Legacy

A Publishing Phenomenon

A Tale of Two Citieshas sold over 200 million copies, making it arguably the best-selling novel in the English language (after Cervantes's Don Quixote in Spanish). It is the most assigned novel in American high schools. For millions of readers around the world, it is their introduction to first Dickens and then the French Revolution — and to the electrifying possibility that a book written in the nineteenth century can still grip a reader by the throat.

The novel's popular success was immediate. When the final installment appeared in All the Year Round, the journal's circulation had tripled since the novel's first installment. Readers were gripped by the serial form — the cliffhangers, the tension, the mounting dread. In the century and a half since, the novel has never gone out of print. It has been adapted for film, television, radio, stage, and opera. It has been translated into dozens of languages. It is one of those rare books — like Frankenstein, Dracula, Alice in Wonderland — that has transcended literature to become a cultural myth.

The Paradox of the Novel

There is a paradox at the heart of A Tale of Two Cities: it is simultaneously the most popular and the most atypical of Dickens's novels. It lacks almost everything that readers love about Dickens — the humor, the sprawling subplots, the unforgettable comic grotesques (the Micawbers, the Wellers, the Sairey Gamps). It is short, tense, and almost completely humorless. It reads less like a Victorian novel and more like a thriller written a century ahead of its time. And yet it is the novel that has sold more copies than any of his others. The very qualities that make it unlike Dickens made it universal.

The Most Famous Opening Line in English Fiction

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...” — the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Citiesis arguably the most famous in English fiction. It is a masterclass in rhetorical balance, a cascade of antitheses that establishes the novel's central vision: a world of extremes, of irreconcilable opposites, of contradictions that cannot be resolved but only lived. The sentence has been quoted, parodied, and referenced so often that it has become part of the English language — a shorthand for any era of dramatic contrasts and upheaval.

The Shadow of Sydney Carton

Sydney Carton is the prototype of the “dissolute hero who redeems himself through sacrifice” — a figure whose shadow falls across English and American literature. From Hemingway's self-destructive men to Batman (Bruce Wayne, the playboy wastrel who becomes a sacrificial hero), Carton's DNA is everywhere. The appeal is obvious: the fantasy that a wasted life can be redeemed by a single noble act, that it is never too late to become the person you might have been. Carton's words on the scaffold — “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” — are among the most quoted final lines in literature.

The Political Argument

Dickens's portrait of the French Revolution shaped English-speaking attitudes toward revolution for generations. The novel is anti-aristocratic and anti-revolutionary at once — a position that is logically inconsistent but emotionally coherent. It condemns the old order for its cruelty and the revolution for its violence. It refuses the easy political categories. This ambivalence has made the novel politically useful to both the left (as a critique of aristocratic oppression) and the right (as a warning against the dangers of mob rule). A Tale of Two Cities is not a political treatise. But it is a profound meditation on what happens when a society collapses and ordinary people are caught between the forces of history.

Why It Matters

The novel asks three questions, and they are as urgent now as they were in 1859. Can violence ever be redemptive? Can individuals be “recalled to life” — can they recover from trauma, reinvent themselves, begin again? Is a better world possible? In true Dickensian fashion, the novel answers all three questions not with an argument but with a story — the story of a man who gave his life for his friends, and in doing so found himself. That story has survived every change of literary fashion, every shift in political ideology, every cultural revolution of the last century and a half. It will, in all likelihood, survive the next one too.