A Tale of Two Cities (Illustrated by Harvey Dunn with introductions by G. K. Chesterton, Andrew Lang, and Edwin Percy Whipple)

By Charles Dickens

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” so begins Charles Dickens’s famous novel concerning the contentious time leading up to and during the French Revolution. In these first words Dickens exemplifies the dichotomous relationship that existed between the aristocracy and the lower classes of the time and the universal themes that would be depicted throughout the book. “A Tale of Two Cities,” is set in London and Paris, the titular two cities, at the end of the 18th century, and principally concerns the lives of Dr. Alexandre Manette, his daughter Lucie, who marries a French nobleman, Charles Darnay, and their close family friend, barrister Sydney Carton. Despite the union of Lucie and Darney, Carton confesses his love to Lucie, declaring to “embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you,” a promise that he will uphold in dramatic fashion by the end of the novel. Dickens considered “A Tale of Two Cities” to be the best novel that he had ever written. One of only two works of historical fiction that the author would compose; it is a sweeping narrative that explores the best and the worst of the human character and condition. This edition is illustrated by Harvey Dunn, includes introductions by G. K. Chesterton, Andrew Lang, and Edwin Percy Whipple, and a biographical afterword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Nov 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781420951776

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens nació en Portsmouth en 1812, segundo de los ocho hijos de un funcionario de la Marina. A los doce años, encarcelado el padre por deudas, tuvo que ponerse a trabajar en una fábrica de betún. Su educación fue irregular: aprendió por su cuenta taquigrafía, trabajó en el bufete de un abogado y finalmente fue corresponsal parlamentario de The Morning Chronicle. Sus artículos, luego recogidos en Bosquejos de Boz (1836-1837), tuvieron un gran éxito y, con la aparición en esos mismos años de los Papeles póstumos del club Pickwick, Dickens se convirtió en un auténtico fenómeno editorial. Novelas como Oliver Twist (1837), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839) o (1841) alcanzaron una enorme popularidad, así como algunas crónicas de viajes, como Estampas de Italia (1846; ALBA CLÁSICA núm. LVII). Con Dombey e hijo (1846-1848) inicia su época de madurez novelística, de la que son buenos ejemplos David Copperfield (1849-1850), su primera novela en primera persona, y su favorita, en la que elaboró algunos episodios autobiográficos, Casa desolada (1852-1853), La pequeña Dorrit (1855-1857), Historia de dos ciudades (1859; ALBA PRIMEROS CLÁSICOS núm. 5) y Grandes esperanzas (1860-1861; ALBA CLÁSICA MAIOR núm. I). Dickens murió en Londres en 1870.

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A TALE OF TWO CITIES

By CHARLES DICKENS

Introductions by

G. K. CHESTERTON, ANDREW LANG,

and EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE

Illustrated by HARVEY DUNN

A Tale of Two Cities

By Charles Dickens

Introductions by G. K. Chesterton, Andrew Lang, and Edwin Percy Whipple

Illustrated by Harvey Dunn

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5176-9

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5177-6

This edition copyright © 2015. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: A detail of Sydney Carton, from ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by Charles Dickens (gouache on paper), Bruce, Ralph (20th century) / Private Collection / © Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

FIRST INTRODUCTION

SECOND INTRODUCTION

THIRD INTRODUCTION

BOOK I. RECALLED TO LIFE.

Chapter I. The Period

Chapter II. The Mail

Chapter III. The Night Shadows

Chapter IV. The Preparation

Chapter V. The Wine-shop

Chapter VI. The Shoemaker

BOOK II. THE GOLDEN THREAD.

Chapter I. Five Years Later

Chapter II. A Sight

Chapter III. A Disappointment

Chapter IV. Congratulatory

Chapter V. The Jackal

Chapter VI. Hundreds of People

Chapter VII. Monseigneur in Town

Chapter VIII. Monseigneur in the Country

Chapter IX. The Gorgon’s Head

Chapter X. Two Promises

Chapter XI. A Companion Picture

Chapter XII. The Fellow of Delicacy

Chapter XIII. The Fellow of No Delicacy

Chapter XIV. The Honest Tradesman

Chapter XV. Knitting

Chapter XVI. Still Knitting

Chapter XVII. One Night

Chapter XVIII. Nine Days

Chapter XIX. An Opinion

Chapter XX. A Plea

Chapter XXI. Echoing Footsteps

Chapter XXII. The Sea Still Rises

Chapter XXIII. Fire Rises

Chapter XXIV. Drawn to the Loadstone Rock

BOOK III. THE TRACK OF A STORM.

Chapter I. In Secret

Chapter II. The Grindstone

Chapter III. The Shadow

Chapter IV. Calm in Storm

Chapter V. The Wood-Sawyer

Chapter VI. Triumph

Chapter VII. A Knock at the Door

Chapter VIII. A Hand at Cards

Chapter IX. The Game Made

Chapter X. The Substance of the Shadow

Chapter XI. Dusk

Chapter XII. Darkness

Chapter XIII. Fifty-two

Chapter XIV. The Knitting Done

Chapter XV. The Footsteps Die Out For Ever

BIOGRAPHICAL AFTERWORD

NOTE TO THE ILLUSTRATIONS

The illustrations in this edition by Harvey Dunn originally appeared in the 1921 edition published by Cosmopolitan Book Co. They have been reproduced in grayscale for the paperback edition and in color for the electronic edition.

First Introduction

As an example of Dickens’s literary work, A Tale of Two Cities is not wrongly named. It is his most typical contact with the civic ideals of Europe. All his other tales have been tales of one city. He was in spirit a Cockney; though that title has been quite unreasonably twisted to mean a cad. By the old sound and proverbial test a Cockney was a man born within the sound of Bow bells. That is, he was a man born within the immediate appeal of high civilization and of eternal religion. Shakespeare, in the heart of his fantastic forest, turns with a splendid suddenness to the Cockney ideal as being the true one after all. For a jest, for a reaction, for an idle summer love or still idler summer hatred, it is well to wander away into the bewildering forest of Arden. It is well that those who are sick with love or sick with the absence of love, those who weary of the folly of courts or weary yet more of their wisdom, it is natural that these should trail away into the twinkling twilight of the woods. Yet it is here that Shakespeare makes one of his most arresting and startling assertions of the truth. Here is one of those rare and tremendous moments of which one may say that there is a stage direction, Enter Shakespeare. He has admitted that for men weary of courts, for men sick of cities, the wood is the wisest place, and he has praised it with his purest lyric ecstasy. But when a man enters suddenly upon that celestial picnic, a man who is not sick of cities, but sick of hunger, a man who is not weary of courts, but weary of walking, then Shakespeare lets through his own voice with a shattering sincerity and cries the praise of practical human civilization:

If ever you have looked on better days,

If ever you have sat at good men’s feasts,

If ever been where bells have knolled to church,

If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear

Or know what ’tis to pity and be pitied.

