A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Charles Dickens, Gillen D'Arcy Wood and Gillen DArcy Wood

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.   “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” With these famous words, Charles Dickens plunges the reader into one of history’s most explosive eras—the French Revolution. From the storming of the Bastille to the relentless drop of the guillotine, Dickens vividly captures the terror and upheaval of that tumultuous period. At the center is the novel’s hero, Sydney Carton, a lazy, alcoholic attorney who, inspired by a woman, makes the supreme sacrifice on the bloodstained streets of Paris.

One of Dickens’s most exciting novels, A Tale of Two Cities is a stirring classic of love, revenge, and resurrection.

Gillen D’Arcy Wood received his Ph.D in English from Columbia University in 2000 and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411433236

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) gehört bis heute zu den beliebtesten Schriftstellern der Weltliteratur, in England ist er geradezu eine nationale Institution, und auch bei uns erfreuen sich seine Werke einer nicht nachlassenden Beliebtheit. Sein „Weihnachtslied in Prosa“ erscheint im deutschsprachigen Raum bis heute alljährlich in immer neuen Ausgaben und Adaptionen. Dickens’ lebensvoller Erzählstil, sein quirliger Humor, sein vehementer Humanismus und seine mitreißende Schaffensfreude brachten ihm den Beinamen „der Unnachahmliche“ ein.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In 1855, at a time of brewing public resentment over the slowness of political reform and a disastrous military failure in Crimea, Charles Dickens wrote to the liberal parliamentarian A. H. Layard of the imminent danger of social revolution in England:

I believe the discontent to be so much the worse for smouldering instead of blazing openly, that it is extremely like the general mind of France before the breaking out of the first Revolution, and is in danger of being turned by any one of a thousand accidents—a bad harvest—the last strain too much of aristocratic insolence or incapacity—a defeat abroad—a mere chance at home—into such a Devil of a conflagration as never has been beheld since (Letters, vol. 7, p. 587; see For Further Reading).

A Tale of Two Cities, which Dickens sat down to write a few years later, is only in part a historical novel. On Dickens’s mind was not so much the state of France in 1789, as the current state of England, and his fear of public riots and mob violence in the streets of London. Karl Marx, in an article for the New York Daily Tribune, wrote that Dickens had issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together (August 1, 1854); but, unlike Marxism, Dickens’s politics were essentially a matter of inexhaustible personal sympathy, not an abstract program of social change. To the extent he conceptualized in groups at all, the dominant author of the Victorian age saw himself as a leader of a new, aspirant middle class in British society, one that concentrated its reformist energies on Parliament, and whose values of family, charity, and fair-dealing far transcended the brutish will of any mob. Dickens’s lack of sympathy for the Parisian sansculottes in A Tale of Two Cities is thus directly correlated to his apprehensiveness over revolutionary rumblings at home. Dickens had a grand social vision for his own city of London, but it did not rhyme with liberté, egalité, fraternité.

Dickens invented Victorian London as a theater of the imagination, and in his sixteen novels he ushered literally thousands of characters onto that stage. The colorful Dickensian army of Pickwicks, Micaw bers, and Little Nells—not types, but singular, unrepeatable citizens of the metropolis—formed a line of imaginative defense against what Dickens perceived as the darker potential of urbanized humanity: their transformation into an undifferentiated mass, a mob. In 1849 he attended a public execution for the purpose of observing the behavior of the crowd, and came away horrified by what he had seen:

I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning could be imagined by no man . . . thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind, flocked to the ground, with every variety of foul and offensive behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general excitement. When the sun rose brightly—as it did—it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the Devil (The Times, November 14, 1849).

Dickens writes here in his role as concerned citizen and liberal reformer, but the letter reads like a draft for one of the famous crowd scenes in A Tale of Two Cities.There is one apparent discrepancy:The scene is London, not Paris—Horsemonger Lane, not the Place de la Révolution. But for Dickens, the brutal mirth and callousness of the mob, as a destructive social menace, transcends national boundaries: It is the same tale in both cities. The first depiction of a mob we see in the novel is in fact an English one, an ogreish swarm of blue-flies at Charles Darnay’s trial at the Old Bailey. At his unexpected acquittal, the crowd came pouring out with a vehemence that nearly took him off his legs, and a loud buzz swept into the street as if the baffled blue-flies were dispersing in search of other carrion (pp. 80-81).

In the preface to his gripping novel of mob violence, Dickens acknowledges his debt to Thomas Carlyle’s dramatic history, The French Revolution (1837). Carlyle was the first writer to convincingly evoke the world-historical energies of the event itself, which transformed not only France, but dragged all Europe into a maelstrom of war and political upheaval from which eventually emerged the modern nation-states of the continent we recognize today. Carlyle’s swirling tumultuous prose, full of breathless outrages and bloody imagery, is a true revolutionary register, and Dickens knew well he could not improve upon it. But if the thrilling set pieces of A Tale of Two Cities—the storming of the Bastille, the September massacres—recall Carlyle, Dickens’s damning judgment of the mob more closely echoes conservative politician and theorist Edmund Burke. In 1790, in the midst of the first great shock of events in France, Burke described the abduction of the King and Queen in terms that sent a permanent shiver through the British body politic:

History will record that on the morning of the 6th of October, 1789, the king and queen of France, after a day of confusion, alarm, dismay, and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged security of public faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite and troubled, melancholy repose. . . . A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen and pierced with a hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and, through ways unknown to the murderers, had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband not secure of his own life for a moment. This king, to say no more of him, and this queen, and their infant children (who once would have been the pride and hope of a great and generous people) were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses (Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 62).

