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    A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities
    Ebook561 pages8 hours

    A Tale of Two Cities

    By Charles Dickens

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    “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, so begins Charles Dickens’s famous novel concerning the contentious time leading up to and during the French Revolution. In these first words Dickens exemplifies the dichotomous relationship that existed between the aristocracy and the lower classes of the time and the universal themes that would be depicted throughout the book. “A Tale of Two Cities”, is set in London and Paris, the titular two cities, at the end of the 18th century, and principally concerns the lives of Dr. Alexandre Manette, his daughter Lucie, who marries a French nobleman, Charles Darnay, and their close family friend, barrister Sydney Carton. Despite the union of Lucie and Darney, Carton confesses his love to Lucie, declaring to “embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you”, a promise that he will uphold in dramatic fashion by the end of the novel. Dickens considered “A Tale of Two Cities” to be the best novel that he had ever written. One of only two works of historical fiction that the author would compose; it is a sweeping narrative that explores the best and the worst of the human character and condition. This edition is illustrated by Harvey Dunn, includes introductions by G. K. Chesterton, Andrew Lang, and Edwin Percy Whipple, and a biographical afterword.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateSep 21, 2020
    ISBN9781420976632
    Author

    Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens was born in 1812 and grew up in poverty. This experience influenced ‘Oliver Twist’, the second of his fourteen major novels, which first appeared in 1837. When he died in 1870, he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey as an indication of his huge popularity as a novelist, which endures to this day.

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    Reviews for A Tale of Two Cities