There is nothing finer even in Shakespeare than that conception of the circle of rich men all pretending to rough it in the country, and the one really hungry man entering, sword in hand, and praising the city. If ever been where bells have knolled to church; if you have ever been within sound of Bow bells; if you have ever been happy and haughty enough to call yourself a Cockney.

We must remember this distinction always in the case of Dickens. Dickens is the great Cockney, at once tragic and comic, who enters abruptly upon the Arcadian banquet of the æsthetics and says, Forbear and eat no more, and tells them that they shall not eat until necessity be served. If there was one thing he would have favored instinctively it would have been the spreading of the town as meaning the spreading of civilization. And we should (I hope) all favor the spreading of the town if it did mean the spreading of civilization. The objection to the spreading of the modern Manchester or Birmingham suburb is simply that such a suburb is much more barbaric than any village in Europe could ever conceivably be. And again, if there is anything that Dickens would have definitely hated it is that general treatment of nature as a dramatic spectacle, a piece of scene-painting which has become the common mark of the culture of our wealthier classes. Despite many fine pictures of natural scenery, especially along the English roadsides, he was upon the whole emphatically on the side of the town. He was on the side of bricks and mortar. He was a citizen; and, after all, a citizen means a man of the city. His strength was, after all, in the fact that he was a man of the city. But, after all, his weakness, his calamitous weakness, was that he was a man of one city.

For all practical purposes he had never been outside such places as Chatham and London. He did indeed travel on the Continent; but surely no man’s travel was ever so superficial as his. He was more superficial than the smallest and commonest tourist. He went about Europe on stilts; he never touched the ground. There is one good test and one only of whether a man has traveled to any profit in Europe. An Englishman is, as such, a European, and as he approaches the central splendors of Europe he ought to feel that he is coming home. If he does not feel at home he had much better have stopped at home. England is a real home; London is a real home; and all the essential feelings of adventure or the picturesque can easily be gained by going out at night upon the flats of Essex or the cloven hills of Surrey. Your visit to Europe is useless unless it gives you the sense of an exile returning. Your first sight of Rome is futile unless you feel that you have seen it before. Thus useless and thus futile were the foreign experiments and the continental raids of Dickens. He enjoyed them as he would have enjoyed, as a boy, a scamper out of Chatham into some strange meadows, as he would have enjoyed, when a grown man, a steam in a police boat out into the fens to the far east of London. But he was the Cockney venturing far; he was not the European coming home. He is still the splendid Cockney Orlando of whom I spoke above; he cannot but suppose that any strange men, being happy in some pastoral way, are mysterious foreign scoundrels. Dickens’s real speech to the lazy and laughing civilization of Southern Europe would really have run in the Shakespearian words:

but whoe’er you be

Who in this desert inaccessible,

Under the shade of melancholy boughs

Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time.

If ever you have looked on better things,

If ever been where bells have knolled to church.

If, in short, you have ever had the advantage of being born within the sound of Bow bells. Dickens could not really conceive that there was any other city but his own.

It is necessary thus to insist that Dickens never understood the Continent, because only thus can we appreciate the really remarkable thing he did in A Tale of Two Cities. It is necessary to feel, first of all, the fact that to him London was the centre of the universe. He did not understand at all the real sense in which Paris is the capital of Europe. He had never realized that all roads lead to Rome. He had never felt (as an Englishman can feel) that he was an Athenian before he was a Londoner. Yet with everything against him he did this astonishing thing. He wrote a book about two cities, one of which he understood; the other he did not understand. And his description of the city he did not know is almost better than his description of the city he did know. This is the entrance of the unquestionable thing about Dickens; the thing called genius; the thing which everyone has to talk about directly and distinctly because no one knows what it is. For a plain word (as for instance the word fool) always covers an infinite mystery.

A Tale of Two Cities is one of the more tragic tints of the later life of Dickens. It might be said that he grew sadder as he grew older; but this would be false, for two reasons. First, a man never or hardly ever does grow sad as he grows old; on the contrary, the most melancholy young lovers can be found forty years afterwards chuckling over their port wine. And second, Dickens never did grow old, even in a physical sense. What weariness did appear in him appeared in the prime of life; it was due not to age but to overwork, and his exaggerative way of doing everything. To call Dickens a victim of elderly disenchantment would be as absurd as to say the same of Keats. Such fatigue as there was, was due not to the slowing down of his blood, but rather to its unremitting rapidity. He was not wearied by his age; rather he was wearied by his youth. And though A Tale of Two Cities is full of sadness, it is full also of enthusiasm; that pathos is a young pathos rather than an old one. Yet there is one circumstance which does render important the fact that A Tale of Two Cities is one of the later works of Dickens. This fact is the fact of his dependence upon another of the great writers of the Victorian era. And it is in connection with this that we can best see the truth of which I have been speaking; the truth that his actual ignorance of France went with amazing intuitive perception of the truth about it. It is here that he has most clearly the plain mark of the man of genius; that he can understand what he does not understand.

Dickens was inspired to the study of the French Revolution and to the writing of a romance about it by the example and influence of Carlyle. Thomas Carlyle undoubtedly rediscovered for Englishmen the revolution that was at the back of all their policies and reforms. It is an entertaining side joke that the French Revolution should have been discovered for Britons by the only British writer who did not really believe in it. Nevertheless, the most authoritative and the most recent critics on that great renaissance agree in considering Carlyle’s work one of the most searching and detailed power. Carlyle had read a great deal about the French Revolution. Dickens had read nothing at all, except Carlyle. Carlyle was a man who collected his ideas by the careful collation of documents and the verification of references. Dickens was a man who collected his ideas from loose hints in the streets, and those always the same streets; as I have said, he was the citizen of one city. Carlyle was in his way learned; Dickens was in every way ignorant. Dickens was an Englishman cut off from France; Carlyle was a Scotsman, historically connected with France. And yet, when all this is said and certified, Dickens is more right than Carlyle. Dickens’s French Revolution is probably more like the real French Revolution than Carlyle’s. It is difficult, if not impossible, to state the grounds of this strong conviction. One can only talk of it by employing that excellent method which Cardinal Newman employed when he spoke of the notes of Catholicism. There were certain notes of the Revolution. One note of the Revolution was the thing which silly people call optimism, and sensible people call high spirits. Carlyle could never quite get it, because with all his spiritual energy he had no high spirits. That is why he preferred prose to poetry. He could understand rhetoric; for rhetoric means singing with an object. But he could not understand lyrics; for the lyric means singing without an object; as everyone does when he is happy. Now for all its blood and its black guillotines, the French Revolution was full of mere high spirits. Nay, it was full of happiness. This actual lilt and levity Carlyle never really found in the Revolution, because he could not find it in himself. Dickens knew less of the Revolution, but he had more of it. When Dickens attacked abuses, he battered them down with exactly that sort of cheery and quite one-sided satisfaction with which the French mob battered down the Bastille. Dickens utterly and innocently believed in certain things; he would, I think, have drawn the sword for them. Carlyle half believed in half a hundred things; he was at once more of a mystic and more of a sceptic. Carlyle was the perfect type of the grumbling servant; the old grumbling servant of the aristocratic comedies. He followed the aristocracy, but he growled as he followed. He was obedient without being servile, just as Caleb Balderstone was obedient without being servile. But Dickens was the type of the man who might really have rebelled instead of grumbling. He might have gone out into the street and fought, like the man who took the Bastille. It is somewhat nationally significant that when we talk of the man in the street it means a figure silent, slouching, and even feeble. When the French speak of the man in the street, it means danger in the street.

