; the English, carried by another current, might go – even now – where the French once went. Yet the more closely Dickens examines the French Revolution the more impossible it becomes to discern (or, at least, to admit to discerning) any firm connection – so that in the end, according to Rance, the novel nullifies the ‘admonitory thesis’ with which it began. Rance’s own thesis, if not nullified, is at any rate neatly reversed by what Cates Baldridge says of the shifting image of bourgeois London in Dickens’s Tale: offered initially as ‘a reassuring counterpoint’ to insurgent Paris, but emerging more and more as its ‘equally hideous mirror image’. In Baldridge’s reading, therefore, the cross-comparison tends not towards a demonstration of absolute difference but towards a discovery of latent kinship. On a national level, this time, contrast is collapsed into a paradoxical identity. The idea is developed in Bjørn Tysdahl’s account of the novel’s ‘grammar of comparison’, which (for example) finds a ‘basic similarity’ joining the London branch of Tellson’s Bank both to the Defarges’ wine-shop and to the Bastille. He and many other commentators point to several moments when what occurs in or near one of the two cities in question reflects what has occurred in and around the other, and unfolds its implications. Thus, Foulon’s ‘grand mock-funeral’ (p. 180) can be read as an echo of Roger Cly’s (pp. 124ff.), since that too ‘was a take in’ (p. 248); and John Carey observes that the Marquis’s carriage toiling up ‘a steep hill’ (p. 91) grotesquely mirrors the initial lumbering of the Dover mail (pp. 5ff.).

    The repetitive patterning of A Tale of Two Cities can be accounted for in perhaps two ways. One explanation would be that the repetition results straightforwardly from the form. It is not only encouraged but positively required by the obviously sectional structure of any serialised novel. Without the cues supplied by suggestive kinds of repetition, readers proceeding at the rate of a little every week (or even a little every month) may not recall with sufficient clarity what has gone before. Help for such readers, moreover, can be as subtle and unobtrusive as the writer wishes; very often, in order for entire clusters of memories to be effectively reactivated, it is merely necessary that some small detail attaching to those memories should recur. Dickens in fact tests this with an experiment of his own, as soon as a conversation with Doctor Manette (pp. 161ff.) has persuaded Jarvis Lorry of the principle. For he ends the chapter that contains this conversation by having Mr Lorry, suitably assisted by Miss Pross, hack the Doctor’s bench to pieces (p. 166); and in the following week’s instalment a little fixative detail, the battering to bits of the same man’s old worm-eaten table and stool (p. 177), will lock the reader instantly back into the whole of the episode which was thus concluded. Alternatively, and above all in the book’s scenes of political violence, the various repetitions threaded into the Tale may be understood as Dickens’s attempt to impart a phantasmagoric feel to what he describes. If France’s descent into chaos is to appear the same ‘awful nightmare’ to us as to Doctor Manette (p. 220), the novel needs to evoke that sense of eternal recurrence which is one of the features of nightmare; Mr Lorry’s reveries in the mail-coach, at least, consist of the same face showing itself to him in a multitude of ways, and the same question asked a hundred times over (p. 12). Dickens’s plot proves perfect for this purpose. Interlacing at various junctures two or three events which are replicas of one another (Darnay’s trials) or two or three people who are one another’s proxies (Darnay standing in the dock for a third time, with a blood-guilt pinned upon him which really belongs to his forefathers; Carton then standing in the tumbril, Darnay’s ‘counterpart’ to the last and about to accept Darnay’s punishment), it contrives an apparently unstoppable accumulation and transmission of suffering. It conveys by those means the same obsessively insistent iteration that marked the reveries of Jarvis Lorry. And history in this novel comes to seem the sort of nightmare from which anyone involuntarily caught up in it would certainly, like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, be trying to awake.