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    • 4/5
      I am not sure that anything I can say will add any value to the wealth of critical comment already available for this classic novel. I first read it towards the end of the last millennium (to lend an appropriately archaic feel) as one of the set books for my English Literature O level (the predecessor of what we would today call GCSEs). I was fortunate to enjoy the support of some excellent English teachers throughout my time at school, yet even their attentive ministrations failed to save this book from falling prey to the fate of most works that are encountered as compulsory reading. As a fifteen-year-old I found it very tedious and longwinded, and could not then imagine I might ever read it again for pleasure.To be fair, I think that tedious and longwinded are not always unfair when applied to Dickens, and would cite either Barnaby Rudge (surely there is an initial D missing from that surname) or Our Mutual Friend as evidence for the prosecution. (Indeed, it is quite a feat on Dickens’ part to make tedious a novel that starts so promisingly, with bodies being dragged from the Thames late at night.)They are not, however, fair for A Tale of Two Cities. Going off at another tangent, I have been struggling to think of another book which has such famous first AND last sentences: there are plenty that can offer one or the other, but few that manage both. The story is, of course, well known, so I won’t waste everyone’s time with a synopsis of the plot. There are some excellent characters: Jarvis Lorry, the serious solicitor who has given his professional life in service of Tellson’s Bank is a paragon of probity, always clad in various shades of brown. Not a man overburdened with humour, and perhaps not one with whom one might wish to be closeted on a long journey (although that fate befalls various people throughout the book). Jerry Cruncher is a hardy perennial from the Dickens stable: a Cockney, salt of the earth type, vaguely reminiscent of Silas Wegg, though better served in the leg department, or less chirpy Sam Weller, who is always on hand to do Mr Lorry’s or Tellson’s bidding, but who has a dark secret. C J Stryver, the pompous, overbearing barrister is brilliantly drawn, hyperinflated with his own self-importance and clothed in obtuseness as in armour of triple steel. Paradoxically, the more central figures seem less substantial. Charles Darnay (another man with a secret) is rather two dimensional, and the reader almost wishes that his lookalike, the diffident and dissolute lawyer Sidney Carton, whose nocturnal efforts keep legal Stryver’s practice afloat, but with precious little acknowledgement of that debt) had won Lucie Manette’s love.Like most of Dickens’ n ovels, this was published in weekly or fortnightly instalments, a fact reflected in the peaks and troughs of action throughout, as the writer carefully regulated the flow to leave sufficiently gripping cliff-hangers. Dickens was a master at conflicting tone. The chapter in which Jerry Cruncher’s sun follows his father on a nocturnal expedition, expecting to see him go fishing, is hilarious, although the mirth is in sharp juxtaposition with a chapter of huge sadness.This is a novel that repays reading for pleasure. It is also a more manageable length for modern taste than some of his heftier tomes. I read it in the excellent Penguin Classics edition which offers extensive background notes throughout the story, and an introduction full of insight (possibly aimed more at informing a re-reading, than for someone coming to the story for the first time.
    • 5/5
      Why has it taken me so long to go back and read this incredible book?
    • 4/5
      Having read my way through Dickens in publication order to this point, I'm of two minds about this entry. I probably did this Dickens novel a disservice - and myself - by reading it on the heels of "Citizens" by Siman Schama, a thick non-fiction history about the French Revolution. Dickens' overdramatization of revolutionary elements rubbed me wrong in a few places, and that had some side effects. I was irritated with the more-than-usual obfuscating language in the opening chapters, and their thick layer of sentimentality I hadn't seen so much of since The Old Curiosity Shop, my least favourite. It's a more poetic look at mobs and mob behaviour than he's done before, but weaker for not being as close or insightful a study as we saw in Barnaby Rudge. This version relies on symbols for brevity, the Defarges standing in for practically every historical figure on the revolutionary side.I struggled to find a favourite character among these many reversions of prior Dickens figures, settling for Dr. Manette because of his unusual ailment but only reminding me of how mild the Bastille experience actually was for its inmates. Besides the usual Dickens flaws - the boatload of coincidence, weak female characterizations, domestic abuse presented as humour - what impressed me least was the plot. Dickens had his end in mind and drives straight towards it without any side trips, only throwing in some revolutionary glimpses for decoration. That's hardly the stuff of Bleak House. And then comes the other hand. In its delineated third part, there are improvements in every respect. Dr. Manette acquires a new fascinating aspect to his character, Charles earned my sympathy, and the plot introduces some nasty twists in its path. Most important, the revolutionary period of France is thrown into the bold and detailed relief that was lacking to this point. Finally I obtained a sense of what it would truly be like to live in the midst of that hair-raising Terror tumult with its irrational courts and bloodshed in the streets, and it fits with all the facts I know plus adds a few I didn't. Therese Defarge takes on an especially epic scale of menace with her sewing needles, possibly earning the crown among Dickens villains. And there are braver examples here of men facing death than the one Fagin set so long ago. I'm reminded of David Copperfield, with its strange lull through the middle, except that the problems here extend through the beginning as well. Is a fantastic and stirring third act enough to compensate for all? It raises this novel well above Curiosity Shop, and I think it's stronger than Hard Times, another of Dickens' shorter novels, but it cannot rank among his best.
    • 5/5
      Great story, Great opening line. Great closing line.Not the easiest read with Dickens old fashion style of writing.Set during the French Revolution and the reign of terror. There are time jumps.
    • 4/5
      Lucy & Charles, Dr. Minette, and the menacing de Farge's. Hearing it, rather than reading it, helped me get through this classic with some understanding of the plot and what was going on. I will have to try some other Dickens because I really enjoyed this one!
    • 5/5
      When my high schooler was complaining about having to read this for school I took the opportunity to read along in solidarity and also as an excuse to final read something that I wished I had read many years ago and consider a gap in my classics reading experience.So my kid didn't love it, but I really did. To be fair - in college this sort of thing was what I gravitated towards and I read quite a fair amount of 17th-19th century lit, so it didn't have the same intimidation factor as it had for my kid. In fact, I kept (inwardly) marvelling over how short it was for Dickens. Anyway, for me, it was a treat. The story was most of the time pretty gripping. Granted, there were interludes that were v e r y slow but most of it felt snappy to me. It made me contemplate the French Revolution in a way that I think I failed to when studying it in college. The horror of the reality of it is really hard to contemplate. And its relative recentness is also sobering. Also, France's recovery is pretty amazing to think about.Even though it was certainly very heavy, I am sad that it is over - and I am so glad I finally read it.
    • 4/5
      An actual thriller. Loved it and cried.
    • 5/5
      Historical Fiction set during the Terror of the French Revolution by Charles Dickens; although starting at a slow pace, and sometimes exhibiting a confusing change of time and setting, by the time you reach Book III it really takes off and beats out any modern Hollywood action drama film by far. Aside from having perhaps two of the most well known literary quotations at the beginning and end of the book, it is a classic in how it deals with the nature of human perseverance during the darkness of times, the nature of sacrifice, and fickleness of the mob versus the solidity of individual principle. A book more relevant for our time than I'd like. A must read.
    • 5/5
      Classic book drama. What an wonderful story of treason, romance, and danger.
    • 4/5
      One of my all-time favourites, because of Dicken's political and social insight, and because of how the story ends with a man's ultimate sacrifice for the sake of love.
    • 5/5
      A historical fiction novel from Dickens which follows a group of characters in London and Paris at the start of the French Revolution. The story follows a group of characters including an ex-prisoner of the Bastille who is dealing with the after effects of his imprisonment; a French nobleman who is trying to break free of his high social status and a pair of revolutionaries (one of whom knits constantly). There is an interesting mix of characters and the street riots along with the storming of the Bastille were exceptional. The juxtaposition of the two cities is reflected in the characters, and the heartless and brutal nature of the revolution is reflected in the story.
    • 5/5
      The annual read, after the annual viewing of the film on Thanksgiving Day (Ronald Colman version, only, thank you). It has to be the mark of brilliance that even after a dozen readings, each time you harbor a secret hope that maybe THIS year he won't (spoiler alert...) get his head cut off. No better opening and closing lines in literature.
    • 5/5
      Set during the French Revolution, the story follows a French doctor, wrongfully imprisoned for years, who reunites with his daughter and moves to London. There, they settle into a comfortable life, the daughter happily marries and starts a family, all unknowing that they will be pulled back to Paris and into the horror of the revolution. This is Dickens at his finest, weaving various threads into such an intricate pattern and only hinting here and there at the final dramatic design, in which all the characters play a surprising part in relation to one another. Thrilling in parts and tender in others, this ticks all the right boxes for me. I loved it.
    • 3/5
      "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." begins A Tale of Two Cities and the book itself felt like that to me. Some of it was really good and some of it was quite a struggle to get through.In the first parts of it I only really enjoyed the scenes that took place around Fleet Street and The Strand in London, places it was easy for me to imagine after wandering around there quite a bit on a business trip, and I didn't really get into it again until all the main characters had made their way to Paris.I didn't enjoy the comic aspects of Jerry Cruncher or Miss Pross, feeling they were completely unbelievable and out of place in what was otherwise pretty dramatic. But once in Paris they weren't funny anymore and had pretty serious roles to play.I certainly didn't understand Sydney Carton. I knew he loved and would never have a relationship with Lucie Manette, but he kept going on about his life was a waste and making it sound like he'd done bad things, but there's no hint what anything might've been. All we see of him is his heavy drinking, deep thinking and general rudeness to everyone else. It was only clear at the end what he was willing to do for Lucie's happiness...The heaviest hitting line in the book was Madame Defarge, one of the leaders of the French Revolution after her own personal revenge against the aristocrats, when her husband asks if they might've executed enough people so far and she replies "tell the Wind and Fire where to stop. But don't tell me."Overall, it wasn't my favorite Dickens book. It had some good parts but I had to really work hard to not give up reading it.
    • 4/5
      I thought it was about time I read a classic.
      I loved the opening passage "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness ..."
      At the end it was just as good a page turner as modern novels.
      An eye opener, I was astounded at the brutality of the revolution, the inhumanity of the revolutionaries. I presume quite historically accurate.
      Good portrayal of characters and subtle revelation of relationships.
    • 5/5
      It is probably my twentieth reading of this book. It inspires me every time.

