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.”
Why This Book 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 other sentence in English prose. It established the template for the historical novel as moral allegory and gave the English language its most famous paired superlatives.
Firsts & Innovations
First major English novel to treat the French Revolution as a subject for sustained moral examination rather than historical spectacle
Established the principle that the historical novel could serve as contemporary political warning
Pioneered the cinematic intercut — alternating timelines (Carton in prison / Lucie fleeing) that would not become a film technique for fifty years
Cultural Impact
'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times' is the most parodied, quoted, and misquoted opening in English literature
The final two sentences are taught in virtually every English-speaking school system as exemplars of the Victorian prose ideal
Multiple film adaptations, most famously Ronald Colman (1935) and Dirk Bogarde (1958)
The novel's theme of sacrifice-for-love has become a cultural template — cited in fan fiction, film, and popular culture as 'the Sydney Carton moment'
Dickens's portrait of the Terror influenced generations of historians and public intellectuals writing about revolutionary violence
Banned & Challenged
Challenged or restricted in various school districts for depictions of violence (public executions, the lamppost hanging of Foulon) and for its complex moral treatment of revolutionary violence — some conservative curricula object to what they read as sympathy for the French Revolution.