    In so far as there is any hope of an awakening from the dreadful night of systematised Terror, that hope is vested in the character who controls what I have called the novel’s sunny spot and whose name’s Latin root makes her its bright shining light. Wisdom and comfort and cheerfulness radiate, therefore, from Lucie Manette. The things that are good, gentle and magnanimous in A Tale of Two Cities are generally done by those to whom this ‘baby, girl, and woman’ (p. 107) is daughter or wife or mother, or whom she otherwise tenderly draws into her circle of influence. And it is around her that the redeeming possibility of a protected private life set apart from the darkness and disfigurements of public history crystallises. This reversion to the safe anchorage of the domestic and the feminine is a familiar reflex in Victorian fiction. In 1985 it prompted Ruth Bernard Yeazell to enquire (in connection not with Dickens but with Disraeli, Gaskell and Eliot) ‘why political novels have heroines’. In books which open up potentially dangerous ‘social and political anxieties,’ she suggested, these figures are needed not so much for resolution as for relief; their presence enables a novelist to ‘substitute the narrative of the conventional heroine for one of political violence’ (Yeazell, p. 143). That same substitution has since come to be regarded by many writers on Dickens as the most interesting and revealing aspect of the Tale. For them, the challenge that the novel sets involves seeking to make satisfactory sense of Lucie, and of all she represents, in relation to the political storms which reverberate round about. John B. Lamb and Catherine Waters have both very convincingly done so. ‘In A Tale of Two Cities,’ writes Waters (p. 124), ‘the Victorian middle-class family appears to promise a haven of true love and humanity in the midst of the Revolution.’ ‘Domestic ideology,’ writes Lamb (p. 236), ‘becomes the primary containment strategy by which Dickens attempts to morally manage and ultimately repudiate the forces of revolution.’

    Yet, as if Dickens’s novel had the same ‘magic secret’ as Lucie herself (p. 172) and could thus become all things to all readers, it also comfortably accommodates and richly rewards critical approaches markedly different from these. While critics like Waters and Lamb highlight the family as a locus of value and a base for recovery and reparation, the emphasis falls elsewhere upon Dickens’s understanding of those ‘forces of revolution’ whose unleashing is what moves him to that ringing affirmation. This means that it falls upon Dickens’s absorption of Thomas Carlyle, whose mammoth history The French Revolution (1837) shaped the novelist’s understanding indispensably, while also enabling him – by the emphasis it threw upon certain vividly realised scenes – to discover crucial elements of drama in the events recounted. The contributions made to A Tale of Two Cities by ‘Mr Carlyle’s wonderful book’ (as Dickens’s Preface would generously term it) have always been obvious; but from those scholars who have continued to explore them – including Andrew Sanders and Michael Timko – comes some of the most illuminating criticism that the novel has ever drawn.

    Nor is this reference of Dickens’s work to its most important (and openly acknowledged) source the only possible way of supplementing the insights of Waters and Lamb. For while the figure of Lucie is central to their readings of the Tale, either because she is ‘the novel’s chief resurrectionist’ (Lamb, p. 232) or because of ‘the unifying power of the domestic woman in Victorian culture’ (Waters, p. 147), other characters besides her have both attracted and deserved to attract comparably close critical attention. There are commentators exercised above all by the riddle of Sydney Carton, apparently a sphinx-like amalgam of Richard Wardour from Wilkie Collins’s play The Frozen Deep (a character whom, in circumstances to be recalled in the novel’s Preface, Dickens had recently portrayed on stage) and Richard Doubledick from an earlier piece of Dickens’s own called ‘The Seven Poor Travellers’ (again very fresh in his mind in 1859 because he had abridged and adapted it for the previous year’s public readings). There are also commentators interested in those (usually obscurer) nurseries from which the character of Doctor Manette might have been ‘dug out’. According to one authority, Dickens’s forgotten contemporary John Frederick Smith planted the seed; but another goes back to M. G. Lewis’s melodrama The Castle Spectre. [5]

    One final sally of source-hunting, which also involves Doctor Manette, may help to focus some of Dickens’s general themes and ideas. Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), for years one of Dickens’s favourite books, contains a famous sequence in which the narrator contemplates the Bastille and conjures up the figure of a solitary prisoner, ‘half wasted away’, ‘pale and feverish’ for want of sunlight, and measuring out his long captivity with notches on a stick. It is a fragmentary yet powerful prefiguring of the imprisonment of Dickens’s ‘withered and worn’ Doctor Manette (p. 33), complete of course with improvised calendar (p. 177). Contrastingly, the sunny spot of Sterne’s book is the Traveller’s chance meeting with a family of French peasants, who invite him to share their supper of wine and bread and lentil soup. And afterwards, in front of the farmhouse, they join in a dance which is both an act of worship and an expression of joy. [6] As the common folk of France leave A Sentimental Journey, so they enter Dickens’s Tale: gathered together, and as if at play. But the ‘wine game’ in Saint Antoine (pp. 23–4) stands Sterne’s scene on its head. The cheerful communion shown by Sterne is, we can now see, destined to become a cannibalistic supping up of human blood. It duly does so at the grindstone, of course (pp. 213–14), where the turning action of the two ruffians grimly parodies the playing on the vielle for the peasants’ dance in A Sentimental Journey.