      It is a story of redemption of several, but none more so than of Sydney Carton. Beauty in the midst of madness and terror.
    • 2/5
      A great classic.
    • 3/5
      Men in love with the same woman join the French revolution. It's a love triangle involving a married couple and another man. Madame Dafarge, obsessed with her knitting, presents a sinister character. The far kinder Lucie Manette is devoted to her father. Will those accused of treason keep their heads? Although this is one of Dickens' classic works, it's not a favorite. The memorable opening line is about as good as the novel gets for me. This was a re-read, although it's been several years since I read it.
    • 2/5
      The French Revolution takes an interest in a family of expatriates.2/4 (Indifferent).There are some good characters (and also some terrible ones who exist purely to be noble or evil). About half the book is spent dwelling on Big Important Historical Tragedy in a way that guarantees the book is regarded as a Big Important Historical Work. A Tale of Two Cities is to Charles Dickens what Schindler's List is to Steven Spielberg.
    • 2/5
      over rated
    • 4/5
      It was my first Dickens, it was not my last. It was summer in Chicago and I was surrounded by lovely albeit unruly children. Oh dear, it was a struggle at times, watching three kids while my wife and their mother were in the city. Still I finished the novel over a long afternoon without drugging my charges.

      It is a story of sacrifice, maybe of redemption. I felt for everyone, zealots and drunkards alike. The concluding scaffold scene engendered tears, it has to be admitted. Is there a better novel about the French Revolution, its aspirations and its contradictions?
    • 5/5
      Suuuuuper glad I read this as an adult. I'm sure I appreciated it a lot more than I would have at 15. Not sure if it was reading via audiobook (Dickens' writing is incredibly lyrical), but I really enjoyed this book.
    • 4/5
      A family is caught up in the drama and terror of the French Revolution.Often I can summarize the plot of a classic, even one I have not read, because it's such a touchstone in the general culture. Not so this book. I knew the first line and the last line, but not much about what happened in between (just, blah, blah, blah, French Revolution, blah, blah, blah...). Now, having read it, I still find it a little difficult to summarize. It's a great story, full of love and sacrifice, high ideals and Revolutionary fervor. As with all of the classics I've tackled this year, I'm glad I read it -- and (which is not the case with all the classics I read this year), I'm keeping it on my shelf against the possibility of future rereadings.
    • 5/5
      A Tale of Two Cities with David Copperfield & Great Expectations acclaimed by some as one of the finest of Dickens many superb novels, however, other critics have been much less positive: It really does depend on the reader's viewpoint of Dicken's blend of historical-fiction with very well known events & and cities. It is a story that evokes the thrilling excitement and ghastly butchery of the French Revolution & all the social emotional explosion surrounding it told through the life, love and experiences of French Dr. Manette in Paris, & his daughter Lucie in London. Every student or lover of literature should have read it.
    • 4/5
      This is book number 22 of the Kings Treasuries of Literature Series. Beside the text of the story itself, the book contains commentaries on: The structure of the story, the historical basis of the story, a memoir of Dickens and some notes and suggestions for student readers. As with all of these little books, it is a pleasure to hold, to see on your shelf and to read.
    • 3/5
      A Tale of Cities. Charles Dickens. Open Road. I haven’t read any Dickens since high school and I enjoyed this as it was quite a change from the books I usually read even for book club. I enjoyed the love story and the description of life in France before and after the revolutions. Faults on both sides, friends, and Dickens showed them. I was only familiar with the first and last paragraphs of the book before I read it. And those are still the best lines. If you like to sink into Dickens, this is a good one.
    • 3/5
      There is much that is typical Dickens in this book, most especially the childlike Lucie with her blond curls and her hands clasped before her, that is not surprising. By this book, though, the bits of literary brilliance that are shown in "Little Dorrit" and "Hard Times" come to the fore. The opening paragraph and the final chapters are this brilliance: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" and "It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done" are some of the miracles of the English language and the primary reason that I have undertaken this journey of reading Dickens' corpus with a F2F group.Looking at this book with a 21st Century mindset, there is much that I find lacking: the lack of true character development until the very end with Sydney Carlton (who is mentioned so seldom) and the letter of Dr. Manette that sheds light on his story; the opening of the book with a carriage ride that leaves so very, very much out as any sort of action; and a plot other than people caught up in the bloody part of the French Revolution. But within itself and its time, it does much that would appeal to generations of readers: bringing characters into existence that help explain the human toll of the French Revolution and Reign of Terror, including the years leading up to the storming of the Bastille. The Revolution did not happen in a vacuum, and Dickens explains this peripheral damage very well and without holding back.
    • 4/5
      I read this one on a plane on the way to England and actually enjoyed it. It isn't my favorite of all the Dickens I've read but it was valuable in and of itself. Everything really leads up to the last moments, which are insanely devastating in so many ways but touching. It didn't bring tears to my eyes - it didn't touch me on a deeply emotional level - but it was good. Definitely recommend.
    • 5/5
      Still one of my favorites and maybe the best last line of any book ever.
    • 2/5
      All I can say about this book is "I got through it"! Without the spark notes, I would not have understood a single thing here, but I have officially read a classic because I wanted to, not because I was forced to.

    Book preview

    A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

    cover.jpg

    A TALE OF TWO CITIES

    By CHARLES DICKENS

    Introductions by

    G. K. CHESTERTON, ANDREW LANG,

    and EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE

    Illustrated by HARVEY DUNN

    A Tale of Two Cities

    By Charles Dickens

    Introductions by G. K. Chesterton, Andrew Lang, and Edwin Percy Whipple

    Illustrated by Harvey Dunn

    Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7496-6

    eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7663-2

    This edition copyright © 2021. Digireads.com Publishing.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

    Cover Image: A detail of Sydney Carton, from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (gouache on paper), by Ralph Bruce (20th century) / Private Collection / © Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images.

