Charles Dickens · 1859
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities is the most read of his historical novels and one of the most quoted opening sentences in English literature. Published in weekly instalments in 1859, the novel is at once a study of the French Revolution, a romance, a melodrama, and a meditation on doubles — the doubled cities (London and Paris), the doubled men (Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton), and the doubled eras (eighteenth-century stability and revolutionary violence).
The novel's first paragraph is one of the most carefully constructed in English fiction — a sequence of antitheses that announces the doubled structure the whole novel will work in:
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…
Ten antitheses in a single sentence. The technique is making a structural claim: the era cannot be characterised in a single direction; any description has to hold both simultaneously. The novel works the same way.
The cities of the title are London and Paris. The novel moves between them — and the parallel is doing thematic work. London is the stable backdrop where most of the romance plot unfolds; Paris is the revolutionary city where the climax takes place. Both, the novel insists, contain the same human material — the same capacity for cruelty, the same potential for redemption. The English smugness about France was, for Dickens, the central reader-assumption to be disturbed.
The novel was published in 1859, with Dickens looking back at the Revolution from seventy years later. The book is partly a warning. The injustice the French aristocracy produced — the running over of children in the street, the contemptuous non-recognition of the poor — Dickens treats as the engine that produced the Terror. The novel argues that a country that permits the first injustice eventually produces the second.
The two male protagonists are doubles in the strict sense — they look so similar they are visually indistinguishable, a fact that becomes the novel's plot device. Charles Darnay is the renounced French nobleman who has made a new life in England as a quiet tutor; Sydney Carton is the dissipated English lawyer who has wasted his talents. Both love Lucie Manette. Darnay marries her. Carton, who cannot have her, eventually saves Darnay's life by taking his place at the guillotine.
The double-substitution is the novel's most powerful melodramatic device and its central moral image. Carton, by dying as Darnay, redeems his wasted life through a single choice. The novel argues — sentimentally, but with conviction — that a life is not fixed by its pattern; one decisive act can change what it was.
The Defarges — Monsieur Defarge, the wine-shop owner, and his wife Madame Defarge — are the novel's revolutionary figures. They are presented sympathetically at first (victims of aristocratic injustice) and increasingly chillingly as the Revolution radicalises.
Madame Defarge is the novel's most striking symbolic character. She sits knitting in the wine-shop, recording in her knitted patterns the names of those marked for the guillotine. The quiet knitting needles are the novel's emblem of revolutionary patience — the long, methodical recording of grievance until the moment of release. Her knitting is one of the most often discussed images in nineteenth-century fiction.
The novel ends with Carton's prophetic vision on the scaffold — a vision the novel attributes to him but does not have him say aloud. The closing line is the most quoted in Dickens:
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 line is unguarded sentiment — a kind of moral statement Dickens permits himself in moments most modern fiction would avoid. Whether the novel earns the line is a matter of critical disagreement. Most readers, on first reading, find it unguardedly moving. The risk of sentimentality is Dickens's constant trade-off.
Dickens's reputation has fluctuated; A Tale of Two Cities survives partly because of the famous opening, partly because the doubled-men structure is so tightly constructed, and partly because it is the most accessible of Dickens's later novels — shorter than Bleak House, more focused than Little Dorrit, more melodramatically engineered than Our Mutual Friend. For many readers it is the only Dickens they read. The novel holds up to single-novel acquaintance better than most of his work.
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