Tale of Two Cities, A, is a historical novel by the English author Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris at the time of the French Revolution (1789-1799). It includes many vividly written fictional scenes of the events of the time, and remains one of the most popular of all Dickens’s novels. A Tale of Two Cities first appeared in serial form in 1859 in the weekly magazine All The Year Round, which Dickens had founded. The complete novel was published in 1859.
A Tale of Two Cities opens in 1775 with the release of Dr. Manette, a French physician, from a French prison. He had been unjustly imprisoned for 18 years to prevent him from revealing a secret he had learned regarding the Marquis St. Evremonde. Manette had discovered that the marquis had caused great suffering to a young peasant woman and had been responsible for the death of her brother. Manette is mentally ill from his time in prison. He is reunited with his daughter, Lucie, and brought to England, where he slowly begins to recover.
The marquis’s nephew, Charles St. Evremonde, renounces his heritage out of disgust at the French nobility. He travels to England under the name of Charles Darnay. There he meets Lucie, and they marry. During the Reign of Terror, a period in the French Revolution of chaos and executions, Darnay goes back to Paris. He plans to try to save the life of a former servant who has been accused by the revolutionaries of having supported the nobility. Darnay is arrested and condemned to death. He is saved at the last moment by an English lawyer, Sydney Carton. Carton has an apparently weak character but is devoted to Lucie. Darnay and Carton look alike, so Carton helps Darnay escape from prison and takes his place to be executed. The final lines of the novel contain the famous words spoken by Carton: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest, that I go to, than I have ever known.” The novel is often remembered for Carton’s heroic self-sacrifice, which gives meaning to his wasted life. The novel is also known for its famous opening, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” and for the character of the vengeful French revolutionary Madame Defarge, continuously knitting symbolic shrouds.
A Tale of Two Cities was one of Dickens’s later novels and one of his most powerful. It was the second of two historical novels that he wrote. The first was Barnaby Rudge (1841). A Tale of Two Cities was influenced by Thomas Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution (1837), which Dickens admired. The mob scenes in the novel highlight the overwhelming despair of the poor and their potential for violent revenge.