    Please visit www.digireads.com

    CONTENTS

    FIRST INTRODUCTION

    SECOND INTRODUCTION

    THIRD INTRODUCTION

    BOOK I. RECALLED TO LIFE.

    Chapter I. The Period

    Chapter II. The Mail

    Chapter III. The Night Shadows

    Chapter IV. The Preparation

    Chapter V. The Wine-shop

    Chapter VI. The Shoemaker

    BOOK II. THE GOLDEN THREAD.

    Chapter I. Five Years Later

    Chapter II. A Sight

    Chapter III. A Disappointment

    Chapter IV. Congratulatory

    Chapter V. The Jackal

    Chapter VI. Hundreds of People

    Chapter VII. Monseigneur in Town

    Chapter VIII. Monseigneur in the Country

    Chapter IX. The Gorgon’s Head

    Chapter X. Two Promises

    Chapter XI. A Companion Picture

    Chapter XII. The Fellow of Delicacy

    Chapter XIII. The Fellow of No Delicacy

    Chapter XIV. The Honest Tradesman

    Chapter XV. Knitting

    Chapter XVI. Still Knitting

    Chapter XVII. One Night

    Chapter XVIII. Nine Days

    Chapter XIX. An Opinion

    Chapter XX. A Plea

    Chapter XXI. Echoing Footsteps

    Chapter XXII. The Sea Still Rises

    Chapter XXIII. Fire Rises

    Chapter XXIV. Drawn to the Loadstone Rock

    BOOK III. THE TRACK OF A STORM.

    Chapter I. In Secret

    Chapter II. The Grindstone

    Chapter III. The Shadow

    Chapter IV. Calm in Storm

    Chapter V. The Wood-Sawyer

    Chapter VI. Triumph

    Chapter VII. A Knock at the Door

    Chapter VIII. A Hand at Cards

    Chapter IX. The Game Made

    Chapter X. The Substance of the Shadow

    Chapter XI. Dusk

    Chapter XII. Darkness

    Chapter XIII. Fifty-two

    Chapter XIV. The Knitting Done

    Chapter XV. The Footsteps Die Out For Ever

    BIOGRAPHICAL AFTERWORD

    NOTE TO THE ILLUSTRATIONS

    The illustrations in this edition by Harvey Dunn originally appeared in the 1921 edition published by Cosmopolitan Book Co. They have been reproduced in grayscale for the paperback edition and in color for the electronic edition.

    First Introduction

    As an example of Dickens’s literary work, A Tale of Two Cities is not wrongly named. It is his most typical contact with the civic ideals of Europe. All his other tales have been tales of one city. He was in spirit a Cockney; though that title has been quite unreasonably twisted to mean a cad. By the old sound and proverbial test a Cockney was a man born within the sound of Bow bells. That is, he was a man born within the immediate appeal of high civilization and of eternal religion. Shakespeare, in the heart of his fantastic forest, turns with a splendid suddenness to the Cockney ideal as being the true one after all. For a jest, for a reaction, for an idle summer love or still idler summer hatred, it is well to wander away into the bewildering forest of Arden. It is well that those who are sick with love or sick with the absence of love, those who weary of the folly of courts or weary yet more of their wisdom, it is natural that these should trail away into the twinkling twilight of the woods. Yet it is here that Shakespeare makes one of his most arresting and startling assertions of the truth. Here is one of those rare and tremendous moments of which one may say that there is a stage direction, Enter Shakespeare. He has admitted that for men weary of courts, for men sick of cities, the wood is the wisest place, and he has praised it with his purest lyric ecstasy. But when a man enters suddenly upon that celestial picnic, a man who is not sick of cities, but sick of hunger, a man who is not weary of courts, but weary of walking, then Shakespeare lets through his own voice with a shattering sincerity and cries the praise of practical human civilization:

    If ever you have looked on better days,

    If ever you have sat at good men’s feasts,

    If ever been where bells have knolled to church,

    If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear

    Or know what ’tis to pity and be pitied.

    There is nothing finer even in Shakespeare than that conception of the circle of rich men all pretending to rough it in the country, and the one really hungry man entering, sword in hand, and praising the city. If ever been where bells have knolled to church; if you have ever been within sound of Bow bells; if you have ever been happy and haughty enough to call yourself a Cockney.

    We must remember this distinction always in the case of Dickens. Dickens is the great Cockney, at once tragic and comic, who enters abruptly upon the Arcadian banquet of the æsthetics and says, Forbear and eat no more, and tells them that they shall not eat until necessity be served. If there was one thing he would have favored instinctively it would have been the spreading of the town as meaning the spreading of civilization. And we should (I hope) all favor the spreading of the town if it did mean the spreading of civilization. The objection to the spreading of the modern Manchester or Birmingham suburb is simply that such a suburb is much more barbaric than any village in Europe could ever conceivably be. And again, if there is anything that Dickens would have definitely hated it is that general treatment of nature as a dramatic spectacle, a piece of scene-painting which has become the common mark of the culture of our wealthier classes. Despite many fine pictures of natural scenery, especially along the English roadsides, he was upon the whole emphatically on the side of the town. He was on the side of bricks and mortar. He was a citizen; and, after all, a citizen means a man of the city. His strength was, after all, in the fact that he was a man of the city. But, after all, his weakness, his calamitous weakness, was that he was a man of one city.