No one can fail to notice this deep difference between Dickens and the Carlyle whom he avowedly copied. Splendid and symbolic as are Carlyle’s scenes of the French Revolution, we have in reading them a curious sense that everything is happening at night. In Dickens even massacre happens by daylight. Carlyle always assumes that because things were tragedies therefore the men who did them felt tragic. Dickens knows that the man who works the worst tragedies is the man who feels comic; as for example, Mr. Quilp. The French Revolution was a much simpler world than Carlyle could understand; for Carlyle was subtle and not simple. Dickens could understand it, for he was simple and not subtle. He understood that plain rage against plain political injustice; he understood again that obvious vindictiveness and that obvious brutality which followed. Cruelty and the abuse of absolute power, he told an American slave-owner, are two of the bad passions of human nature. Carlyle was quite incapable of rising to the height of that uplifted common-sense. He must always find something mystical about the cruelty of the French Revolution. The effect was equally bad whether he found it mystically bad and called the thing anarchy, or whether he found it mystically good and called it the rule of the strong. In both cases he could not understand the common-sense justice or the common-sense vengeance of Dickens and the French Revolution.

Yet Dickens has in this book given a perfect and final touch to this whole conception of mere rebellion and mere human nature. Carlyle had written the story of the French Revolution and had made the story a mere tragedy. Dickens writes the story about the French Revolution, and does not make the Revolution itself the tragedy at all. Dickens knows that an outbreak is seldom a tragedy; generally it is the avoidance of a tragedy. All the real tragedies are silent. Men fight each other with furious cries, because men fight each other with chivalry and an unchangeable sense of brotherhood. But trees fight each other in utter stillness; because they fight each other cruelly and without quarter. In this book, as in history, the guillotine is not the calamity, but rather the solution of the calamity. The sin of Sydney Carton is a sin of habit, not of revolution. His gloom is the gloom of London, not the gloom of Paris.

G. K. CHESTERTON

1906.

Second Introduction

Probably Dickens never wrote a more popular book (unless Pickwick is the exception) than his Tale of Two Cities. Among readers whom Nature has made incapable (to their pride and loss) of appreciating Mr. Pickwick and Mrs. Gamp, and all our dearest friends, the Tale of Two Cities is admired. Meanwhile the lovers of the old irresponsible humour and high spirits of Dickens’s earlier days must admit that the Tale is an historical melodrama of unrivalled vividness and power. It is a book that will not allow itself to be forgotten, with its refrain of trampling multitudinous feet, and its melancholy figure of Sydney Carton.

The French Revolution has been a fertile but not a fortunate field for novelists. Scott justly observed, about some other historical events, that they are, in themselves, too strong for romantic treatment. Nothing can add to the native romance of the conquest of Anahuac by Cortés; fancy lags in the trail of fact. The poignancy and horror of the Revolution outdo all mere imaginative effort to cope with them: it is Nature that here purges by pity and terror, that distracts our sympathies, and finally leaves us in an impotent anger against the shiftless party which fell, and the fiendish party which triumphed in that fall, and then turned its fangs against itself. We are too near that chaldron of Medea, too near its brink ourselves, for the existence of a merely artistic interest. Therefore even the great Dumas did not succeed in this field, as he did in fields more remote, and among catastrophes less cosmical. Dickens has, probably, the advantage here over that renowned master of France; his English background aids him, by affording relief. Doubtless this is the best novel of the Revolution, and the best of Dickens’s novels which venture into history.

On one point, historical accuracy, not very much need be said. Dickens, in a letter to Bulwer Lytton, shows that he was quite familiar with the scientifically historical view of his topic. Enquiries and figures regarding the precise social condition of the peasantry might prove this or that, on the whole, but examples of oppression were recent enough, and common enough (he held), to justify the use which he made of them in fiction. We must beware of checking the fancy of the novelist by pedantic restrictions—pedantic because out of place. The historical novelist is not the historian. Mr. Freeman has been severe on Ivanhoe for want of congruity with facts. Kenilworth and Peveril of the Peak present characters dead long before the tale begins—or at that time children, though they figure as grown men. In Thackeray’s splendid picture of the King, in Esmond, there is hardly one line or touch of colour consistent with historical verity. This is hard on the character, and Dickens’s wicked Marquis may be hard on his order. It is not unreasonable or unallowable to suppose a nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas, says Dickens to Lytton, and, in romance, it is doubtless allowable. He might have added that, in the Marquis de Sade, a real contemporary, the bestial Gilles de Raiz of 1440 was actually reincarnated, and was not burned, nor even guillotined, while so many innocent heads were falling. The Bastille, by the time it was destroyed, was as obsolete almost for its old purposes, and nearly as empty, as the cave of Giant Pagan, in Bunyan. But in a curious wandering book, the Letters of Oliver Macallister, we read of horrors worse than Dickens could invent—the black dungeons of Galbanon, where men’s lives were one long noisome torture; where prisoners disappeared forever, none knew how or why, none dared to ask. Macallister, a mouton, or prison spy, causes, despite his verbose futile digressions, a. shudder which cannot be forgotten. The date of his experiences was 1755-1760, sufficiently near the period of the novel for the purposes of fiction. The pressure of taxation, its most unequal pressure, is undeniable, while the results were wasted in the way with which we are familiar. Dickens cites Mercier’s Tableau de Paris as authority for his bad Marquis, though he does not tell us what were the Quellen of Mercier. Indeed, we need not ask. The question is not whether the stories are true, but whether, like the blood-baths of Louis XV., the stories were believed. India is full of such myths about ourselves, as medieval Europe was full of them about the Jews. The historian examines the facts: to the novelist is permitted a larger liberty. As an old critic justly puts it, the novelist is the landscape gardener of history. Rousseau is cited by Dickens for the peasants shutting up his house when he had a bit of meat. We may, of course, say that the Revolution did not greatly benefit the peasant, or anybody. That is rather an extreme opinion. Certainly the peasant escaped from the element of tyrannical personal caprice. Revolutions never produce a millennium, but they gratify the passion of revenge, and they shift and modify grievances. The sick world gets such relief as a fevered man obtains from turning in his bed.

