A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens
Summary
Dr Alexandre Manette is released after eighteen years in the Bastille, imprisoned on a secret charge he can barely remember, and is brought back to London to be reunited with the daughter, Lucie, he has never really known. Lucie marries Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat who has renounced his family's title and cruelty and moved to England under an assumed name, unaware how thoroughly his family's past will catch up with him. When Darnay is drawn back to Paris during the Revolution to help a former servant, he is arrested as an emigre aristocrat and condemned, largely through the relentless prosecution of Madame Defarge, a revolutionary who knits the names of the condemned into her work and has her own, entirely justified, murderous grievance against the Darnay family reaching back decades. Sydney Carton, an English barrister who resembles Darnay closely enough to have once used the likeness to save his life in a courtroom, has loved Lucie hopelessly for years and uses that same resemblance to take Darnay's place at the guillotine, going to his death so that Lucie's family can escape France intact.
Dickens sets the private story of the Manette and Darnay families against the machinery of the Terror itself, the tribunals, the crowds, the tumbrils rolling toward the scaffold, and the novel moves with unusual speed for Dickens, tighter and less digressive than his other big novels, built almost entirely around the approach to Carton's sacrifice. It opens with one of the most quoted first lines in English fiction, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," and closes on Carton's own, equally famous, "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done."
The book is regularly counted among the best selling novels ever written, and WorldCat records more than 1,500 editions of it in library catalogues worldwide.
Historical Context & Significance
A Tale of Two Cities ran in thirty one weekly instalments in All the Year Round, the periodical Dickens founded and edited himself, from April to November 1859, and was published as a complete novel by Chapman and Hall the same year. Thomas Carlyle, whose history of the French Revolution Dickens drew on directly while writing it, responded warmly and left Dickens "heartily delighted," though the critic James Fitzjames Stephen dismissed the book as a disjointed rehash of Dickens's usual material.
It has remained one of Dickens's most widely read novels, placing 63rd in the BBC's 2003 Big Read poll of Britain's best loved books, and Carton's closing sacrifice has become one of the most quoted passages in English literature, referenced and parodied across more than a century of later fiction and film.