    For all practical purposes he had never been outside such places as Chatham and London. He did indeed travel on the Continent; but surely no man’s travel was ever so superficial as his. He was more superficial than the smallest and commonest tourist. He went about Europe on stilts; he never touched the ground. There is one good test and one only of whether a man has traveled to any profit in Europe. An Englishman is, as such, a European, and as he approaches the central splendors of Europe he ought to feel that he is coming home. If he does not feel at home he had much better have stopped at home. England is a real home; London is a real home; and all the essential feelings of adventure or the picturesque can easily be gained by going out at night upon the flats of Essex or the cloven hills of Surrey. Your visit to Europe is useless unless it gives you the sense of an exile returning. Your first sight of Rome is futile unless you feel that you have seen it before. Thus useless and thus futile were the foreign experiments and the continental raids of Dickens. He enjoyed them as he would have enjoyed, as a boy, a scamper out of Chatham into some strange meadows, as he would have enjoyed, when a grown man, a steam in a police boat out into the fens to the far east of London. But he was the Cockney venturing far; he was not the European coming home. He is still the splendid Cockney Orlando of whom I spoke above; he cannot but suppose that any strange men, being happy in some pastoral way, are mysterious foreign scoundrels. Dickens’s real speech to the lazy and laughing civilization of Southern Europe would really have run in the Shakespearian words:

    but whoe’er you be

    Who in this desert inaccessible,

    Under the shade of melancholy boughs

    Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time.

    If ever you have looked on better things,

    If ever been where bells have knolled to church.

    If, in short, you have ever had the advantage of being born within the sound of Bow bells. Dickens could not really conceive that there was any other city but his own.

    It is necessary thus to insist that Dickens never understood the Continent, because only thus can we appreciate the really remarkable thing he did in A Tale of Two Cities. It is necessary to feel, first of all, the fact that to him London was the centre of the universe. He did not understand at all the real sense in which Paris is the capital of Europe. He had never realized that all roads lead to Rome. He had never felt (as an Englishman can feel) that he was an Athenian before he was a Londoner. Yet with everything against him he did this astonishing thing. He wrote a book about two cities, one of which he understood; the other he did not understand. And his description of the city he did not know is almost better than his description of the city he did know. This is the entrance of the unquestionable thing about Dickens; the thing called genius; the thing which everyone has to talk about directly and distinctly because no one knows what it is. For a plain word (as for instance the word fool) always covers an infinite mystery.

    A Tale of Two Cities is one of the more tragic tints of the later life of Dickens. It might be said that he grew sadder as he grew older; but this would be false, for two reasons. First, a man never or hardly ever does grow sad as he grows old; on the contrary, the most melancholy young lovers can be found forty years afterwards chuckling over their port wine. And second, Dickens never did grow old, even in a physical sense. What weariness did appear in him appeared in the prime of life; it was due not to age but to overwork, and his exaggerative way of doing everything. To call Dickens a victim of elderly disenchantment would be as absurd as to say the same of Keats. Such fatigue as there was, was due not to the slowing down of his blood, but rather to its unremitting rapidity. He was not wearied by his age; rather he was wearied by his youth. And though A Tale of Two Cities is full of sadness, it is full also of enthusiasm; that pathos is a young pathos rather than an old one. Yet there is one circumstance which does render important the fact that A Tale of Two Cities is one of the later works of Dickens. This fact is the fact of his dependence upon another of the great writers of the Victorian era. And it is in connection with this that we can best see the truth of which I have been speaking; the truth that his actual ignorance of France went with amazing intuitive perception of the truth about it. It is here that he has most clearly the plain mark of the man of genius; that he can understand what he does not understand.

    Dickens was inspired to the study of the French Revolution and to the writing of a romance about it by the example and influence of Carlyle. Thomas Carlyle undoubtedly rediscovered for Englishmen the revolution that was at the back of all their policies and reforms. It is an entertaining side joke that the French Revolution should have been discovered for Britons by the only British writer who did not really believe in it. Nevertheless, the most authoritative and the most recent critics on that great renaissance agree in considering Carlyle’s work one of the most searching and detailed power. Carlyle had read a great deal about the French Revolution. Dickens had read nothing at all, except Carlyle. Carlyle was a man who collected his ideas by the careful collation of documents and the verification of references. Dickens was a man who collected his ideas from loose hints in the streets, and those always the same streets; as I have said, he was the citizen of one city. Carlyle was in his way learned; Dickens was in every way ignorant. Dickens was an Englishman cut off from France; Carlyle was a Scotsman, historically connected with France. And yet, when all this is said and certified, Dickens is more right than Carlyle. Dickens’s French Revolution is probably more like the real French Revolution than Carlyle’s. It is difficult, if not impossible, to state the grounds of this strong conviction. One can only talk of it by employing that excellent method which Cardinal Newman employed when he spoke of the notes of Catholicism. There were certain notes of the Revolution. One note of the Revolution was the thing which silly people call optimism, and sensible people call high spirits. Carlyle could never quite get it, because with all his spiritual energy he had no high spirits. That is why he preferred prose to poetry. He could understand rhetoric; for rhetoric means singing with an object. But he could not understand lyrics; for the lyric means singing without an object; as everyone does when he is happy. Now for all its blood and its black guillotines, the French Revolution was full of mere high spirits. Nay, it was full of happiness. This actual lilt and levity Carlyle never really found in the Revolution, because he could not find it in himself. Dickens knew less of the Revolution, but he had more of it. When Dickens attacked abuses, he battered them down with exactly that sort of cheery and quite one-sided satisfaction with which the French mob battered down the Bastille. Dickens utterly and innocently believed in certain things; he would, I think, have drawn the sword for them. Carlyle half believed in half a hundred things; he was at once more of a mystic and more of a sceptic. Carlyle was the perfect type of the grumbling servant; the old grumbling servant of the aristocratic comedies. He followed the aristocracy, but he growled as he followed. He was obedient without being servile, just as Caleb Balderstone was obedient without being servile. But Dickens was the type of the man who might really have rebelled instead of grumbling. He might have gone out into the street and fought, like the man who took the Bastille. It is somewhat nationally significant that when we talk of the man in the street it means a figure silent, slouching, and even feeble. When the French speak of the man in the street, it means danger in the street.