In his novel of the Revolution, Dickens expresses pity, even outrage for the downtrodden individuals under the yoke of France’s ancien régime and abhors that regime itself; but once its oppressed citizens transform themselves into a mob, he is filled with the same disgust and horror he experienced at the hanging at Horsemonger Lane. Dickens never concedes the loftiness of French revolutionary ideals, because his vision is filled with Burkean images of the revolutionary militias, whose pitiless violence renounced not only human ideals but reason itself:

The mad joy over the prisoners who were saved, had astounded him scarcely less than the mad ferocity against those who were cut to pieces. One prisoner there was, he said, who had been discharged into the street free, but at whom a mistaken savage had thrust a pike as he passed out. Being besought to go to him and dress the wound, the Doctor had passed out at the same gate, and had found him in the arms of a company of Samaritans, who were seated on the bodies of their victims. With an inconsistency as monstrous as anything in this awful nightmare, they had helped the healer, and tended the wounded man with the gentlest solicitude—had made a litter for him and escorted him carefully from the spot—had then caught up their weapons and plunged anew into a butchery so dreadful, that the Doctor had covered his eyes with his hands, and swooned away in the midst of it (p. 269).

In many of Dickens’s novels, it is children who experience the keenest terror, trapped in an adult world of violent caprice and cynicism in which they have no power to defend themselves. Pip’s encounter with Magwitch on the marshes in Great Expectations is the most convincing description of childhood fear in literature, and David Copperfield’s persecution at the hands of the Murdstones has the power of archetype, a modern-day Hansel and Gretel. Dickens’s success in evoking the terror of the mob in A Tale of Two Cities (it is what most readers remember long after they have forgotten Lucie, Darnay, and the rest) lies in his transferring those real and imagined terrors of childhood, of which he is the fictional master, to the adult world and the stage of history. Returning to his native Paris, Doctor Manette stumbles into a scene of infantile nightmare: a world where bullies and gangs and revenges and tattletales are removed from the relative security of the playground to the public square turned death trap. The Manettes and their entourage, the grown-up innocents of the tale, fight for survival in this murderous topsy-turvy city, where the helplessness and dread of childhood seem once again the permanent conditions of existence; presiding over the carnage is the totemic Guillotine, like some monstrous, deadly toy come to life and let loose in the playroom: Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine (p. 367).

When Dickens expressed to A. H. Layard his fear of revolution in Britain in 1855, he only echoed many dozens of commentators over the preceding six decades, who wondered why mob violence could not simply cross the English Channel and turn the streets of London into a bloodbath of class retribution. The textbook historian’s answer points to the bloodless coup of 1688, the so-called Glorious Revolution, which saw the tyrant James II forced into exile, and William and Mary inaugurate a form of managerial rule in Britain, a constitutional, mixed monarchy where many absolute powers of the Crown were ceded to Parliament. With the consolidation of that legislative body, however unrepresentative, Britain’s nobility insured itself against the apocalyptic disaster that was to befall their French counterparts. The divergent tale of the two cities thus begins in 1688.

But as a novelist, Dickens, who loved Paris and traveled there often, offers more intuitive, closely observed reasons for the untranslatable quality of that city’s Revolution. In an 1856 article for his weekly magazine, Household Words, he calls Paris the Moon, and describes a culture of spectacle implicitly alien to his London readers. On the grand Parisian boulevards, Dickens watches the upper classes put on a mighty show. Later, he takes coffee and a cigar at one of Paris’s ubiquitous cafés, and participates in a kind of collective voyeurism unfamiliar to the English capital:

The place from which the shop front has been taken makes a gay proscenium; as I sit and smoke, the street becomes a stage, with an endless procession of lively actors crossing and re-crossing. Women with children, carts and coaches, men on horseback, soldiers, water-carriers with their pails, family groups, more soldiers, lounging ex quisites, more family groups (coming past, flushed, a little late for the play). . . . We are all amused, sitting seeing the traffic in the street, and the traffic in the street is in its turn amused by seeing us (Railway Dreaming, pp. 373-374).

Paris is a society of spectacle, a glamorous outdoor stage where citizens are both actors and audience. Later in the article, however, Dickens describes a more sinister aspect of this culture of display when he is jostled by the crowds at the Paris morgue, whose bodies lie on inclined planes within a great glass window, as though Holbein should represent Death, in his grim Dance, keeping a shop, and displaying his goods like a Regent Street or boulevard linen-draper (p. 375). Dickens is unnerved here, as he was at Horsemonger Lane, by a society that places no restraints on visibility, even to preserve the solemnity of the dead.

It is a short step in Dickens’s imagination from the peep-show atmosphere of the Paris morgue in 1856 to the ritual slaughter in the Place de la Révolution during Robespierre’s Reign of Terror of 1793-1794. A Tale of Two Cities shows the dark side of urban theatricality, that a public appetite for glamorous show can rapidly degenerate into an insatiable hunger for scenes of horror and demoralization. The essentially theatrical quality of Parisian social life produces a theatrical Revolution. At the revolutionary trials at the Hall of Examination, Madame Defarge, we are told, clapped her hands as at a play. There is something uniquely Parisian, too, in the spectacle of the liberation of the Bastille (with only seven prisoners inside) and in the rituals of the Terror itself, as the tumbrils roll daily to the guillotine watched by knitting ladies, who take up seats in their favored spots each morning as if at a sideshow or circus. As Dickens describes it, even the victims of the Terror cannot escape the theatrical atmosphere of the proceedings. Among the condemned, there are some so heedful of their looks that they cast upon the multitude such glances as they have seen in theatres, and in pictures. Contrast this with Charles Darnay, who, on trial for his life earlier in the novel, disdains the play at the Old Bailey: He neither flinched from the situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it. Our hero disappoints us on occasion, but here, by resisting being converted into a spectacle, he defends the most important social principle of the novel: the dignity of the private citizen in the face of the howling mob.

