Chapter II
The Novel
A Tale of Two Cities · 1859
What Is It?
A Tale of Two Citieswas published in weekly installments in Dickens's journal All the Year Roundfrom April to November 1859. It is set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, spanning the years 1775 to roughly 1794. The novel is, by Dickens's standards, exceptionally short — about 135,000 words — and exceptionally tight. Unlike most of his novels, it has no humor, no sprawling subplots, no comic grotesques. It is a study in tension: a thriller that moves between two cities, two worlds, and two conceptions of justice.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...”
— The opening paragraph
The Three Books
The novel is structured in three books, each with a title that encapsulates its central theme:
Book the First: Recalled to Life
The novel opens in 1775 with the release of Dr. Alexandre Manette after eighteen years of unjust imprisonment in the Bastille. He is a broken man — reduced to shoemaking in a garret room, barely aware of his own name. His daughter Lucie, who believed him dead, travels with the banker Jarvis Lorry to Paris and brings him back to London, where her love slowly restores him to himself. This book also introduces the central mystery: what did Dr. Manette see in the Bastille that led to his imprisonment? And what connects Charles Darnay — a young Frenchman on trial for treason in England — to the secret buried in Paris?
Book the Second: The Golden Thread
The middle book spans the years of uneasy peace before the Revolution. Lucie Manette is the “golden thread” connecting all the characters. Charles Darnay, who is actually a French aristocrat (the nephew of the Marquis St. Evrémonde), has renounced his family name and wealth and come to England to escape his heritage. He marries Lucie. Sydney Carton — the dissolute, self-hating lawyer who bears a striking physical resemblance to Darnay — declares his hopeless, unrequited love for Lucie. In Paris, the revolution is brewing: the Defarges, wine-shop owners in Saint Antoine, are secretly plotting against the aristocracy. Madame Defarge knits the names of the doomed. The Marquis St. Evrémonde — Darnay's uncle — runs over a child with his carriage and is murdered in his bed. The storm is gathering.
Book the Third: The Track of a Storm
The final book plunges into the Revolution. In 1792, as the Terror intensifies, Darnay returns to Paris to save a former servant. He is arrested as an aristocrat — and the secret of his family name is revealed. Dr. Manette's testimony — a damning indictment written in the Bastille, condemning all Evrémondes — is produced at Darnay's trial. Darnay is sentenced to death. And then Carton, who has followed them to Paris, takes Darnay's place at the guillotine. The substitution depends on their physical resemblance and on Carton's knowledge of Darnay's drugged state. The novel ends with Carton's imagined final words: “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 Dual Structure
The novel is built on pairs and oppositions. London and Paris are mirror cities: one represents law without justice (the Old Bailey scenes, where defendants face casual capital punishment), the other represents justice without law (the revolutionary tribunals). Darnay and Carton are physical doubles — “the likeness between them was almost startling” — but opposites in character: one is virtuous and conventional, the other dissipated and brilliant. Love (Lucie, the golden thread) is counterposed to vengeance (Madame Defarge, the fatal knitter). Private life is set against public catastrophe: the novel tracks how the Revolution reaches into individual lives and consumes them.
Symbolism and Motifs
Resurrection & Memory
The novel opens with Dr. Manette being “recalled to life” from his living death in the Bastille. This motif of resurrection — of being restored from the grave — echoes through the novel: Darnay is repeatedly saved from death (three trials, each a resurrection); Carton rises through his own death at the guillotine, reciting the words of the burial service: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” The question the novel asks: can a person truly begin again?
Knitting
Madame Defarge knits ceaselessly throughout the novel. Her knitting is a secret death register — she encodes the names of those marked for execution into its stitches. The knitting is at once domestic and monstrous, female and fatal. It is the novel's central image of implacable, patient vengeance — the revolution as a textile, woven stitch by stitch, until the web is complete.
The Guillotine
The guillotine dominates the novel's final third — the “sharp female, called La Guillotine.” Dickens personifies it, makes it a character, a hunger that can never be satisfied. It is the horizontal blade that levels all distinctions: aristocrat and peasant, guilty and innocent, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary. The Terror devours its own. The machine consumes everything.
Wine & Blood
The novel opens with a famous scene in which a wine cask breaks in the street of Saint Antoine, and the starving people scramble to drink the wine from the cobblestones. Hands, faces, and mouths are stained red — a prefiguration of the blood that will soon run in the same streets. The scene anticipates the violent energy of the Revolution and Dickens's critique of a society that has starved its people to the point of desperation.
A Different Dickens
A Tale of Two Citiesis unlike any other Dickens novel. Where most of his work is sprawling and digressive, this novel is tight and propulsive. Where most Dickens novels overflow with comic characters — the Micawbers, the Pickwicks, the Sairey Gamps — this one has none. Where most Dickens novels slow down for set-piece descriptions of London streets and fog and riverbanks, this novel moves relentlessly forward. The prose itself is different: more compressed, more rhetorical, more driven by parallelism and antithesis (“the best of times, the worst of times”). It is Dickens writing at the peak of his powers, but it is also Dickens writing against his own grain — forcing himself into a discipline he had rarely practiced, and producing something lean, urgent, and unforgettable.