    No one can fail to notice this deep difference between Dickens and the Carlyle whom he avowedly copied. Splendid and symbolic as are Carlyle’s scenes of the French Revolution, we have in reading them a curious sense that everything is happening at night. In Dickens even massacre happens by daylight. Carlyle always assumes that because things were tragedies therefore the men who did them felt tragic. Dickens knows that the man who works the worst tragedies is the man who feels comic; as for example, Mr. Quilp. The French Revolution was a much simpler world than Carlyle could understand; for Carlyle was subtle and not simple. Dickens could understand it, for he was simple and not subtle. He understood that plain rage against plain political injustice; he understood again that obvious vindictiveness and that obvious brutality which followed. Cruelty and the abuse of absolute power, he told an American slave-owner, are two of the bad passions of human nature. Carlyle was quite incapable of rising to the height of that uplifted common-sense. He must always find something mystical about the cruelty of the French Revolution. The effect was equally bad whether he found it mystically bad and called the thing anarchy, or whether he found it mystically good and called it the rule of the strong. In both cases he could not understand the common-sense justice or the common-sense vengeance of Dickens and the French Revolution.

    Yet Dickens has in this book given a perfect and final touch to this whole conception of mere rebellion and mere human nature. Carlyle had written the story of the French Revolution and had made the story a mere tragedy. Dickens writes the story about the French Revolution, and does not make the Revolution itself the tragedy at all. Dickens knows that an outbreak is seldom a tragedy; generally it is the avoidance of a tragedy. All the real tragedies are silent. Men fight each other with furious cries, because men fight each other with chivalry and an unchangeable sense of brotherhood. But trees fight each other in utter stillness; because they fight each other cruelly and without quarter. In this book, as in history, the guillotine is not the calamity, but rather the solution of the calamity. The sin of Sydney Carton is a sin of habit, not of revolution. His gloom is the gloom of London, not the gloom of Paris.

    G. K. CHESTERTON

    1906.

    Second Introduction

    Probably Dickens never wrote a more popular book (unless Pickwick is the exception) than his Tale of Two Cities. Among readers whom Nature has made incapable (to their pride and loss) of appreciating Mr. Pickwick and Mrs. Gamp, and all our dearest friends, the Tale of Two Cities is admired. Meanwhile the lovers of the old irresponsible humour and high spirits of Dickens’s earlier days must admit that the Tale is an historical melodrama of unrivalled vividness and power. It is a book that will not allow itself to be forgotten, with its refrain of trampling multitudinous feet, and its melancholy figure of Sydney Carton.

    The French Revolution has been a fertile but not a fortunate field for novelists. Scott justly observed, about some other historical events, that they are, in themselves, too strong for romantic treatment. Nothing can add to the native romance of the conquest of Anahuac by Cortés; fancy lags in the trail of fact. The poignancy and horror of the Revolution outdo all mere imaginative effort to cope with them: it is Nature that here purges by pity and terror, that distracts our sympathies, and finally leaves us in an impotent anger against the shiftless party which fell, and the fiendish party which triumphed in that fall, and then turned its fangs against itself. We are too near that chaldron of Medea, too near its brink ourselves, for the existence of a merely artistic interest. Therefore even the great Dumas did not succeed in this field, as he did in fields more remote, and among catastrophes less cosmical. Dickens has, probably, the advantage here over that renowned master of France; his English background aids him, by affording relief. Doubtless this is the best novel of the Revolution, and the best of Dickens’s novels which venture into history.

    On one point, historical accuracy, not very much need be said. Dickens, in a letter to Bulwer Lytton, shows that he was quite familiar with the scientifically historical view of his topic. Enquiries and figures regarding the precise social condition of the peasantry might prove this or that, on the whole, but examples of oppression were recent enough, and common enough (he held), to justify the use which he made of them in fiction. We must beware of checking the fancy of the novelist by pedantic restrictions—pedantic because out of place. The historical novelist is not the historian. Mr. Freeman has been severe on Ivanhoe for want of congruity with facts. Kenilworth and Peveril of the Peak present characters dead long before the tale begins—or at that time children, though they figure as grown men. In Thackeray’s splendid picture of the King, in Esmond, there is hardly one line or touch of colour consistent with historical verity. This is hard on the character, and Dickens’s wicked Marquis may be hard on his order. It is not unreasonable or unallowable to suppose a nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas, says Dickens to Lytton, and, in romance, it is doubtless allowable. He might have added that, in the Marquis de Sade, a real contemporary, the bestial Gilles de Raiz of 1440 was actually reincarnated, and was not burned, nor even guillotined, while so many innocent heads were falling. The Bastille, by the time it was destroyed, was as obsolete almost for its old purposes, and nearly as empty, as the cave of Giant Pagan, in Bunyan. But in a curious wandering book, the Letters of Oliver Macallister, we read of horrors worse than Dickens could invent—the black dungeons of Galbanon, where men’s lives were one long noisome torture; where prisoners disappeared forever, none knew how or why, none dared to ask. Macallister, a mouton, or prison spy, causes, despite his verbose futile digressions, a. shudder which cannot be forgotten. The date of his experiences was 1755-1760, sufficiently near the period of the novel for the purposes of fiction. The pressure of taxation, its most unequal pressure, is undeniable, while the results were wasted in the way with which we are familiar. Dickens cites Mercier’s Tableau de Paris as authority for his bad Marquis, though he does not tell us what were the Quellen of Mercier. Indeed, we need not ask. The question is not whether the stories are true, but whether, like the blood-baths of Louis XV., the stories were believed. India is full of such myths about ourselves, as medieval Europe was full of them about the Jews. The historian examines the facts: to the novelist is permitted a larger liberty. As an old critic justly puts it, the novelist is the landscape gardener of history. Rousseau is cited by Dickens for the peasants shutting up his house when he had a bit of meat. We may, of course, say that the Revolution did not greatly benefit the peasant, or anybody. That is rather an extreme opinion. Certainly the peasant escaped from the element of tyrannical personal caprice. Revolutions never produce a millennium, but they gratify the passion of revenge, and they shift and modify grievances. The sick world gets such relief as a fevered man obtains from turning in his bed.