Theatricality is not the monopoly of the Terror. As the scene of the royal procession at Versailles shows, public exhibition was a deep-grained aspect of French court culture that, when revolution came, translated easily in the imagination from the palace to the public square:

Soon the large-faced King and the fair-faced Queen came in their golden coach, attended by the shining Bull’s Eye of their Court, a glittering multitude of laughing ladies and fine lords; and in jewels and silks and powder and splendour and elegantly spurning figures and handsomely disdainful faces of both sexes, the mender of roads bathed himself, so much to his temporary intoxication, that he cried Long live the King, Long live the Queen, Long live everybody and everything . . . until he absolutely wept with sentiment (p. 172).

An aide to Thomas Jefferson (who served as ambassador to France from 1785 to 1789) saw in the King’s levée an Oriental splendor and magnificence; the wild geographical inaccuracy of the description only reinforces our sense of how deeply alien French court culture was to the emergent liberal Anglo-American sensibility. The grotesque pomp and negligence of the royals that Dickens describes might itself have represented sufficient justification for revolution, were it not for the mindless response of the mender of roads, a hapless would-be revolutionary who shows himself so susceptible to the glamour of court spectacle that he weeps and wishes long life to those very people he has sworn to destroy. The dangers of a society of spectacle are summed up in his response: Whether it is the court of Louis XVI or Robespierre’s revolutionary committee, no government that asserts its power in the form of public exhibition can guarantee control of its audience’s reaction. The irrational fervor inspired by spectacle may distract the people from ideology, as it does the mender of roads at Versailles, who is disarmed by sentiment; but spectacle may just as easily produce the murderous revolutionary dance of the carmagnole, and the tumbrils that bring everyone—Louis and Robespierre, royals and revolutionaries alike—before the indiscriminate justice of the guillotine.

A tale of two fundamentally different cities, then? Given Dickens’s fascination with mob violence, it is not surprising that his only other historical novel, Barnaby Rudge (1841), describes the most significant popular uprising in London’s history, the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, during which mobs roamed the streets for three days and ransacked Parliament. Nevertheless, the fact that Dickens needed to draw on events from the prerevolutionary era (and that the protest itself fizzled) suggests that the Gordon Riots are the exception proving the rule for the history of English civil unrest. Dickens’s London, with its bad weather in place of sunny boulevards, and private clubs instead of cafés, does not possess the physical or cultural conditions for successful revolt. Mobs form in London in A Tale of Two Cities—at Darnay’s trial, and the burial of Roger Cly—but just as quickly melt away.

But the society of spectacle has a second, more sinister aspect from which England is not immune: paranoia. Dickens in Paris watching the passing crowds, who in turn watch him, might pass for a harmless afternoon’s entertainment in the city, but when the opportunity for seeing and being seen is hardened to an expectation, or even a right to total visibility, it is a short distance to paranoia and a culture obsessed with secrets. When there is no escape from the social gaze, voyeurs quickly turn into spies and informants, and the least assertion of individuality or privacy is interpreted as a guilty secret that needs to be exposed.

Dickens reminds his readers that our English reasons for vaunting our superiority to secrecy and spies are of very modern date, and looks back in the novel to a time when the governments of both France and England were fully closed, decision-making structures, dependent on an invisible trade in secrets in their dealings both with each other and with their own citizens. We are introduced to this paranoid world from the novel’s first pages, in which Dickens powerfully creates a mood of secrecy, intrigue, and fear of exposure that feeds the atmosphere of almost every scene that follows: The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but the horses (p. 12). In the mail coach sits one of our principal characters, Mr. Lorry of Tellson’s Bank (itself a repository of many secrets), on a clandestine mission whose purpose he will not divulge anywhere or in any way, except to trusty Jerry Cruncher in the form of a single, enigmatic phrase: Even I, safe as an Englishman, and even Tellson’s, important as they are to French credit, avoid all naming of the matter. I carry about me, not a scrap of writing openly referring to it. This is a secret service altogether. My credentials, entries, and memoranda, are all comprehended in the one line, ‘Re called to Life’ (pp. 29-30). Mr. Lorry’s cautiousness is no fictional fancy. In the late-eighteenth century, interception of the mail by government agents was nearly universal. The London Public Record Office alone possesses more than two dozen volumes of intercepted dispatches for the years 1756 to 1763, while in France, surveillance was almost total: The notorious cabinet noir read all letters sent abroad through the French post (Neilson, Go Spy the Land, p. 101).

Even the background canvas of Dover is gloomy with secret business conducted in the dead of night: A little fishing was done in the port, and a quantity of strolling about by night, and looking seaward. . . . Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever, sometimes unaccountably realised large fortunes, and it was remarkable that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter (p. 23). Spies, smugglers, pirates. And Dickens himself gets in on the act. The opening scenes of his novel take the form of a secret, a mystery revealed with almost unbearable slowness, the story of Mr. Lorry’s client who has been unjustly imprisoned in the Bastille for eighteen years, and who is now to be reunited with his daughter.

Later, outside the Old Bailey, we witness a public manifestation of informer culture as extraordinary to Dickens’s contemporary readers as it is to us—the funeral procession of Roger Cly:

The crowd approached; they were bawling and hissing round a dingy hearse and dingy mourning coach, in which mourning coach there was only one mourner, dressed in the dingy trappings that were considered essential to the dignity of the position. The position appeared by no means to please him, however, with an increasing rabble surrounding the coach, deriding him, making grimaces at him, and incessantly groaning and calling out: Yah! Spies! Tst! Yaha! Spies! with many compliments too numerous and forcible to repeat. . . .

What is it, brother? What’s it about?

"I don’t know, said the man. Spies! Yaha! Tst! Spies!"

He asked another man. Who is it?

"I don’t know, returned the man, clapping his hands to his mouth nevertheless, and vociferating in a surprising heat and with the greatest ardour, Spies! Yaha! Tst, tst! Spi-ies!" (p. 155).