The Tale of Two Cities was the next in sequence after Little Dorrit, and though so vastly superior to that work in vividness, concentration, and construction, was written in unhappy circumstances. The author and his wife had separated, and a dispute about the publication of a statement on this topic by Dickens led to the abandonment of Household Words. From Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, its publishers, Dickens went back to his old allies, Messrs. Chapman and Hall, never to leave them again. He established All the Year Round, practically the old periodical under a new name. And here, though not very relevantly, one may observe that household words was a household word, or proverbial phrase, before Shakespeare’s day. Randolph, the ambassador of Queen Elizabeth in Scotland (1565), talks of household words, as poor men use to say, in one of his despatches.

In All the Year Round the new story was published. The germ of the idea, a vague fancy, had occurred to Dickens when acting with his friends and children, in Wilkie Collins’s Frozen Deep, during the summer of 1857. In the end of January, 1858, he reverted to the notion, partly because work at a story would relieve his worried mind. A number of titles were thought of: Buried Alive; The Thread of Gold, or The Doctor of Beauvais; but it was in March, 1859, that he decided on A Tale Two Cities. He meant to put the story into his magazine, and also, for another public, into monthly numbers. His purpose was that the legend should express the characters more than they should express themselves in dialogue—a story of incident pounding the characters in its own mortar, and beating their interest out of them. Seldom, indeed, have fictitious characters been more severely pounded. As Mr. Forster says, Dickens does rely more on incident than character; but perhaps it would be as true to say that he drops that surplusage of description of character, and that Carlylean trick of iteration played on some personal feature, as on Pancks’s snort or Carker’s teeth. Most in his regular manner are the bullying Stryver, and the Resurrectionist. The humour of Jerry’s remarks on the barbarity of quartering a criminal, because it spoils a subject, are exactly in the manner of Dennis, the hangman, in Barnaby Rudge. Mr. Forster, usually a most lenient critic, thinks Dickens’s experiment hardly successful, from the absence of humour, and of rememberable figures. But it is not well to be humorous in scenes of oppression, popular or patrician; while Dr. Manette, and Sydney Carton, and Mr. Stryver, and Madame Defarge are surely characters memorable enough. Carton has been argued against, as not a plausible character, and, in the nature of the case, he is not a usual character. But there is nothing impossible, or gravely improbable, in him. He does not set a pin’s fee on a life which he has wrecked, and lacks the energy to rebuild. He has a great passion; greater love has no man than this, that a man should give his life for his friend. He makes a noble end of a wasted existence, as he might do, under the stress of his affection for Mrs. Darnay, and perhaps more tears have been shed over Sydney Carton than over any personage in Dickens’s novels. Nobody need grudge them to the school-fellow of Mr. Stryver, whose last scene is in a high degree pathetic, yet not melodramatic. There were too many such farewells to life, when the mob had its will and its way.

According to the right rule of historical fiction, the characters are unhistorical. The domestic life of a few simple private people is so knitted and interwoven with the outbreak of a terrible public event, that the one seems but part of the other. Dickens does not give us long chapters of actual history. He could have introduced the real people—the King, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just; and Dumas or Scott would probably have done so, with good effect. But the more modest plan is the safer, and, as the example proves, not the less interesting. The Revolution exists, so to say, for the story. Even that gallant feat, the storming of a scarcely defended castle, is described because of its necessity to the plot; the Doctor’s manuscript, concealed in No. 105, North Tower, has to be discovered by Defarge. The novel does rather suggest that the Bastille was assaulted mainly for that purpose, and that the Revolution was chiefly caused by the vintner’s wife, to serve her private ends. The conditions, or some of them, which nourished the bacillus of revolt, are described, however, in earlier chapters, consistently with what Dickens calls the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle’s wonderful book. With similar skill the September massacres are not dragged in, for the mere sake of description, but are of moment to the conduct of the story. It were hypercritical to object to the coincidence whereby the spies, whom we first met in England, meet and are mastered by Carton at the nick of time. Such allowances are the common right of novelists. Indeed, when Dickens, writing to Monsieur Regnier of the Comédie Française, called this book the best story I have written, his self-criticism was just. It is the best charpenté of his tales up to that date; the most compact, and the most lucid in its development. Excellence in construction had not hitherto been his forte, partly because his tales had too many interests, in which that of plot was apt to be obscured and overlaid by a mass of heterogeneous detail. In this instance, just because the characters were to be pounded out by circumstance, all lies clear before the eye of author and reader.

Throughout the novel, the scenes, as described, reach a high level of vision, whether they are cast in London or in Paris. Mr. Forster, in his Life of Dickens, is annoyed with Mr. Lewes’s criticisms on Dickens’s power of vision. They are expressed, perhaps, rather pedantically, and in the terminology of psychological science, which seems to have been hardly intelligible to Mr. Forster. Vividness of conception, almost amounting to hallucination, is decidedly a form of genius. In Goethe’s case, both in scientific and personal thought, conception externalized itself as hallucination. He would think of the girl of the hour till she actually came to meet me, he told Eckermann. To possess this vigour of phantasia, and to communicate it in a secondary degree to the reader (as Dickens here does in a score of splendid passages), is to give proof demonstrable of the highest romantic genius. Lewes was paying a tribute to Dickens with one hand, while taking it away with the other, when he called the characters wooden. They are anything but wooden, as a rule, in A Tale of Two Cities, though, in places, the humour of Jerry may be censured as verbal, or mechanical. Hallucination will never account for it, cries Mr. Forster, apparently regarding hallucination as synonymous with mental aberration. This is what comes of introducing scientific technical language into literary criticism. Dickens said, "I don’t invent, really do not, but see, thus attesting the correctness of Mr. Lewes’s diagnosis. But the mechanism of genius is an obscure topic: we ordinary minds may be grateful for the results of processes whereof we have no personal experience. Dickens wrote to Lytton that he never gave way to his invention recklessly, but constantly restrained it; and, of course, he occasionally failed in restraint. His invention did not often present him with a jeune première of great interest, and the heroine of A Tale of Two Cities is even as most heroines of male novelists. The turn which makes Miss Pross an accidental avenging angel, was censured, as if Dickens, here, had not restrained his invention. But he justly replied that he wished to contrast Madame Defarge’s mean death in a grotesque scuffle, with the stately and honourable death of Carton. The grim ingenuity of the device by which Jerry learns that Cly is not dead, accounts for the introduction of a character common enough, at the time and much later, the Resurrectionist. That a man in his position should practise this by-work, is, it must be admitted, not very probable.