    The Tale of Two Cities was the next in sequence after Little Dorrit, and though so vastly superior to that work in vividness, concentration, and construction, was written in unhappy circumstances. The author and his wife had separated, and a dispute about the publication of a statement on this topic by Dickens led to the abandonment of Household Words. From Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, its publishers, Dickens went back to his old allies, Messrs. Chapman and Hall, never to leave them again. He established All the Year Round, practically the old periodical under a new name. And here, though not very relevantly, one may observe that household words was a household word, or proverbial phrase, before Shakespeare’s day. Randolph, the ambassador of Queen Elizabeth in Scotland (1565), talks of household words, as poor men use to say, in one of his despatches.

    In All the Year Round the new story was published. The germ of the idea, a vague fancy, had occurred to Dickens when acting with his friends and children, in Wilkie Collins’s Frozen Deep, during the summer of 1857. In the end of January, 1858, he reverted to the notion, partly because work at a story would relieve his worried mind. A number of titles were thought of: Buried Alive; The Thread of Gold, or The Doctor of Beauvais; but it was in March, 1859, that he decided on A Tale Two Cities. He meant to put the story into his magazine, and also, for another public, into monthly numbers. His purpose was that the legend should express the characters more than they should express themselves in dialogue—a story of incident pounding the characters in its own mortar, and beating their interest out of them. Seldom, indeed, have fictitious characters been more severely pounded. As Mr. Forster says, Dickens does rely more on incident than character; but perhaps it would be as true to say that he drops that surplusage of description of character, and that Carlylean trick of iteration played on some personal feature, as on Pancks’s snort or Carker’s teeth. Most in his regular manner are the bullying Stryver, and the Resurrectionist. The humour of Jerry’s remarks on the barbarity of quartering a criminal, because it spoils a subject, are exactly in the manner of Dennis, the hangman, in Barnaby Rudge. Mr. Forster, usually a most lenient critic, thinks Dickens’s experiment hardly successful, from the absence of humour, and of rememberable figures. But it is not well to be humorous in scenes of oppression, popular or patrician; while Dr. Manette, and Sydney Carton, and Mr. Stryver, and Madame Defarge are surely characters memorable enough. Carton has been argued against, as not a plausible character, and, in the nature of the case, he is not a usual character. But there is nothing impossible, or gravely improbable, in him. He does not set a pin’s fee on a life which he has wrecked, and lacks the energy to rebuild. He has a great passion; greater love has no man than this, that a man should give his life for his friend. He makes a noble end of a wasted existence, as he might do, under the stress of his affection for Mrs. Darnay, and perhaps more tears have been shed over Sydney Carton than over any personage in Dickens’s novels. Nobody need grudge them to the school-fellow of Mr. Stryver, whose last scene is in a high degree pathetic, yet not melodramatic. There were too many such farewells to life, when the mob had its will and its way.

    According to the right rule of historical fiction, the characters are unhistorical. The domestic life of a few simple private people is so knitted and interwoven with the outbreak of a terrible public event, that the one seems but part of the other. Dickens does not give us long chapters of actual history. He could have introduced the real people—the King, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just; and Dumas or Scott would probably have done so, with good effect. But the more modest plan is the safer, and, as the example proves, not the less interesting. The Revolution exists, so to say, for the story. Even that gallant feat, the storming of a scarcely defended castle, is described because of its necessity to the plot; the Doctor’s manuscript, concealed in No. 105, North Tower, has to be discovered by Defarge. The novel does rather suggest that the Bastille was assaulted mainly for that purpose, and that the Revolution was chiefly caused by the vintner’s wife, to serve her private ends. The conditions, or some of them, which nourished the bacillus of revolt, are described, however, in earlier chapters, consistently with what Dickens calls the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle’s wonderful book. With similar skill the September massacres are not dragged in, for the mere sake of description, but are of moment to the conduct of the story. It were hypercritical to object to the coincidence whereby the spies, whom we first met in England, meet and are mastered by Carton at the nick of time. Such allowances are the common right of novelists. Indeed, when Dickens, writing to Monsieur Regnier of the Comédie Française, called this book the best story I have written, his self-criticism was just. It is the best charpenté of his tales up to that date; the most compact, and the most lucid in its development. Excellence in construction had not hitherto been his forte, partly because his tales had too many interests, in which that of plot was apt to be obscured and overlaid by a mass of heterogeneous detail. In this instance, just because the characters were to be pounded out by circumstance, all lies clear before the eye of author and reader.

    Throughout the novel, the scenes, as described, reach a high level of vision, whether they are cast in London or in Paris. Mr. Forster, in his Life of Dickens, is annoyed with Mr. Lewes’s criticisms on Dickens’s power of vision. They are expressed, perhaps, rather pedantically, and in the terminology of psychological science, which seems to have been hardly intelligible to Mr. Forster. Vividness of conception, almost amounting to hallucination, is decidedly a form of genius. In Goethe’s case, both in scientific and personal thought, conception externalized itself as hallucination. He would think of the girl of the hour till she actually came to meet me, he told Eckermann. To possess this vigour of phantasia, and to communicate it in a secondary degree to the reader (as Dickens here does in a score of splendid passages), is to give proof demonstrable of the highest romantic genius. Lewes was paying a tribute to Dickens with one hand, while taking it away with the other, when he called the characters wooden. They are anything but wooden, as a rule, in A Tale of Two Cities, though, in places, the humour of Jerry may be censured as verbal, or mechanical. Hallucination will never account for it, cries Mr. Forster, apparently regarding hallucination as synonymous with mental aberration. This is what comes of introducing scientific technical language into literary criticism. Dickens said, "I don’t invent, really do not, but see, thus attesting the correctness of Mr. Lewes’s diagnosis. But the mechanism of genius is an obscure topic: we ordinary minds may be grateful for the results of processes whereof we have no personal experience. Dickens wrote to Lytton that he never gave way to his invention recklessly, but constantly restrained it; and, of course, he occasionally failed in restraint. His invention did not often present him with a jeune première of great interest, and the heroine of A Tale of Two Cities is even as most heroines of male novelists. The turn which makes Miss Pross an accidental avenging angel, was censured, as if Dickens, here, had not restrained his invention. But he justly replied that he wished to contrast Madame Defarge’s mean death in a grotesque scuffle, with the stately and honourable death of Carton. The grim ingenuity of the device by which Jerry learns that Cly is not dead, accounts for the introduction of a character common enough, at the time and much later, the Resurrectionist. That a man in his position should practise this by-work, is, it must be admitted, not very probable.