It is a typical Dickensian crowd, its passion directly proportional to its stupidity. Here they are duped entirely (Roger Cly lives!), but that such a crowd might be whipped up to mock a dead government agent signifies a state intelligence apparatus that is as ubiquitous and unpopular as it is incompetent. These are not the spies of John le Carré, let alone Ian Fleming, and A Tale of Two Cities is the more historically credible for that. Secret agents in the late-eighteenth century were mostly grasping mercenaries drawn from the criminal classes. There were few Nathan Hales, one historian records, and for the most part it remained a venal business (Go Spy the Land, p. 110).

But it is Paris, not London, that is most infested with spies. Dickens drew much historical detail for the Paris sections of the novel from Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s twelve-volume Le Tableau de Paris (1781-1788). In an essay entitled Spies, Mercier describes how, in the 1780s the Parisian . . . was surrounded . . . by spies . . . it was the universal means of gathering secrets for the efficient use of the ministers. Historians’ estimates for the numbers of government agents in Paris alone range up to three thousand. And as Barsad’s unsuccessful infiltration of Saint-Antoine shows, Parisians were equally on their guard against foreign spies. The atmosphere in the Defarges’ wine-shop when Barsad drops in reads like the script for a thousand twentieth-century films noir: A figure entering at the door threw a shadow on Madame Defarge which she felt to be a new one. She laid down her knitting, and began to pin her rose in her head-dress, before she looked at the figure. It was curious. The moment Madame Defarge took up the rose, the customers ceased talking, and began gradually to drop out of the wine-shop (p. 179).

By the time Charles Darnay travels into revolutionary France, the atmosphere of deadly intrigue at the Saint-Antoine wine-shop has expanded to comprehend the entire country and its governance. The Revolutionary Convention has enacted its infamous Law of Suspects (September 1793), by which anyone might be accused by anyone, and now wields universal watchfulness as its supreme weapon of terror and control:

The universal watchfulness so encompassed him, that if he had been taken in a net, or were being forwarded to his destination in a cage, he could not have felt his freedom more completely gone.

This universal watchfulness not only stopped him on the highway twenty times in a stage, but retarded his progress twenty times in a day, by riding after him and taking him back, riding before him and stopping him by anticipation, riding with him and keeping him in charge (p. 245).

Darnay is in France to repudiate a lettre de cachet—a form of anonymous indictment admissible in French courts—brought against the manager of his former estate. But the sublime prosecutorial power of universal watchfulness means that he will do no better than join his man in the Bastille. There, of course, he will find more spies, the so-called sheep of the prisons, whose existence points to the paranoid extremes of government surveillance during the Terror. Even those already condemned to death aren’t safe from its harassing gaze.

The principal victim of state secrecy in the novel is not, of course, Darnay or Gabelle, but Doctor Manette. The French term for solitary confinement, en secret (the title of the opening chapter of the third book), defines not merely the physical nature of Manette’s incarceration but its systemic meaning. When Dickens traveled abroad in 1842, he found to his horror that this sinister tradition of the ancien régime was being continued where he least expected to find it: in the cradle of American democracy, Philadelphia. Dickens was no bleeding heart when it came to the routine brutalization of inmates in nineteenth-century prisons; but the practice of solitary confinement tapped the deep wellsprings of his imaginative sympathy. His visit to the Philadelphia state prison is the most passionately rendered episode in his American Notes:

Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired. He never hears of wife or children; home or friends; the life or death of any single creature. He sees the prison officers, but with that exception he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair (p. 69).

Here is the seed, almost two decades in germination, for Doctor Manette and A Tale of Two Cities (and its preliminary title, Buried Alive). While some of the scenes and characters of the novel creak with age, and read to us as stock melodrama, Dickens’s rendering of the effects of psychological torture on Doctor Manette is a terrific achievement, his use of the eighteenth-century associationist language of philosophers John Locke and David Hartley more subtle and gripping than a library’s worth of post-Freudian case studies. The effects of punitive isolation on the prisoner are so complete that he no longer knows his own name:

Did you ask me for my name?

Assuredly I did.

One Hundred and Five, North Tower.

Is that all?

One Hundred and Five, North Tower.

With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor a groan, he bent to work again, until the silence was again broken.

You are not a shoemaker by trade? said Mr. Lorry, looking steadfastly at him. . . .

He lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those measured changes on his hands the whole time. His eyes came slowly back, at last, to the face from which they had wandered; when they rested on it, he started, and resumed, in the manner of a sleeper that moment awake, reverting to a subject of last night.

I asked leave to teach myself, and I got it with much difficulty after a long while, and I have made shoes ever since (p. 45).

The Doctor’s making and mending of shoes (another detail borrowed from the Philadelphia prison) takes the place of rage and remembering. This therapeutic act, ceaselessly repeated, transforms the angry young inmate who pronounced a curse on the heads of the Darnay family into the gentle old man his daughter finds above the wine-shop in Saint Antoine, and ultimately into a hero of humane charity in the killing fields of the Revolution.

For Doctor Manette, the love of family is the cure for the cruel effects of state secrecy. In the politics of A Tale of Two Cities, however, it is also the best means of preventing the tyranny of state surveillance in the first place. Paradoxically, Dickens’s argument against the police state proceeds from a meditation on secrecy itself: not the manufacture of secrets by a paranoid government, but the secret at the core of human personality, the essential privacy of the individual that it is the duty of the modern, liberal state to protect. To make this key point, Dickens stands back from his narrative at the beginning of chapter 3, and speaks in his own voice:

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! . . . My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was al ways in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end (p. 16).

This is a metaphysics of secrecy, a philosophical affirmation of what we might call the right to privacy. It is consecrated by the private, wholly nontheatrical marriage of the hero and heroine in Soho, in a neighbouring church, where no strange eyes looked on, and it opens up the positive social vision in the novel.

