A Tale of Two Cities

About this book

A Tale of Two Cities is one of only two historical novels Charles Dickens wrote, the other being Barnaby Rudge. It is set in London and Paris in the years before and during the French Revolution, and it was the first novel Dickens serialized in All the Year Round, the weekly magazine he founded in 1859. Dickens acknowledged a debt to Thomas Carlyle’s history The French Revolution, which he read closely while preparing the book.

The novel is shorter and more tightly plotted than most of Dickens’s work, with less comedy and fewer of the sprawling subplots his readers were used to. That compactness, along with its famous opening and closing lines, has made it one of his most widely assigned and most frequently adapted books.

The story

In 1775 a banker’s agent, Jarvis Lorry, travels to Paris to collect Dr. Alexandre Manette, who has been released after eighteen years as a prisoner in the Bastille and is being cared for by a former servant, Ernest Defarge, and his wife. Manette’s daughter Lucie, raised in England and unaware her father was alive, goes with Lorry to bring him home.

Five years later, a French emigrant named Charles Darnay is tried in London for treason and is acquitted partly because of his resemblance to a dissolute English lawyer, Sydney Carton. Both men are drawn into the Manette household. Darnay has a past in France he has tried to renounce, and when the Revolution breaks out in 1789 and the Defarges become leaders in their district, that past pulls the characters back to Paris at the most dangerous possible moment.

Themes and historical context

Dickens presents the Revolution as the result of long oppression. The early French chapters show an aristocracy indifferent to the suffering it causes, and the novel treats the uprising as inevitable while refusing to excuse the mass executions that followed. Madame Defarge, who knits the names of the condemned into her work, is Dickens’s figure for vengeance that outgrows any sense of justice.

Against that cycle the book sets images of rescue and return: a man brought back from living death in prison, a defendant saved by a double, and the question of whether a wasted life can still be put to use. The title’s two cities are also two societies, and Dickens implies that England of his own day had no grounds for complacency.

The novel was popular from the start, selling strongly in its weekly numbers and in the monthly parts issued alongside them, and it has remained one of the best-known novels in English.

Who should read it

At around 135,000 words, A Tale of Two Cities is medium length for Dickens and shorter than Bleak House or David Copperfield. The opening chapters are slow and atmospheric, and the many coincidences will strike some readers as contrived, but the second half moves quickly. The vocabulary and sentence structure are typical of mid-Victorian fiction and take a little adjustment. It is a good first Dickens for readers who want plot over sprawl, and a strong choice for anyone drawn to the period.

Edition notes

Project Gutenberg #98 was prepared by Judith Boss and David Widger. It is the complete English text.