Dickens sent the proofs of the story to M. Regnier, to be dramatized. But the censure, as M. Regnier saw, would have replied——

"Incedis per ignes

Suppositos cineri doloso."

ANDREW LANG.

1898.

Third Introduction

A Tale of Two Cities is one of the most thrilling narratives in the whole range of the literature of fiction. Considered a part from all the other works of Dickens, it would entitle him to a very high rank among romancers. The provoking pauses in the progress of his other stories, made for the purpose of introducing new characters, are not observable in this, which seems to be spurred and driven on by some overmastering power above and back of the author, making him

"Like one, that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round, walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread."

The stimulant which kindled Dicken’s imagination was Carlyle’s wonderful prose epic, The French Revolution, which so captivated him that he re-read it a score of times with ever new delight. After he had decided to write the tale, Carlyle furnished him with many of the books he had himself used in preparing his work, and which aided Dickens in gaining a vivid conception of the condition of France, both while the Revolution was impending and after it had rushed into its worst excesses. The idea of the story was working vaguely in his mind when he was specially disturbed by his domestic troubles; it grew into shape gradually; and, after his quarrel with the publishers of Household Words had impelled him to establish the weekly periodical of All the Year Round, he inaugurated his new enterprise by publishing, on April 30, 1859 the opening portions of A Tale of Two Cities. The story at once carried the circulation of the weekly up to an average sale varying between thirty and forty thousand copies. Before venturing on the publication, he had the usual correspondence with Forster, as to choosing an appropriate title. One of These Days was his first choice; then came Buried Alive! then The Thread of Gold; then The Doctor of Beauvais. The idea of the plot had been brooding in his mind nearly a year before he finally decided on something which would fit, as he said, the opening of the story to a T,—A Tale of Two Cities. As the work went on, he was gratified by a letter from Carlyle warmly praising it I set myself to the task, he wrote to Forster, "of making a picturesque story, rising in every chapter, with characters true to nature, but whom the story should express more than they should express themselves by dialogue. I mean, in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written (in place of the odious stuff that is written under that pretence), pounding the characters in its own mortar, and beating their interest out of them." To Forster’s historical objections, that the feudal cruelties did not come within the date of the action sufficiently to justify his use of them, Dickens returned a ready answer.{1} I had, of course, he said, full knowledge of the formal surrender of the feudal privileges, but these had been bitterly felt quite as near to the time of the Revolution as the doctor’s narrative, which you will remember dates long before the Terror. With the slang of the new philosophy on the one side, it was surely not unreasonable or unallowable, on the other, to suppose a nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas and representing the time going out, as his nephew represents the time coming in. If there be anything certain on earth, I take it that the condition of the French peasant generally at that day was intolerable. No later inquiries or provings by figures will hold water against the tremendous testimony of men living at the time. . . . I am not clear, and I never have been clear, respecting the canon of fiction which forbids the interposition of accident in such a case as Madame Defarge’s death. Where the accident is inseparable from the action and passion of the character; where it is strictly consistent with the entire design, and arises out of some culminating proceeding on the part of the individual which the whole story has led up to; it seems to me to become, as it were, an act of divine justice. And when I use Miss Pross (though this is quite another question) to faring about such a catastrophe, I have the positive intention of making that half comic intervention a part of the desperate woman’s failure; and of opposing that mean death, instead of a desperate one in the streets, which she wouldn’t have minded, to the dignity of Carton’s. Wrong or right, this was all design, and seemed to me to be in the fitness of things. In all this, Dickens shows himself an admirable, interpretative critic,—at least of his own work. Nothing could be better than his reasons, except the masterly way in which he carried out the design which the reasons fully justify.

As a mere story, founded on the Revolution of ’89, it excels in terseness, vividness, and interest any romance of Alexandre Dumas, on the same period; and at the same time it includes attractive moral elements, of which Dumas never had the slightest conception. Were it not that the romance is artistically constructed, demanding some exercise of mind on the reader’s part to be thoroughly appreciated, there seems to be no reason why its popularity should not have outrun that of every sensational novel of the time, and have taken by storm the public which reads Reynolds and Miss Braddon, as well as the public that reads Thackeray, Bulwer, and Charles Reade. Yet A Tale of Two Cities is hardly known by thousands who have Pickwick and Nickleby almost by heart; and among these thousands are many intelligent as well as many unintelligent readers of Dickens. The man or woman is to be envied who reads this Tale of Two Cities for the first time, as it has every quality of interest calculated to stir the dullest imagination, and stimulate the most jaded heart. In the style and treatment of the story there is also present that element of the serious grotesque, mounting at times to the gigantesque, which fascinates us in the romances of Victor Hugo.

The characters are generally subordinated to the incidents, yet the story is still rich in various characterization. Dr. Manette, his daughter Lucie, and the Defarges; Miss Pross, and Solomon her brother; Jerry Cruncher,—not forgetting his distressed wife and hopeful son; Mr. Stryver and Sydney Carton; and the sleek, sneering, cruel, voluptuous, blandly inhuman Marquis, abhorred by everybody, and specially abhorred by his nephew, who is in the line of succession to his rank and land,—a rank degraded by crime, and land blasted by infamous exactions on its tenants to pay the debts of profligacy and riot;—all these are indisputable characters, each having an individual interest. It may be said, however, that Charles Darnay, the philanthropic nephew of the monster aristocrat, a man who becomes the central object of interest in the story,—the lover and husband of Lucie Manette, who wins the greatest blessing that life affords, a tender and intelligent wife, in whom affection rises to the height of genius,—is drawn with the faintest colors of the artist’s pencil. Brave, honorable, noble as he is, his qualities are didactically rather than dramatically expressed, and one feels that he is insufficiently individualized when his prominence among the characters is considered. Still, the particular persons of the tale, whether attractive or repulsive, whether strongly or feebly delineated, are all drifted to and fro in the storm of events, representing the uprising of an oppressed people, blind and mad in selecting both its favorites and victims. In this revolutionary tempest Darnay and his wife, with all their surroundings, are but autumn leaves, swept hither and thither by a hurricane which regards neither reason nor justice in its wide, remorseless sweep.