Dickens’s urban social ideal—for a society made up of private families, unharassed by mob or state—glows most sentimentally in A Christmas Carol. The struggling Cratchits serve as Dickens’s essential social unit: a Victorian family gathered together around the hearth, a charmed circle of retreat that is sanctuary against the humiliation and injustice heaped on its individual members in the harsh world out there. In this overfamiliar story, Scrooge dominates the public world of business but has rejected family ties. He can only look in on the happy Cratchits from their threshold, first in wonder, then in a mortification of envy and regret.

In A Tale of Two Cities, the role of the Cratchits is played by the Manettes and their friends, the battered but unbroken community that reclaims its head from the dungeons of the French police state, and retreats to its quiet suburban idyll at the northern outskirts of London: a cool spot, staid but cheerful, a wonderful place for echoes, and a very harbour from the raging streets (p. 94). The miniature social order they reconstitute for themselves in Soho is a kind of benign matriarchy, presided over by the heroine, Lucie Manette: Ever busily winding the golden thread which bound her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old directress and companion, in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house in the tranquilly resounding corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of years (p. 207). Lucie embodies the miracle of domestic life: that its binding force is greater than the sum power of its individual members. Her love for her family is a self-replenishing energy, satisfying all as it sustains her:

many times her father had told her that he found her more devoted to him married (if that could be) than single, and . . . many times her husband had said to her that no cares and duties seemed to divide her love for him or her help to him, and asked her What is the magic secret, my darling, of your being everything to all of us, as if there were only one of us, yet never seeming to be hurried, or to have too much to do? (p. 210).

This benevolent example extends to Miss Pross, a servant elevated to companion who eats with the family on Sundays and, in her devotion to her employers, reminds Mr. Lorry that there is nothing in it [the world] better than the faithful service of the heart; so rendered and so free from any mercenary taint (p. 98). This relationship between the classes in the Soho household is the real English guarantee against revolution. It is a fictional construction of the social goal Dickens once described to the Administrative Reform Association, one of the many liberal bodies he addressed in his career as all-purpose public advocate: It is stated that this Association sets class against class. Is this so? No, it finds class set against class, and seeks to reconcile them (Speeches, p. 203).

But the Manettes’ trials have only just begun. While Lucie, surely Dickens’s blandest angel of goodness, directs the process of family healing from her tranquil corner of London, in the opposite corner, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in Paris, stands the unforgettable Madame Defarge, English fiction’s matriarch of horror. The single encounter between the two women is one of the most hair-raising episodes in the novel:

Is that his child? said Madame Defarge, stopping in her work for the first time, and pointing her knitting-needle at little Lucie as if it were the finger of Fate.

Yes, madame, answered Mr. Lorry; this is our poor prisoner’s darling daughter, and only child.

The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed to fall so threatening and dark on the child, that her mother instinctively kneeled on the ground beside her, and held her to her breast. The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed then to fall, threatening and dark, on both the mother and the child (p. 266).

Madame Defarge, is a supreme Dickens creation, often likened to Lady Macbeth; but she outdoes even this daunting model with her diabolical mix of patient cunning and shocking malevolence. As with Dickens’s account of the Revolution in general, the Madame is more mythic than strictly historical. She is one of the Furies of Hell:

There were many women at that time, upon whom the time laid a dreadfully disfiguring hand; but, there was not one among them more to be dreaded than this ruthless woman, now taking her way along the streets. . . . imbued from her childhood with a brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class, opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone out of her.

It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live (pp. 358-359).

Liberty becomes a problematic ideology when it is embodied by a she-demon like Madame Defarge. She represents how apparently modern, progressive social forces of liberation can be hijacked by primal energies of bloodlust and tribal revenge. To the early-twenty-first century reader, she is a chillingly familiar figure, a prototype for the warrior ideologues of our own history, from Pol Pot to Osama Bin Laden: Unappeasable and merciless, her response to legitimate grievance is an entirely illegitimate appetite for blood and destruction. Even when the devastating crimes wrought on her family by Charles Darnay’s uncle are revealed at the end of the novel, we cannot admire or pity her. Our knowledge of her suffering cannot erase the image of what she has allowed herself to become as a consequence, because we have, in the figure of Doctor Manette, an example of how the resentment of terrible wrongs may be conquered by strength of moral will.

The most deeply English character in the novel, its true Burkean patriot, is Miss Pross: For gracious sake, don’t talk about Liberty; we have quite enough of that (p.287). She does not speak French in Paris; instead she speaks English more emphatically. So it is given to Miss Pross as the personification of commonsense, conservative En glishness to vanquish the threat of French extremism embodied in Madame Defarge. Because of her heroic stand against the Terror Incarnate, Doctor Manette and his son-in-law are ultimately saved, and the family is reconstituted in the suburban bosom of Soho. This conventional comedic reunion, however, is not achieved without the sacrifice of one unofficial member of the Manette family.

Which brings us to Sydney Carton, the black sheep of the Soho circle. Carton is one of Dickens’s prize delinquents, an enigmatic, ironical, and darkly appealing character to whom he gives the novel’s final words, the most famous exit line in English fiction. For some, Carton’s instant redemption on the scaffold strains credibility. The substitution of one character for another under the guillotine was a stock plot twist in French Revolution melodramas; only Carton’s ringing words save the moment from bathos. But the logic of the substitution runs deeper. Carton is granted the novel’s defining moral act not because he is Darnay’s double, but because he is Dickens’s.

In his preface, Dickens reveals that he first conceived the main idea of this story while acting in Wilkie Collins’s 1857 melodrama, The Frozen Deep (which Dickens coauthored). The fact that Dickens played the role of Richard Wardour, who first swears enmity to his rival for the love of the heroine only to give up his life for him in the end, strongly suggests that Dickens’s identification with Carton is at the heart of the novel. The question of why this is so remains, however, and the answer lies as deeply buried in Dickens’s psyche as Doctor Manette in the dungeons of the Bastille.