    The same deliberate debasement can be seen in Dickens’s set-piece description of that aptest emblem of escalating national frenzy, the revolutionary Carmagnole (pp. 226–7); ‘a fallen sport’, he calls it, and ‘a something, once innocent, delivered over to all devilry’. Beneath the wild whirling of Dickens’s ‘five thousand demons’ there still lies Sterne’s picture of sportive country dancing, therefore, although – like everything about the France from which it came – it has now ‘gone raving mad’. This convergence of contradictory images, one so edifying and the other so horrifying, very usefully maps the two poles between which Dickens’s attitude to the ‘gaunt scarecrows’ (p. 25) who make France their Republic is liable to swing. Moreover, it adds corroborative weight to the sense that several critics share of inconsistencies, anomalies, sudden revulsions of feeling in the novel: Dickens’s view of the Revolution ‘oscillat[es] between . . . sympathy and horrified antagonism’, or he ‘changes sides in the middle of the story’, or he underlays a ‘muffled discourse of subversion’. [7] There is no harm in conceding, now that the term is available to us, [8] that some such ideological ‘faultline’ does indeed run through A Tale of Two Cities. For this phenomenon is far from ‘grind[ing] to pieces everything before it’, like the earthquake imagined by Madame Defarge (p. 144). Rather, it is constitutive of the modern fascination of a novel which continues to show the same resilience through vicissitude that it prophetically ascribes to the city of Paris.

    Peter Merchant

    Principal Lecturer in English

    Canterbury Christ Church University College

    Notes to the Introduction

    1. Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Chapter xi

    2. Full details of Auerbach’s work, and of every other critical book or essay to which this Introduction makes abbreviated reference, appear in the appended Bibliography.

    3. See Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Merlin Press, London 1962)

    4. The rest of this paragraph draws upon the works cited as follows: Rance, pp. 85–6; Baldridge, pp. 145–6; Tysdahl, pp. 112–14; Carey, p.125

    5. See, respectively, the listed essays by Harland Nelson and Fredric S. Schwarzbach

    6. In the Wordsworth Classics edition of A Sentimental Journey (1995), the two sequences referred to appear on pp. 55–8 and 92–4.

    7. Monod, as listed, p. 35; Sidney Dark, introduction to A Tale of Two Cities (Collins, London and Glasgow 1952), pp. 11–12; Baldridge, as listed, p. 150

    8. See Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1992)

    Bibliography

    The following works of reference are particularly important as research aids:

    Ruth F. Glancy (ed.), ‘A Tale of Two Cities’: An Annotated Bibliography, Garland, New York and London 1993

    Andrew Sanders, The Companion to ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, Unwin Hyman, London 1988

    The following books and essays all have a direct relevance to the interpretation of A Tale of Two Cities, or to the argument of my Introduction, and will be valuable to any reader. The list is not comprehensive but seeks to represent a wide range of critical positions.

    Robert Alter, ‘The Demons of History in Dickens’ Tale’, Novel, 2, 1969, pp. 135–42

    Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London 1982

    Cates Baldridge, The Dialogics of Dissent in the English Novel, University Press of New England, Hanover, New Hampshire and London 1994

    Harold Bloom (ed.), Charles Dickens’s ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, Chelsea House, Broomall, Pennsylvania 1997

    John Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination, second edition, Faber and Faber, London 1991

    Philip Collins, ‘A Tale of Two Novels: A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations in Dickens’ Career’, Dickens Studies Annual, 2, 1972, pp. 336–51

    Earle Davis, The Flint and the Flame: The Artistry of Charles Dickens, Victor Gollancz, London 1964

    Richard J. Dunn, ‘A Tale for Two Dramatists’, Dickens Studies Annual, 12, 1983, pp. 117–24

    Edwin M. Eigner, The Dickens Pantomime, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1989

    Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, Maryland and London 1971

    Lawrence Frank, Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska and London 1984

