Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Whether it was either depends on whether you were an aristocrat or a starving peasant -- and which side of the English Channel you were on.

About the work

A Tale of Two Cities was published in 1859 in thirty-one weekly installments in Dickens's own magazine, All the Year Round. It is set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution (roughly 1775-1794) and follows the intersecting lives of Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat who has renounced his title; Sydney Carton, a dissolute English lawyer who resembles Darnay; Lucie Manette, the woman they both love; and Dr. Manette, Lucie's father, who has been released after eighteen years of secret imprisonment in the Bastille.

The novel is one of Dickens's most widely read works and contains one of the most famous opening passages and closing lines in English fiction. It is also one of his most atypical novels: shorter than his usual sprawling narratives, more focused on historical events, and more explicitly concerned with political violence. Dickens wrote it at the height of his career, between Little Dorrit and Great Expectations, and it was a commercial success from the start.

The historical context matters. Dickens was writing in the 1850s, a period of relative stability in Britain but also of anxiety about social unrest, urban poverty, and the possibility of revolution. The French Revolution was still within living cultural memory, and its meaning was contested. Conservatives saw it as a warning about what happens when the lower classes seize power. Radicals saw it as a necessary, if bloody, response to centuries of aristocratic oppression. Dickens, a reformer but not a revolutionary, occupied an uneasy middle position, and the novel reflects that unease.

Things to notice

The opening paragraph. "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..." The passage continues in this vein for several more clauses, each presenting a paradox. Notice what this does: it refuses to choose. The French Revolution was simultaneously all of these things, depending on who you were and where you stood. The passage also establishes the novel's governing technique -- doubling, mirroring, holding contradictory truths simultaneously.

The doubles structure. The entire novel is built on pairs and mirrors. London and Paris. Darnay and Carton (who look alike). The two cities. The two eras (pre-Revolution and Revolution). Dr. Manette's double life (prisoner and father). The Marquis St. Evremonde (Darnay's uncle, representing aristocratic cruelty) and Madame Defarge (representing revolutionary vengeance). Notice how often characters and situations echo each other. This is not merely a stylistic device; it is a thematic argument. Dickens is suggesting that London and Paris, England and France, the old order and the new, are not as different as they might appear. The same forces of injustice that produced the Revolution in France exist in England -- the difference is one of degree, not kind.

The resurrection motif. The word "recalled to life" appears repeatedly, starting with the message that brings Jarvis Lorry to meet Dr. Manette. Dr. Manette is literally recalled to life from his imprisonment. Charles Darnay is recalled to life (acquitted) at his trials. Sydney Carton achieves a kind of resurrection through his sacrifice. The motif works on both literal and symbolic levels: the novel is interested in whether people and societies can be reborn, and whether such rebirths are genuine or temporary.

The storm imagery. Dickens uses the storm as a recurrent image throughout the novel, building toward the Revolution itself. The opening scenes of Book the Second describe a cask of wine breaking in the street in Paris, and the people scrambling to drink it from the cobblestones: "The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there." The storm breaks in Book the Third, with the Revolution figured as an irresistible natural force -- the sea, the wind, the earthquake. Notice that this imagery simultaneously makes the Revolution seem inevitable (you cannot stop a storm) and removes human agency from it (nobody decides to have a storm). This is one of the novel's most problematic features: Dickens portrays the Revolution as a force of nature while also judging the individuals caught up in it.

Madame Defarge. One of Dickens's most memorable characters, Madame Defarge sits in her wine shop knitting a register of the aristocrats who will be sent to the guillotine. She is relentless, pitiless, and -- in the early chapters -- not without justification. Her family was destroyed by the Evremonde brothers (Darnay's father and uncle). The problem is that Dickens allows her no softening. As the novel progresses, she becomes less a figure of justified revenge and more a personification of revolutionary excess, a killing machine without conscience. Notice the gendered dimension of this: Dickens is uncomfortable with female rage on this scale. The "good" women in the novel (Lucie Manette, Miss Pross) are defined by their gentleness and self-sacrifice. Madame Defarge's ferocity is presented as monstrous.

The Tribunal and the guillotine. Dickens's portrayal of the Revolutionary Tribunal is unrelentingly negative. Justice is a mockery. The accused have no real chance of acquittal. The guillotine is described as a mechanical instrument of mass murder that the Parisians have normalized: people go to watch executions the way they might go to the theater. Notice that Dickens does not spend equivalent time on the aristocratic violence that preceded the Revolution -- the imprisonment without trial, the starvation, the casual cruelty of the Marquis. This imbalance is one of the main reasons critics have debated whether the novel is fundamentally conservative.

Sydney Carton's sacrifice. The novel's climax depends on Carton switching places with Darnay in prison (he can do this because they look alike) and going to the guillotine in his stead. This is one of the most famous acts of self-sacrifice in English fiction, and it generates the novel's famous closing line: "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." Notice what this does: it resolves the love triangle by removing the unworthy suitor, redeems Carton's wasted life through a single noble act, and provides an emotionally satisfying ending without requiring any structural change in the society that produced the crisis. The sacrifice is powerful, but it is also politically inert. Carton does not change the system; he rescues one family from it.