As his lifelong passion for amateur theatricals shows, novel writing was never enough for Charles Dickens. He began his career as a journalist writing sketches of city life, and he never gave up his role as an intimate commentator on the daily London scene. In 1850 he launched his own weekly magazine, Household Words; the magazine’s name, drawn from Shakespeare’s Henry V (act 4, scene 3: Then shall our names, / Familiar in his mouth as household words, / . . . Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red) advertised Dickens’s ambition not merely for fame, but his need to belong quite literally to the household itself. Then, in 1858, he embarked on the last great installment of his public career, as a reader of his works before large audiences. Dickens’s public readings, begun only months before he started work on A Tale of Two Cities, were an entirely unprecedented cultural phenomenon, inaugurating our modern age of literary publicity. Dickens was sincerely surprised that the readings had the effect of increasing sales of his books; his real purpose is clear from his opening remarks to his audiences. He encouraged them that

if as he proceeded they should feel disposed to give expression to any little emotion awakened by the story, he begged they would do so in the most natural way possible, and without the least apprehension of disturbing him.—(laughter). Nothing could be more agreeable to him than to receive any assurance that they were interested, and nothing could be more in accordance with his wishes than that they should make themselves as like as possible to a small group of friends assembled to hear a tale told, and that they should at once forget everything ceremonious or formal in the manner of their coming together.—(applause) (Dexter, For One Night Only: An Account of the Famous Readings).

Dickens loved the theater, but he desires a nontheatrical atmosphere for his readings. He renounces spectacle in favor of intimacy: a small group of friends assembled to hear a tale told. He insists on informality, and welcomes emotion. In short, Dickens wants to be family, just as Sydney Carton wants desperately to belong to the Manette household. Carton articulates this desire in a long, maudlin speech to Darnay in which he perhaps makes more sense as Dickens than he does as Sydney Carton: If you could endure to have such a worthless fellow, and a fellow of such indifferent reputation, coming and going at odd times, I should ask that I might be permitted to come and go as a privileged person here (p. 205). Reading Dickens’s own deep-driving need for love from his public into the novel, we understand the necessity of Sydney Carton’s going to the scaffold for Charles Darnay. After all, what wouldn’t Dickens do for his beloved readers?

Charles Dickens’s novels represented him, the popular author of his age, as the perfect mediator between the public world and the private sanctum of the family. His character-filled social panoramas granted him admission as a privileged person to the domestic arena idealized by the Victorians, as a benevolent emissary (never a spy) from the outside world, an educator and entertainer who takes his place at the fireside, informally and without ceremony. By this means, Dickens’s novels participated in that great reconciliation of the classes he looked to in his speech to the Administrative Reform Association. His social vision embraced multitudes; but instead of producing that vision theatrically, with theatricality’s ever-present potential for riots and rolling heads, he transmitted it in prose read by all levels of English society in unprecedented numbers. Dickens gave birth to that privileged medium of Victorian culture, the social novel: It promoted reflection and political reform, while recognizing, in the private act of reading, a solemn proof that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. Out of this recognition comes Dickens’s implicit argument for the natural limits of state power in A Tale of Two Cities, limits so grotesquely exceeded by the French nation both before their revolution, and during it.

Gillen D’Arcy Wood was born in Australia, where he received a master’s degree in English and a diploma of music from Melbourne University, before moving to New York in 1992. He took his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2000, and is now Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a Ful bright scholar and the recipient of multiple Mellon Fellowships and other awards. He is the author of a book on the intersections of Romantic literature and art, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860 (Palgrave, 2001), and numerous articles and reviews on nineteenth-century British and French literature.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

When I was acting, with my children and friends, in Mr. Wilkie Collins’s drama of The Frozen Deep, I first conceived the main idea of this story. A strong desire was upon me then, to embody it in my own person; and I traced out in my fancy, the state of mind of which it would necessitate the presentation to an observant spectator, with particular care and interest.

As the idea became familiar to me, it gradually shaped itself into its present form. Throughout its execution, it has had complete possession of me; I have so far verified what is done and suffered in these pages, as that I have certainly done and suffered it all myself.

Whenever any reference (however slight) is made here to the condition of the French people before or during the Revolution, it is truly made, on the faith of the most trustworthy witnesses. It has been one of my hopes to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, though no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle’s wonderful book.

Tavistock House, London

November, 1859

BOOK THE FIRST

004

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 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.² Even the Cock-lane ghost 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) rapped out theirs.³ Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America:⁴ 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, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it.⁵ Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth 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.⁶ 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 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.⁷ 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.⁸ Daring burglaries 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