The character which rises above all storms of circumstance in this exigency is Sydney Carton. It is useless, he knows, to save the victim doomed to the guillotine by any demonstration of his innocence. All he can do is to take the victim’s place. He succeeds in this by an exercise of skill, forethought, and elaborate contrivance, which other men may have equalled in attempts to save their individual existence, but which none ever employed with similar coolness and intelligence in the effort of sacrificing it. He has sworn to Lucie, for whom he has a far-off, ideal affection, altogether removed from any stain of the sensuality and recklessness on which his own turbid life had been wrecked, that if the time ever came when he could do her a service, it should be done at any cost to himself. Accordingly, when all means have been exhausted to save her husband’s life, he steps in, not precipitately but deliberately; not in a rash, wild way, but in a way which calls forth all his alertness of intellect, and contrives to be Darnay’s substitute for the justice of the guillotine. The scene in which this sacrifice is consummated is pathetic and noble, beyond almost any other in Dickens’s work.

Richard Grant White, a writer who has wandered over a wide field of criticism,—from an intelligent scrutiny of the text of Shakespeare to the minutest questions springing up from the popular use or misuse of common words,—was the first critic who called attention to the singular beauty, the exceptional sublimity, of the character of Sydney Carton. After weighing his words, which at first seem exaggerated, one is impelled at last to agree with him, that Carton stands out as one of the noblest characters in the whole literature of fiction. The more the character is studied, the more we are impressed with the depth of Mr. White’s criticism. As to the work itself, he says, that its portrayal of the noble-natured castaway makes it almost a peerless book in modem literature, and gives it a place among the highest examples of literary art. . . . The conception of this character shows in its author an ideal of magnanimity and of charity never surpassed. There is not a grander, lovelier figure than the self-wrecked, self-devoted Sydney Carton, in literature or history; and the story itself is so noble in its spirit, so grand and graphic in its style, and filled with a pathos so profound and simple, that it deserves and will surely take a place among the great serious works of imagination. The only remark to be made in qualification of this eulogy is, that Carton’s failure in life had made him not only indifferent to life, but heartily disgusted with it; there was no prospect of possible self-amendment rising before his eyes to check in the least his design of self-immolation; and he seized on the heroic form of suicide, presented to him by the distress of the woman he loved, as a means at once of blessing her existence and of extinguishing his own.

The Paris scenes in this Tale of Two Cities’’ are more vivid and impressive than those which occur in London, yet the English incidents are not without special merit and interest. Most English novelists have exerted their talents in describing legal trials, affecting the lives or fortunes of their leading personages. Perhaps the account, in Warren’s Ten Thousand a Tear, of the trial by which Tittlebat Titmouse wins the estates of Mr. Aubrey, is not the least exciting of the incidents of that novel, even to unprofessional readers; and Wilkie Collins so delights in this method of provoking curiosity that a suspicion prevails that he pays heavy fees to eminent lawyers to guide him in matters of law, when, as in Man and Wife and The Law and the Lady," much of the interest depends on the decisions of judges and the verdicts of juries. Dickens delights both in the comic and serious presentation of judicial proceedings; but, throughout his works, it would be vain to find a parallel in force and interest to the account of the trial of Charles Darnay for high treason, as narrated in the present romance. The period is 1780, when Great Britain was at war with France and her own colonies. The opening speech of the Attorney General, the examination and cross of the government spies, the reluctant testimony of Lucie Manette, the speech of the prisoner’s counsel, and all the minor incidents of the varied scene, are presented in such

Reviews for A Tale of Two Cities (Illustrated by Harvey Dunn with introductions by G. K. Chesterton, Andrew Lang, and Edwin Percy Whipple)

[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.

[paperpuss · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

over rated

[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.

[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.

[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.

[rsubber · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's been so long since I read this intense love story that much of it seemed new to me when I read it again. That's not bad. I am always attracted to Dickens' dialogue. His characters feel what they say and they distinctly say what they mean. Sydney Carton, of course, is the protagonist, he does the 18th century version of singing the blues and he's a laid back superhero. I don't mean to disdain his performance; Carton perfects his moral life in a bravely spectacular way, and the escape of Evremonde and his family really is one of literature's most unheralded anticlimaxes.For my money, Miss Pross is the heroine, a classic Dickens supporting character, so haughty, so tenderly solicitous of her Miss Lucie, so contentedly secondary, with such genius of physical and moral courage. Madame Defarge never had a chance when she went up against that pride of the English nation.A reading of Dickens is a swirl of characters you'd really like to meet.Read more on my blog: Barley Literate by Rick

[amante_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My favorite Dickens book!

[mariannem85-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"... all through it, I have known myself to be quite undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire..."

[sigh]

My love of books began with this novel. When I think about A Tale of Two Cities, and Sydney Carton in particular, I feel the same ache in my chest that I feel when I think about real people I love.

Dickens had such a brilliant mind. Even his non-fiction work captivates me. Read his "A Visit to Newgate" if you don't know what I'm talking about, and this novel, well there's simply none better.

[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.

[a_reader_of_fictions · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Story:
Okay, so, to be entirely affair, I confess that, for reasons I will go into greater detail about later, I did not manage to pay too much attention to this audiobook. The result of which is that I have only a vague idea of what happened. I mean, I think I have the overarching plot pretty firm in my mind, but if there were subtle beauties here, they were lost to me.

From what I did gather, A Tale of Two Cities is never going to be a favorite Dickens novel for me. Really, it was going to be either his best, most original work or his least good, failed attempt at novelty. His bread and butter was writing about those suffering in England, the poverty, the terrible schools, the diseases, the hypocrisy. Here, he is tackling the French Revolution, which is something rather different.

My biggest problem, as with so many of the books I do not like, is that I did not connect with any of the characters. The narrative does not really focus on anyone in particular. The omniscient narrator is definitely high above everyone looking down, and, to me, no one looks all that interesting. The bad guys, the good guys...all of them struck me as really blah.

Sydney Carton is the one I think I'm supposed to sympathize or empathize with. I mean, what could be more romantic than giving up your life so that the woman you love can be happy. Umm, how about you both loving each other and getting to be together? Is that just me? I have never thought tragic, doomed, unrequited, etc. romances were romantic. Romeo and Juliet does not thrill me either. And, really, the reason Sydney doesn't get the girl is that he's kind of an ass. Just sayin'. Also, I really don't get his noble sacrifice. In the real world, would he ever have been able to swap himself in for the guillotine? Because I doubt it.

From my imperfect trip through this novel, I would recommend going back and watching the Wishbone episode instead of reading it, but, again, I may be wrong.
Performance:
Now, you may be wondering how on earth I spent over 14 hours of my life listening to a novel and end up having very little idea of most of what happened within that book. Well, here's how. Simon Prebble has narrated a lot of things, which must mean a lot of people think he's a really great narrator. I do not however.