    Elliot L. Gilbert, ‘ To Awake from History: Carlyle, Thackeray and A Tale of Two Cities’, Dickens Studies Annual, 12, 1983, pp. 247–65

    John Gross, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, in Dickens and the Twentieth Century, eds John Gross and Gabriel Pearson, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1962, pp. 187–97

    J. F. Hamilton, ‘Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities’, The Explicator, 53, 1995, pp. 204–8

    Beth F. Herst, The Dickens Hero: Selfhood and Alienation in the Dickens World, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1990

    Bert G. Hornback, ‘Noah’s Arkitecture’: A Study of Dickens’s Mythology, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 1972

    Albert D. Hutter, ‘Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities’, PMLA, 93, 1978, pp. 448–62

    Albert D. Hutter, ‘The Novelist as Resurrectionist: Dickens and the Dilemma of Death’, Dickens Studies Annual, 12, 1983, pp. 1–39

    Wendy S. Jacobson, ‘ The World Within Us: Jung and Dr Manette’s Daughter’, The Dickensian, 93, 1997, pp. 95–108

    John Kucich, ‘The Purity of Violence: A Tale of Two Cities’, Dickens Studies Annual, 8, 1980, pp. 119–37

    John B. Lamb, ‘Domesticating History: Revolution and Moral Management in A Tale of Two Cities’, Dickens Studies Annual, 25, 1996, pp. 227–43

    Sylvère Monod, ‘A Tale of Two Cities: A French View’, in Kathleen Tillotson, Sylvère Monod and Angus Wilson, Dickens Memorial Lectures 1970, Dickens Fellowship, London 1970, pp. 21–37

    Harland Nelson, ‘Shadow and Substance in A Tale of Two Cities’, The Dickensian, 84, 1988, pp. 96–106

    William Oddie, Dickens and Carlyle: The Question of Influence, The Centenary Press, London 1972

    Nicholas Rance, The Historical Novel and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century England, Vision Press, London 1975

    J. M. Rignall, ‘Dickens and the Catastrophic Continuum of History in A Tale of Two Cities’, ELH, 51, 1984, pp. 575–87

    Lisa Robson, ‘The Angels in Dickens’s House: Representation of Women in A Tale of Two Cities’, Dalhousie Review, 72, 1992, pp. 311–33

    Andrew Sanders, ‘ Cartloads of Books: Some Sources for A Tale of Two Cities’, in Dickens and Other Victorians: Essays in Honour of Philip Collins, ed. Joanne Shattock, Macmillan, London 1988, pp. 37–52

    Andrew Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel 1840–1880, Macmillan, London 1978

    Fredric S. Schwarzbach, ‘A New Theatrical Source for Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities’, Notes and Queries, 222, 1977, pp. 18–20

    Linda M. Shires, ‘Of Maenads, Mothers, and Feminized Males: Victorian Readings of the French Revolution’, in Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History, and the Politics of Gender, ed. Linda M. Shires, Routledge, New York and London 1992, pp. 147–65

    Michael Timko, ‘Splendid Impressions and Picturesque Means: Dickens, Carlyle, and The French Revolution’, Dickens Studies Annual, 12, 1983, pp. 177–95

    Bjørn Tysdahl, ‘Europe is Not the Other: A Tale of Two Cities’, Dickens Quarterly, 15, 1998, pp. 111–22

    Kurt Tetzeli Von Rosador, ‘Metaphorical Representations of the French Revolution in Victorian Fiction’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 43, 1988, pp. 1–23

    Catherine Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family, Cambridge University Press, 1997

    Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ‘Why Political Novels Have Heroines: Sybil, Mary Barton, and Felix Holt’, Novel, 18, 1985, pp. 126–44

    A Tale of Two Cities

    Book the First: Recalled to Life

    Chapter 1

    The Period

    It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

    There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. [1] In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

    It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs Southcott [2] had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost [3] had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) [4] rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come [5] to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.

    France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, [6] rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth [7] to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife [8] in it, terrible in history. 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 tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

    In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries [9] by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of ‘the Captain’, gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself by the other four, ‘in consequence of the failure of his ammunition’: after which the mail was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St Giles’s, to search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; today, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and tomorrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence.

    All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures – the creatures of this chronicle among the rest – along the roads that lay before them.

    The Mail

    Chapter 2

    The Mail

    It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the first of the persons with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter’s Hill. [10] He walked uphill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud,

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