A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens (1859)
“The most famous opening in English prose introduces a story where a drunken wastrel chooses death so the man he envies can live — and makes you believe every word of it.”
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A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens (1859) · 489pages · Victorian · 14 AP appearances
Summary
In the years leading to the French Revolution, London lawyer Sydney Carton falls in love with Lucie Manette, whose father was imprisoned in the Bastille for eighteen years. Lucie marries Charles Darnay — a French aristocrat who has renounced his family — and Carton pledges his life to her happiness. When Darnay is arrested in Revolutionary Paris and sentenced to the guillotine, the dissolute Carton switches places with him in prison, sacrificing himself. 'It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.'
Why It Matters
Published serially in Dickens's own magazine All the Year Round in 1859, where it increased circulation from 100,000 to 300,000 readers. It is the best-selling novel in history by some estimates — over 200 million copies sold. More high school students have read the final line than almost any oth...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: High Victorian formal — Latinate, periodic sentences, rhetorical flourish, biblical cadence in key passages
Narrator: Dickens as omniscient Victorian narrator — intrusive, rhetorical, morally present. Unlike Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway,...
Figurative Language: Very high
Historical Context
Published 1859; set 1775-1793 — the French Revolution and its immediate precursors: Dickens was writing for a Victorian English audience that had lived through Chartist unrest and feared that England might have its own revolution. The French Revolution served as both cautionary ta...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Dickens opens with fourteen paired oppositions ('It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...'). How does this syntactic structure prepare you for the entire novel's method? What does the form itself argue?
- Sydney Carton is objectively a better character than Charles Darnay — more interesting, more complex, more memorable. Why does Dickens make the less interesting man the one Lucie marries?
- Madame Defarge has a completely legitimate grievance against the Evrémonde family. At what point, if any, does her revenge cross from justice into atrocity? Where does Dickens draw the line?
- Dr. Manette's Bastille memoir — written to expose the Evrémondes — becomes the document that condemns his own son-in-law. Is this dramatic irony, tragic fate, or something else? What does it say about the relationship between justice and its instruments?
- Dickens wrote this novel immediately after playing a character in a theatrical production who dies for a rival in love. How does knowing the theatrical origin of Carton's sacrifice change your reading of it?
Notable Quotes
“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 th...”
“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”
“Recalled to life.”
Why Read This
Because the last two sentences are the most formally perfect sentences in English prose, and understanding why requires reading the 488 pages before them. Because Sydney Carton is the most interesting redemption arc in Victorian fiction — not a sa...