Prebble seems to have just the wrong voice for me. I don't know if I'm unique in this or not, but I literally cannot pay attention to his voice. Part of the joy of audiobooks is that you can read and do other things (laundry, your dishes, pet the cat, rake the lawn, grocery shopping, drive, etc.). I have done so with all of the ones I have listened to. With this one, though, I could not pay attention. Desperate, I tried reading along with the audiobook. Even then, it took every bit of brain power for me to focus on this man.

You may think I'm exaggerating, but I'm really not. Something about Prebble's voice made me tune out, and tuning back in was pretty much impossible. This was just the strangest and most unfortunate experience. There are narrators I've hated more, but I missed nothing. How is that possible?

[m.belljackson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A Tale of Two Cities is at once a factual horror story and a fictional romance.Set in both London and Paris at the time of The French Revolution, it offers a terrifying portrayalof the descent of human beings, both aristocrats and peasants, into murderous anarchy.That Sydney Carton, whose full story we never learn, makes the ultimate sacrifice does not balance or redeem the sheer horror of what Dickens has described.And what of Charles Darnay? - whose reckless trip plunged his family and friends into a blood soaked city - how will he face the days of his life knowing that his stupidity cost his friend his life?Charles Dickens gives us a masterful skewing of the governments of both France and England,as well as toppling their religious leaders.

[miss_read_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Read this book now.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Documentair zeker waardevol, maar als roman echt mislukt.Geen doorlopende verhaallijn: de stukjes lijken nergens naar toe te voeren.Stilistisch: soms opflakkerend, maar over het algemeen flauw; overdreven toepassing van de spiegelingstechniek (Londen-Parijs, Darnay-Carton)nogal doorzichtig-sociaal gedreven

[unreachableshelf · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

First of all, Dickens deserves some credit for creating the popular image of the French Revolution. Its portrayal in movies and other books such as The Scarlet Pimpernel series is based far more on A Tale of Two Cities than on reality. He also earns some points for the fact that, being Dickens, he shows remarkable sympathy for the poor in France leading up to the revolution. Even if once the revolution begins he tends to depict them as fiendish vultures and the the entire period of the republic as just as bloody as the most intense weeks of the Terror, he shows the justification for the revolution more than many of the authors who followed him did. The story itself is serial melodrama, but it's very good serial melodrama, and holds up to rereading.

[findantonia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Less flowing and coherent than I expected. Sections are good (and highly quotable) reads but the frequency of quotations from this isn't a reflection of the prose throughout - overall it is very uneven. Different for Dickens, in that it is historical, but the same in that his reliance on outrageous coincidence and the Victorian trademark sentimentality are strongly present. The city hopping makes it still more bitty.

[aliciamay_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Plenty has been written about A Tale of Two Cities so I’ll keep my synopsis short. The two cities are London and Paris during the French Revolution and we get wrapped up in the stories of sacrifice and redemption surrounding some extraordinary characters. During the first Book I was hesitant as to how much I would like A Tale of Two Cities, but it is now my favorite Dickens by far! There were a lot more characters introduced initially so it wasn’t clear who the protagonist was. This was also historical fiction, a departure from the Dickens I am fond of, and I felt a little lost with my lack of knowledge about the French Revolution. But I persevered and am so glad I did. The characters were remarkable and memorable, the prose was very atmospheric and beautiful, and there was adventure and twists and turns that I barely saw coming. I cringed, I cheered, I laughed, I cried.

[lexieconyngham · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of my favourite Dickens novels, with a gripping plot and memorable characters, and an ending that will make the strongest man sob like a child.

[satyridae · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Listened to this on CD. 20 CDs. I am a Dickens fan, but this one was too much for me. To romance-y and not hilarious like Pickwick, and often kind of stiffly moralistic and prune-faced. So far this is my least favorite Dickens, by about a mile. It's still better than 90% of everything else, of course. Dickens' characters are so rich, so real, and ultimately so believable.

[barb_h_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

 Just okay. I thought it was mostly boring with a few interesting parts thrown in. Glad I listened to the audiobook rather than read it because I don't think I would have been able to finish it otherwise.

[barryu21 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A classic for all ages.

[cbl_tn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book has one of the greatest opening statements and also one of the greatest closing statements in all of literature. I've read it more than once, and every time the ending leaves me in tears. Each time I read it, I discover something I overlooked in my previous readings. It hadn't sunk in until this time through how long a time span is covered in the book – from the American Revolution to the French Revolution, a period of 15-20 years. I always had a mental image of Lucy as a young woman, but she must be approaching middle age by the end of the book.I think Dickens' real genius is in his characters and the world they inhabit. Although the plot details grow fuzzy between readings, the characters remain alive: Dr. Manette and his shoe bench; Mrs. Cruncher and her floppin'; Madame Defarge and her knitting; Sidney Carton, ever conscious of his moral weakness, yet capable of one great act of courage and sacrifice. This novel is on my top ten list, and it's one that I think everyone should read at least once.

[thetwods · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Though typically assigned as part of the curriculum in American high schools, most readers at this stage of their lives won't appreciate the spectacle and may walk away thinking they've learned a history lesson. However, Dickens was known to play fast and loose with historical facts, molding them as needed to suit his story, and what a story it is. France is boiling over, the common folk have been bled dry, financially, physically, politically, by the elite, aristocratic class. Owning no property, they can barely raise enough food to sustain themselves, and often, when the taxman cometh to claim the right of the landowners and obtain their due, the common folk may well starve. Conspiracies are hatched, freed prisoners are exploited, lists are kept.Against this backdrop, a Frenchman escaping his family's past marries a woman who has only recently found that her father is very much alive and did not perish in a political prison in France. Residing in England, the happy family should be able to escape the terribly bloodletting about to overwhelm the Gallic countryside. Alas, this is a Dickens tale, so contrivances and surprise, almost incredulous plot points are the rule and our heroes find themselves caught up in the Revolution and a possible date with the guillotine.Less socially critical than his earlier work, Dickens still manages to blame the Terror on the hubris of the wealthy elites; after all, you can only keep a populace oppressed for so long. Yet, the overexuberance of the reprisals and the score-settling of the tribunals and executioners is also cast in a murky light.Read it as the romantic adventure it was meant to be, not as the erroneous historical narrative which has assumed mythological proportions. Fun? Yes. Accurate? In a broad, overly generalized way. As a fine example of the cliffhanger storytelling which dominated mid 19th century English literature, it rightfully assumes its place amongst the classics.

[redpandabear · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Heart strings definitely pulled on this one. I never had to read this in high school, and I'm actually glad because I don't think I would have appreciated it as much. I enjoyed the blend of history, drama, and romance. The characters are all so richly developed, you really become vested in their respective journeys. I practically cried reading the last paragraph. Awesome.

