A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is Charles Dickens's novel of the French Revolution, set in London and Paris between 1775 and the Terror of 1793. Through the story of Doctor Manette, his daughter Lucie and the two men who love her, the aristocrat Charles Darnay and the dissolute lawyer Sydney Carton, it depicts injustice, revolution and self-sacrifice.
The story
Doctor Manette, a French physician, is released after eighteen years in the Bastille and brought to London by his daughter Lucie. She marries Charles Darnay, a French émigré who has renounced his title and the cruelty of his family, the Evrémondes. Sydney Carton, a brilliant but idle lawyer who looks strikingly like Darnay, also loves her without hope.
During the Revolution, Darnay returns to Paris to help a former servant and is arrested as an aristocrat. Denounced by the wine-shop keeper Defarge and his implacable wife, who knits the names of the condemned into her work, he is sentenced to the guillotine, and Carton finds a way to save him.
Writing the Revolution
Dickens was deeply influenced by Thomas Carlyle's history The French Revolution (1837), which he said he read again and again. He also drew on his own experience of acting, in 1857, in Wilkie Collins's play The Frozen Deep, about a man who sacrifices himself for his rival in love.
The novel was published in weekly instalments from 30 April to 26 November 1859 in All the Year Round, the new magazine Dickens had just founded, and at the same time in monthly parts. Its tight plot and the need to hold readers each week made it one of his shortest and most dramatic novels.
Reception and legacy
Its famous opening and closing sentences are among the best known in English literature. The book has been one of Dickens's most widely read novels, particularly in schools, and it is frequently cited as one of the best-selling novels of all time.
It has been adapted for stage, film and radio many times, notably in a 1935 Hollywood film and a 1958 British film starring Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton.
Anecdotes
A cartload of books
When Dickens asked Thomas Carlyle to suggest books on the French Revolution, Carlyle is said to have sent him a cartload of volumes from the London Library. In his preface, Dickens acknowledged his debt to Carlyle's book on the Revolution.
A magazine launched with a novel
Dickens founded All the Year Round in 1859 after a quarrel with the publishers of his previous magazine, Household Words. A Tale of Two Cities filled the first pages of the very first issue, and its success helped the new magazine reach a large readership straight away.
Frequently asked questions
Which are the two cities?
London and Paris.
When was A Tale of Two Cities published?
In weekly instalments from April to November 1859, then as a book the same year.
What is A Tale of Two Cities about?
The lives of a family and their friends caught up in the years before and during the French Revolution, ending with an act of self-sacrifice during the Terror.