Dr. Manette's letter. In the pivotal courtroom scene, Dr. Manette's own letter -- written during his imprisonment and hidden in his cell -- is produced as evidence against Darnay. The letter reveals that the Evremonde brothers imprisoned Manette because he knew about their crimes (including the rape of a peasant woman and the murder of her brother). This letter, written years before, seals Darnay's fate. Notice the irony: Manette's attempt to document injustice becomes the instrument of his son-in-law's condemnation. The past, in this novel, is never dead. It keeps returning to shape the present, often in ways the characters cannot control.

Questions to ask

Does the novel portray the French Revolution fairly? Does it adequately represent the suffering that caused it, or does it focus disproportionately on the violence of the Revolution itself?
Is Madame Defarge a villain, a victim, or both? Does the novel's treatment of her change how you read the rest of the Revolutionary scenes?
Carton's sacrifice is presented as noble, but does it actually accomplish anything beyond saving one family? Is personal sacrifice a meaningful response to systemic injustice?
The novel constantly draws parallels between London and Paris. Is it suggesting that England is heading for its own revolution, or that England's more gradual reforms have made revolution unnecessary?
How does the serial publication format (thirty-one weekly installments) affect the novel's structure? Does the need for regular cliffhangers shape the plotting?
Dr. Manette's imprisonment haunts the entire novel. What is the relationship between personal trauma and political violence in the story?
Dickens wrote this novel as entertainment for a middle-class audience. How does that audience shape what he includes and what he omits?

What critics have argued

The conservative reading. Many critics have read A Tale of Two Cities as essentially a conservative novel -- a warning against revolution that presents the French experience as a cautionary tale for England. George Orwell, in his essay "Charles Dickens" (1939), noted that Dickens's criticism of the Revolution far exceeds his criticism of the aristocracy that provoked it. The novel's structure (aristocratic cruelty in the early chapters, revolutionary atrocity in the later ones) creates a rough balance on the surface, but the emotional weight falls on the Terror. The argument is that Dickens, despite his sympathies for the poor, ultimately endorses a vision of social change through individual benevolence rather than collective action. The Carton sacrifice becomes the model: personal redemption, not political revolution.

The radical and historicist reading. Other critics have pushed back against the conservative label, arguing that the novel's portrayal of pre-Revolutionary France is more condemnatory than it is often given credit for. The Marquis St. Evremonde is genuinely monstrous. The starvation of the peasants is presented without sentimentality. The broken wine cask scene explicitly connects aristocratic indifference to the violence that follows. Edward Said, though not writing primarily about this novel, contextualized Dickens's work within the broader framework of nineteenth-century imperialism and social control. Mark Cumming, in A Disimprisoned Epic (1988), argued that the novel's structure and imagery are more politically ambivalent than the conservative reading allows.

Feminist criticism. Feminist critics have focused on the novel's treatment of its female characters. Lucie Manette is the domestic angel -- beautiful, gentle, self-sacrificing, and largely passive. She exists to be loved and protected. Madame Defarge is her dark double -- a woman whose suffering has made her ferocious and who is ultimately killed by another woman (Miss Pross) in a scene that pits English domesticity against French revolutionary fury. The gender politics are stark: good women are quiet and nurturing; dangerous women are public and violent. Anny Sadrin, in Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities (1994), examined how the novel uses female characters to embody opposing political and moral forces.

The formalist and structuralist reading. Critics interested in the novel's formal properties have focused on its doubles structure, its use of repetition and echo, and its symbolic patterning. J.M. Rignall, in Dickens and the Past (1991), analyzed how the novel uses temporal structure -- the relationship between past and present -- to create meaning. The resonance between events in different parts of the novel (the wine cask and the blood of the guillotine, Manette's shoemaking and his letter, Carton's promise and his death) creates a web of connections that gives the novel its characteristic density.

Postcolonial readings. Some critics have situated the novel within the context of British imperialism. The French Revolution, in this reading, represents the fear of colonial subjects rising against their oppressors -- a fear that was very much alive in the 1850s as the British Empire expanded. The novel's portrayal of the revolutionaries as a dehumanized mob, and its ultimate endorsement of individual sacrifice over collective action, can be read as supporting an imperial ideology that discourages colonial resistance. These readings are speculative but extend the novel's political concerns into a larger frame.

Dickens as historical novelist. Critics have debated how seriously to take the novel as a work of historical fiction. Dickens relied heavily on Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837) for his source material and adopted Carlyle's view of the Revolution as a terrible but inevitable judgment on aristocratic corruption. But Dickens also took considerable liberties with historical fact, compressing timelines, inventing characters, and shaping events to fit his narrative needs. The question is whether these liberties matter -- whether the novel should be judged by its historical accuracy or by its effectiveness as fiction. Most critics argue for the latter, but the tension between history and story is real.

About the work

Things to notice

Questions to ask

What critics have argued

Further reading