[fiona0bird · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Okay, so technically I haven't finished reading it but as far as I am concerned I have. Let's not be pedantic about this - I read over half and found it so excruciatingly tiresome that I couldn't force myself through the remaining pages. I looked up what happened next on wikipedia and concluded that nothing much happened next that would validate me wasting more hours or days dragging myself through a book I did not like.For a book that is "One of the most beloved of Dickens' stories" according to the quote on the front cover or "The greatest of his historical novels" I feel very cheated and rather sad too.This book starts with the famous opener: "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."That is fantastic! Reading that I thought I was going to be onto a good 'un! However, just shows that you can't judge a book by its opening paragraph.I have loved Bleak House, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol so it's a shame I find myself giving two stars to an author I have loved in the past. I'm glad this was not my first Dickens as I do not think I would have read any others. I am very disappointed in this book as well as in part, myself for not finishing it. This would have made a much better short story I believe. There was not a plot worth speaking of and the characters were all very thin and one dimensional. Much of the French revolution was described in metaphors and complex symbolism unravelling it all was a bit like trying to find your way through a maze.I have loved Dicken's writing style, it is beautiful, humorous and full of heart, soul and humanity. However, this time it felt like digging my way through a lot of surplus words which had lost their effect long before I could appreciate them. I don't know what got into Dickens when writing this book. It felt very empty and devoid of his usual humour and interesting characters. I can't wait to read another one of his and put this one firmly at the back of my memory so that I can once again hold a high opinion of Charles Dickens.

[br13wivan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens is an interesting book with defined characters, nice use of dialect, good setting descriptions when it can, and (most important of all) a vigorous story that taps into a well of raw emotion; rage against wrongful injustices and empathy for the noble characters who never rest in their battles.We start the story slowly, with a few characters: A banker by the name of Jarvis Lorry, his assistant Jerry Cruncher, a young Frenchman known as Charles Darnay, a scarred doctor named Alexandre Manette, his daughter Lucy, her friend Miss Pross, and an attorney’s assistant named Sidney Carton. Sidney and Darnay are unconnected with the others’ social group until both fall in love with the fair Lucy. Lucy chooses to marry Charles, but Sidney stays by her side, friend-zoned until the end of his days. Soon after, Charles receives a letter from an old friend named Gabelle, who has been captured by revolutionaries (Charles & the gang were in England, but during this time the French Revolution had broken out and the normal people were taking over France from the aristocrats) and needs Charles to come right now to bail him out by saying he’s a good guy and shouldn’t be executed. Because in the French revolution, the rebels executed everybody for every crime, even if they had made it up themselves just to get more people to kill, and they did that a lot too. Up to 40 people a day, I think, were fed to the Guillotine (referred to as the “Barber”). And so Charles went on his way, but even Admiral Ackbar couldn’t have saved him, as IT’S A TRAP! Yes, Charles Darnay came into France, was taken to a town, forced to pay for “escorts”, and was “escorted” to La Force prison. The family came out and tried to help him, the doctor being especially persuasive as he was a Bastille prisoner (and was therefore wronged by the rich), but there was no way out. Charles was to be executed the next day. But then Sidney showed up and made an incredibly heroic (though a bit predictable) move for love. And that’s pretty much it.In my personal opinion it was interesting as I’ve already said. I noticed a few pages written in first person as opposed to 3rd person. Not to mention almost the whole last chapter being written in present tense and not past-tense. There was no defined main character. There was a doctor who wanted to be a shoemaker for no apparent reason. London (one of the 2 cities, the other being Paris) was hardly part of the story. And in the first few chapters, it features normal people doing normal things, such as reading the paper, drinking coffee, taking a walk or even talking about the weather. Those are the things that annoy me about it, setting the otherwise spectacular writing back a few steps. But I feel generous. I’ll say 4 out of 5 stars to A Tale of Two Cities

[benuathanasia · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm not really sure what to say about this; parts of it were really good, but huge chunks felt like filler. It's rather obvious that this was published as a serial; a substantial amount of it has the feelings of a "penny a page" hack type work. The overall story was good, but just so.much.crap in the middle of it.

[blake.rosser · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I re-read this after first reading it about 12 years ago in high school. I remembered it as a slow burner, taking a while to build momentum but having an unforgettable ending, and I was pleased to find that I like it more on the 2nd read. I'm now in a position to appreciate the more subtle literary flourishes that Dickens employed -- all of the wonderful foreshadowing, and social commentary through satire and irony. It's an intensely satisfying read, with a wonderful story and memorable characters, less cartoonish than any of his previous works. Sydney Carton is the tragic hero of modern times, and his devotion to Lucie is a beautiful thing to witness. The characters help make the emotional impact of the story stronger than almost any other book I've ever read. Sure it's cheesy, and very contrived in all of the coincidental meetings among characters, but it's toned down as far as Dickens go. The last two pages equal those of 100 Years of Solitude as my favorite all-time endings.

I'm almost done with reading all of Dickens' later works. And of Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, and this, Tale is my favorite, followed closely by Bleak. List subject to change, as I still have Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend to go.

[6boysandme · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Summary: Ahhh Dickens and one of my favorites.

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

It has been more than ten years since I've read this and in truth I cam to re-reading it in the strangest way - it was referenced in a YA novel and I was reading that and I remembered how much I had loved this book and decided it was past time I read it again and saw if it was as good as I remembered.

As it was - it was every bit as good as my teenage memories led me to believe and if anything it just got more tragic as I aged. I am the first to admit that I find Dickens extremely hit and miss as an author, which I know is bordering on blasphemous in some circles, but it is really true for me. His prose is often too flowery, his characters too unsympathetic and the novels too bleak to warrant the attention they require. This, based on the subject, should be in that category yet somehow it rises above the potential traps. We have a dark subject, a truly tragic hero, a rather unsympathetic and/or unlucky counter hero who gets bailed out, along with a rather bland heroine yet despite all that the book and the story rises above it all. The opening and closing lines are two of the most perfect lines in literature and everything in between just works.

There are faults, yet somehow they don't really detract from the story. Maybe I'm biased, but even some of the irritating moments (Lucie is just one of those characters you roll your eyes at and deep down you want to know how she can justify sending another man to his death when her husband had knowingly endangered his own life in the first place) yet I find myself willing to overlook it. There are also parts of the book that are driven by plot other than characterisation and that jars a little. When Charles abandons his wife and child to go on a suicide mission I know we are supposed to be sympathetic of his goodness, but you just want to strangle him for his martyr complex and other moments that in a lesser story I would have judged more harshly. As it was, I overlook the flaws and concentrate on the good stuff and the good stuff is very, very good.

This is a book I would recommend to anyone, and even if Dickens intimidates you, give it a try. It is a beautiful book with a wonderful story and one of those characters you will grow to love and will stay with you long after you finish.