A Tale of Two Cities

Two cities, one revolution

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens came out in weekly parts in 1859 in his new magazine All the Year Round, and as a book the same year. It is his second historical novel, after Barnaby Rudge. It is set between 1775 and 1793, in London and Paris, before and during the French Revolution. Dickens drew much of his history from Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution.

The novel opens with one of the most famous sentences in English, a long list of opposites: the best and worst of times, wisdom and foolishness, belief and doubt. Dickens says the period was like his own. He warns that a society that grinds the poor will reap violence, and he shows that the violence, once loosed, becomes its own tyranny.

The book has three parts. Book the First: Recalled to Life brings a prisoner back from the Bastille. Book the Second: The Golden Thread follows the family in London and the gathering storm in France. Book the Third: The Track of a Storm takes the main characters into revolutionary Paris. The central themes are resurrection, the cost of injustice, revenge and self-sacrifice.

Book the First: recalled to life

In 1775, Jarvis Lorry, a clerk at Tellson's Bank, rides the Dover mail coach. The bank's messenger, Jerry Cruncher, gallops after him with a message, and Lorry answers: "Recalled to life." At Dover he meets Lucie Manette, a young Frenchwoman raised in England, who believes she is an orphan. Lorry tells her that her father, Doctor Alexandre Manette, is alive. He has been held in the Bastille for eighteen years without trial and has just been released.

In Paris they go to the poor district of Saint Antoine. A cask of wine breaks in the street, and starving people scoop it from the stones. A joker writes the word BLOOD on a wall with the red wine. The wine shop belongs to Ernest Defarge, once Manette's servant, and his wife, Thérèse Defarge, who sits knitting and sees everything. Defarge and three other men, all called Jacques, are revolutionaries.

In a garret above the shop, Manette sits making shoes. Prison has broken his mind. He does not know his name and answers only "One Hundred and Five, North Tower," his cell number. Lucie holds him and weeps, and something in her golden hair reminds him of his wife. Lorry and Lucie take him to England.

Book the Second: the golden thread

Five years later, in 1780, a young Frenchman, Charles Darnay, is on trial for treason at the Old Bailey in London. He is accused of carrying English secrets to France. Lucie and her father were fellow passengers on the boat when Darnay crossed the Channel, and they must testify against him. The defense lawyer, Mr. Stryver, does well, but the key moment comes from his idle assistant, Sydney Carton. A witness swears he saw Darnay in a certain place. Carton points out that he himself looks so much like the prisoner that the witness could have seen either of them. The case collapses and Darnay goes free.

Carton is clever but drinks and does Stryver's work for him in secret. He tells Darnay that he cares for no one and no one cares for him. He envies Darnay, who looks like him but has made something of his life.

Manette slowly recovers in a quiet house in Soho, where his daughter's love is the golden thread that holds his life together. He sometimes slips back into the habits of prison, pacing at night. Lucie's fierce, loyal servant, Miss Pross, watches over the house. Darnay, Carton and Stryver all visit.

In France, the Marquis St. Evrémonde drives his carriage at full speed through Paris and runs over a child. He throws out a gold coin as payment, and another to the wine seller Defarge, who comforts the father, Gaspard. As the carriage moves off, a coin flies back into it. No one sees who threw it. Where Defarge stood, a dark, stout woman stands knitting. At his château, the Marquis meets his nephew, who turns out to be Darnay. Darnay hates the family's cruelty, gives up its name and lands, and plans to earn his own living in England. That night the Marquis is stabbed in his bed. A note on the knife reads: "Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques." Gaspard is later caught and hanged.

Love, marriage and secrets

Darnay teaches French in London and asks Manette for permission to marry Lucie. He offers to tell Manette his real name. Manette asks him to wait until the wedding morning.

Carton confesses his love to Lucie. He says he knows he is not worthy and will never be, but that she has inspired him. He tells her that he would give his life to keep a life she loves beside her. He asks her to remember this, and she promises to keep his secret.

On the wedding morning, Darnay tells Manette his name: Evrémonde. After the couple leaves on their honeymoon, Manette relapses and makes shoes for nine days. Lorry and Miss Pross nurse him through it, and afterward they destroy his shoemaker's bench and tools.

The years pass. Lucie and Charles have a daughter, also named Lucie. Carton becomes a quiet friend of the family. Jerry Cruncher, Tellson's messenger, turns out to be a resurrection man, a body snatcher who digs up fresh corpses at night to sell to doctors. He finds that the coffin of a spy, Roger Cly, holds only stones.

In Saint Antoine, a spy named John Barsad comes to the wine shop. Madame Defarge knits his name into her register, a record of everyone the revolution will punish. The Defarges and the Jacques wait.

The storm breaks

In July 1789, the people of Saint Antoine storm the Bastille, with Defarge leading. He goes straight to cell One Hundred and Five, North Tower, and searches it carefully. Madame Defarge cuts off the head of the governor with her own knife. Days later, the crowd hangs an old official, Foulon, who once said the hungry could eat grass. In the countryside, peasants burn the château of Evrémonde.

In 1792, a letter reaches Darnay at Tellson's. It comes from Gabelle, the family's old servant, who was arrested for collecting rents for Darnay and faces death. Darnay feels responsible. He tells no one and leaves for Paris.

Book the Third: the track of a storm

France is now a place of passes, guards and suspicion. At the city gate, Darnay is arrested as an emigrant aristocrat. Defarge refuses to help him. He is sent to the prison of La Force.

Lucie, her daughter, Miss Pross and Manette follow him to Paris. Manette's eighteen years in the Bastille make him a hero to the revolutionaries, and he uses his influence to protect his son-in-law. He works as a doctor to the prisons. For more than a year Darnay waits in prison while the guillotine, which Dickens calls La Guillotine, takes hundreds of lives. Lucie stands every day at a corner where Darnay might see her from his window. Madame Defarge watches her.

At last Darnay is tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Manette speaks for him, Gabelle testifies, and the crowd cheers his release. For a moment the family thinks it is safe.