Reviews for A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

[eyejaybee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am not sure that anything I can say will add any value to the wealth of critical comment already available for this classic novel. I first read it towards the end of the last millennium (to lend an appropriately archaic feel) as one of the set books for my English Literature O level (the predecessor of what we would today call GCSEs). I was fortunate to enjoy the support of some excellent English teachers throughout my time at school, yet even their attentive ministrations failed to save this book from falling prey to the fate of most works that are encountered as compulsory reading. As a fifteen-year-old I found it very tedious and longwinded, and could not then imagine I might ever read it again for pleasure.To be fair, I think that tedious and longwinded are not always unfair when applied to Dickens, and would cite either Barnaby Rudge (surely there is an initial D missing from that surname) or Our Mutual Friend as evidence for the prosecution. (Indeed, it is quite a feat on Dickens’ part to make tedious a novel that starts so promisingly, with bodies being dragged from the Thames late at night.)They are not, however, fair for A Tale of Two Cities. Going off at another tangent, I have been struggling to think of another book which has such famous first AND last sentences: there are plenty that can offer one or the other, but few that manage both. The story is, of course, well known, so I won’t waste everyone’s time with a synopsis of the plot. There are some excellent characters: Jarvis Lorry, the serious solicitor who has given his professional life in service of Tellson’s Bank is a paragon of probity, always clad in various shades of brown. Not a man overburdened with humour, and perhaps not one with whom one might wish to be closeted on a long journey (although that fate befalls various people throughout the book). Jerry Cruncher is a hardy perennial from the Dickens stable: a Cockney, salt of the earth type, vaguely reminiscent of Silas Wegg, though better served in the leg department, or less chirpy Sam Weller, who is always on hand to do Mr Lorry’s or Tellson’s bidding, but who has a dark secret. C J Stryver, the pompous, overbearing barrister is brilliantly drawn, hyperinflated with his own self-importance and clothed in obtuseness as in armour of triple steel. Paradoxically, the more central figures seem less substantial. Charles Darnay (another man with a secret) is rather two dimensional, and the reader almost wishes that his lookalike, the diffident and dissolute lawyer Sidney Carton, whose nocturnal efforts keep legal Stryver’s practice afloat, but with precious little acknowledgement of that debt) had won Lucie Manette’s love.Like most of Dickens’ n ovels, this was published in weekly or fortnightly instalments, a fact reflected in the peaks and troughs of action throughout, as the writer carefully regulated the flow to leave sufficiently gripping cliff-hangers. Dickens was a master at conflicting tone. The chapter in which Jerry Cruncher’s sun follows his father on a nocturnal expedition, expecting to see him go fishing, is hilarious, although the mirth is in sharp juxtaposition with a chapter of huge sadness.This is a novel that repays reading for pleasure. It is also a more manageable length for modern taste than some of his heftier tomes. I read it in the excellent Penguin Classics edition which offers extensive background notes throughout the story, and an introduction full of insight (possibly aimed more at informing a re-reading, than for someone coming to the story for the first time.

[ibkennedy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Why has it taken me so long to go back and read this incredible book?

[cecrow · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Having read my way through Dickens in publication order to this point, I'm of two minds about this entry. I probably did this Dickens novel a disservice - and myself - by reading it on the heels of "Citizens" by Siman Schama, a thick non-fiction history about the French Revolution. Dickens' overdramatization of revolutionary elements rubbed me wrong in a few places, and that had some side effects. I was irritated with the more-than-usual obfuscating language in the opening chapters, and their thick layer of sentimentality I hadn't seen so much of since The Old Curiosity Shop, my least favourite. It's a more poetic look at mobs and mob behaviour than he's done before, but weaker for not being as close or insightful a study as we saw in Barnaby Rudge. This version relies on symbols for brevity, the Defarges standing in for practically every historical figure on the revolutionary side.I struggled to find a favourite character among these many reversions of prior Dickens figures, settling for Dr. Manette because of his unusual ailment but only reminding me of how mild the Bastille experience actually was for its inmates. Besides the usual Dickens flaws - the boatload of coincidence, weak female characterizations, domestic abuse presented as humour - what impressed me least was the plot. Dickens had his end in mind and drives straight towards it without any side trips, only throwing in some revolutionary glimpses for decoration. That's hardly the stuff of Bleak House. And then comes the other hand. In its delineated third part, there are improvements in every respect. Dr. Manette acquires a new fascinating aspect to his character, Charles earned my sympathy, and the plot introduces some nasty twists in its path. Most important, the revolutionary period of France is thrown into the bold and detailed relief that was lacking to this point. Finally I obtained a sense of what it would truly be like to live in the midst of that hair-raising Terror tumult with its irrational courts and bloodshed in the streets, and it fits with all the facts I know plus adds a few I didn't. Therese Defarge takes on an especially epic scale of menace with her sewing needles, possibly earning the crown among Dickens villains. And there are braver examples here of men facing death than the one Fagin set so long ago. I'm reminded of David Copperfield, with its strange lull through the middle, except that the problems here extend through the beginning as well. Is a fantastic and stirring third act enough to compensate for all? It raises this novel well above Curiosity Shop, and I think it's stronger than Hard Times, another of Dickens' shorter novels, but it cannot rank among his best.

[nx74defiant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great story, Great opening line. Great closing line.Not the easiest read with Dickens old fashion style of writing.Set during the French Revolution and the reign of terror. There are time jumps.

[mojomomma_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lucy & Charles, Dr. Minette, and the menacing de Farge's. Hearing it, rather than reading it, helped me get through this classic with some understanding of the plot and what was going on. I will have to try some other Dickens because I really enjoyed this one!

[alanna1122 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When my high schooler was complaining about having to read this for school I took the opportunity to read along in solidarity and also as an excuse to final read something that I wished I had read many years ago and consider a gap in my classics reading experience.So my kid didn't love it, but I really did. To be fair - in college this sort of thing was what I gravitated towards and I read quite a fair amount of 17th-19th century lit, so it didn't have the same intimidation factor as it had for my kid. In fact, I kept (inwardly) marvelling over how short it was for Dickens. Anyway, for me, it was a treat. The story was most of the time pretty gripping. Granted, there were interludes that were v e r y slow but most of it felt snappy to me. It made me contemplate the French Revolution in a way that I think I failed to when studying it in college. The horror of the reality of it is really hard to contemplate. And its relative recentness is also sobering. Also, France's recovery is pretty amazing to think about.Even though it was certainly very heavy, I am sad that it is over - and I am so glad I finally read it.

[connorshirs · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An actual thriller. Loved it and cried.

[musicformovies · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Historical Fiction set during the Terror of the French Revolution by Charles Dickens; although starting at a slow pace, and sometimes exhibiting a confusing change of time and setting, by the time you reach Book III it really takes off and beats out any modern Hollywood action drama film by far. Aside from having perhaps two of the most well known literary quotations at the beginning and end of the book, it is a classic in how it deals with the nature of human perseverance during the darkness of times, the nature of sacrifice, and fickleness of the mob versus the solidity of individual principle. A book more relevant for our time than I'd like. A must read.

[caanderson-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Classic book drama. What an wonderful story of treason, romance, and danger.

[dragonflydancing · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of my all-time favourites, because of Dicken's political and social insight, and because of how the story ends with a man's ultimate sacrifice for the sake of love.

[vahankinson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A historical fiction novel from Dickens which follows a group of characters in London and Paris at the start of the French Revolution. The story follows a group of characters including an ex-prisoner of the Bastille who is dealing with the after effects of his imprisonment; a French nobleman who is trying to break free of his high social status and a pair of revolutionaries (one of whom knits constantly). There is an interesting mix of characters and the street riots along with the storming of the Bastille were exceptional. The juxtaposition of the two cities is reflected in the characters, and the heartless and brutal nature of the revolution is reflected in the story.

[juliestielstra · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The annual read, after the annual viewing of the film on Thanksgiving Day (Ronald Colman version, only, thank you). It has to be the mark of brilliance that even after a dozen readings, each time you harbor a secret hope that maybe THIS year he won't (spoiler alert...) get his head cut off. No better opening and closing lines in literature.

[electrascaife · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Set during the French Revolution, the story follows a French doctor, wrongfully imprisoned for years, who reunites with his daughter and moves to London. There, they settle into a comfortable life, the daughter happily marries and starts a family, all unknowing that they will be pulled back to Paris and into the horror of the revolution. This is Dickens at his finest, weaving various threads into such an intricate pattern and only hinting here and there at the final dramatic design, in which all the characters play a surprising part in relation to one another. Thrilling in parts and tender in others, this ticks all the right boxes for me. I loved it.

[kevinrubin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." begins A Tale of Two Cities and the book itself felt like that to me. Some of it was really good and some of it was quite a struggle to get through.In the first parts of it I only really enjoyed the scenes that took place around Fleet Street and The Strand in London, places it was easy for me to imagine after wandering around there quite a bit on a business trip, and I didn't really get into it again until all the main characters had made their way to Paris.I didn't enjoy the comic aspects of Jerry Cruncher or Miss Pross, feeling they were completely unbelievable and out of place in what was otherwise pretty dramatic. But once in Paris they weren't funny anymore and had pretty serious roles to play.I certainly didn't understand Sydney Carton. I knew he loved and would never have a relationship with Lucie Manette, but he kept going on about his life was a waste and making it sound like he'd done bad things, but there's no hint what anything might've been. All we see of him is his heavy drinking, deep thinking and general rudeness to everyone else. It was only clear at the end what he was willing to do for Lucie's happiness...The heaviest hitting line in the book was Madame Defarge, one of the leaders of the French Revolution after her own personal revenge against the aristocrats, when her husband asks if they might've executed enough people so far and she replies "tell the Wind and Fire where to stop. But don't tell me."Overall, it wasn't my favorite Dickens book. It had some good parts but I had to really work hard to not give up reading it.

[geoffsc-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thought it was about time I read a classic.
I loved the opening passage "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness ..."
At the end it was just as good a page turner as modern novels.
An eye opener, I was astounded at the brutality of the revolution, the inhumanity of the revolutionaries. I presume quite historically accurate.
Good portrayal of characters and subtle revelation of relationships.

[rodweston · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It is probably my twentieth reading of this book. It inspires me every time.

It is a story of redemption of several, but none more so than of Sydney Carton. Beauty in the midst of madness and terror.

[linyarai · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A great classic.

[thornton37814 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Men in love with the same woman join the French revolution. It's a love triangle involving a married couple and another man. Madame Dafarge, obsessed with her knitting, presents a sinister character. The far kinder Lucie Manette is devoted to her father. Will those accused of treason keep their heads? Although this is one of Dickens' classic works, it's not a favorite. The memorable opening line is about as good as the novel gets for me. This was a re-read, although it's been several years since I read it.

[comfypants · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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.

[paperpuss · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

over rated

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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?

[eraderneely · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[foggidawn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[tommi180744 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[gmillar_8 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[judithrs · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A Tale of Cities. Charles Dickens. Open Road. I haven’t read any Dickens since high school and I enjoyed this as it was quite a change from the books I usually read even for book club. I enjoyed the love story and the description of life in France before and after the revolutions. Faults on both sides, friends, and Dickens showed them. I was only familiar with the first and last paragraphs of the book before I read it. And those are still the best lines. If you like to sink into Dickens, this is a good one.

[threadnsong · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There is much that is typical Dickens in this book, most especially the childlike Lucie with her blond curls and her hands clasped before her, that is not surprising. By this book, though, the bits of literary brilliance that are shown in "Little Dorrit" and "Hard Times" come to the fore. The opening paragraph and the final chapters are this brilliance: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" and "It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done" are some of the miracles of the English language and the primary reason that I have undertaken this journey of reading Dickens' corpus with a F2F group.Looking at this book with a 21st Century mindset, there is much that I find lacking: the lack of true character development until the very end with Sydney Carlton (who is mentioned so seldom) and the letter of Dr. Manette that sheds light on his story; the opening of the book with a carriage ride that leaves so very, very much out as any sort of action; and a plot other than people caught up in the bloody part of the French Revolution. But within itself and its time, it does much that would appeal to generations of readers: bringing characters into existence that help explain the human toll of the French Revolution and Reign of Terror, including the years leading up to the storming of the Bastille. The Revolution did not happen in a vacuum, and Dickens explains this peripheral damage very well and without holding back.

[justagirlwithabook · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this one on a plane on the way to England and actually enjoyed it. It isn't my favorite of all the Dickens I've read but it was valuable in and of itself. Everything really leads up to the last moments, which are insanely devastating in so many ways but touching. It didn't bring tears to my eyes - it didn't touch me on a deeply emotional level - but it was good. Definitely recommend.

[csdaley-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Still one of my favorites and maybe the best last line of any book ever.

[pamv-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

All I can say about this book is "I got through it"! Without the spark notes, I would not have understood a single thing here, but I have officially read a classic because I wanted to, not because I was forced to.