    Dickens sent the proofs of the story to M. Regnier, to be dramatized. But the censure, as M. Regnier saw, would have replied——

    "Incedis per ignes

    Suppositos cineri doloso."

    ANDREW LANG.

    1898.

    Third Introduction

    A Tale of Two Cities is one of the most thrilling narratives in the whole range of the literature of fiction. Considered a part from all the other works of Dickens, it would entitle him to a very high rank among romancers. The provoking pauses in the progress of his other stories, made for the purpose of introducing new characters, are not observable in this, which seems to be spurred and driven on by some overmastering power above and back of the author, making him

    "Like one, that on a lonesome road

    Doth walk in fear and dread,

    And having once turned round, walks on,

    And turns no more his head;

    Because he knows a frightful fiend

    Doth close behind him tread."

    The stimulant which kindled Dicken’s imagination was Carlyle’s wonderful prose epic, The French Revolution, which so captivated him that he re-read it a score of times with ever new delight. After he had decided to write the tale, Carlyle furnished him with many of the books he had himself used in preparing his work, and which aided Dickens in gaining a vivid conception of the condition of France, both while the Revolution was impending and after it had rushed into its worst excesses. The idea of the story was working vaguely in his mind when he was specially disturbed by his domestic troubles; it grew into shape gradually; and, after his quarrel with the publishers of Household Words had impelled him to establish the weekly periodical of All the Year Round, he inaugurated his new enterprise by publishing, on April 30, 1859 the opening portions of A Tale of Two Cities. The story at once carried the circulation of the weekly up to an average sale varying between thirty and forty thousand copies. Before venturing on the publication, he had the usual correspondence with Forster, as to choosing an appropriate title. One of These Days was his first choice; then came Buried Alive! then The Thread of Gold; then The Doctor of Beauvais. The idea of the plot had been brooding in his mind nearly a year before he finally decided on something which would fit, as he said, the opening of the story to a T,—A Tale of Two Cities. As the work went on, he was gratified by a letter from Carlyle warmly praising it I set myself to the task, he wrote to Forster, "of making a picturesque story, rising in every chapter, with characters true to nature, but whom the story should express more than they should express themselves by dialogue. I mean, in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written (in place of the odious stuff that is written under that pretence), pounding the characters in its own mortar, and beating their interest out of them." To Forster’s historical objections, that the feudal cruelties did not come within the date of the action sufficiently to justify his use of them, Dickens returned a ready answer.{1} I had, of course, he said, full knowledge of the formal surrender of the feudal privileges, but these had been bitterly felt quite as near to the time of the Revolution as the doctor’s narrative, which you will remember dates long before the Terror. With the slang of the new philosophy on the one side, it was surely not unreasonable or unallowable, on the other, to suppose a nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas and representing the time going out, as his nephew represents the time coming in. If there be anything certain on earth, I take it that the condition of the French peasant generally at that day was intolerable. No later inquiries or provings by figures will hold water against the tremendous testimony of men living at the time. . . . I am not clear, and I never have been clear, respecting the canon of fiction which forbids the interposition of accident in such a case as Madame Defarge’s death. Where the accident is inseparable from the action and passion of the character; where it is strictly consistent with the entire design, and arises out of some culminating proceeding on the part of the individual which the whole story has led up to; it seems to me to become, as it were, an act of divine justice. And when I use Miss Pross (though this is quite another question) to faring about such a catastrophe, I have the positive intention of making that half comic intervention a part of the desperate woman’s failure; and of opposing that mean death, instead of a desperate one in the streets, which she wouldn’t have minded, to the dignity of Carton’s. Wrong or right, this was all design, and seemed to me to be in the fitness of things. In all this, Dickens shows himself an admirable, interpretative critic,—at least of his own work. Nothing could be better than his reasons, except the masterly way in which he carried out the design which the reasons fully justify.

    As a mere story, founded on the Revolution of ’89, it excels in terseness, vividness, and interest any romance of Alexandre Dumas, on the same period; and at the same time it includes attractive moral elements, of which Dumas never had the slightest conception. Were it not that the romance is artistically constructed, demanding some exercise of mind on the reader’s part to be thoroughly appreciated, there seems to be no reason why its popularity should not have outrun that of every sensational novel of the time, and have taken by storm the public which reads Reynolds and Miss Braddon, as well as the public that reads Thackeray, Bulwer, and Charles Reade. Yet A Tale of Two Cities is hardly known by thousands who have Pickwick and Nickleby almost by heart; and among these thousands are many intelligent as well as many unintelligent readers of Dickens. The man or woman is to be envied who reads this Tale of Two Cities for the first time, as it has every quality of interest calculated to stir the dullest imagination, and stimulate the most jaded heart. In the style and treatment of the story there is also present that element of the serious grotesque, mounting at times to the gigantesque, which fascinates us in the romances of Victor Hugo.

    The characters are generally subordinated to the incidents, yet the story is still rich in various characterization. Dr. Manette, his daughter Lucie, and the Defarges; Miss Pross, and Solomon her brother; Jerry Cruncher,—not forgetting his distressed wife and hopeful son; Mr. Stryver and Sydney Carton; and the sleek, sneering, cruel, voluptuous, blandly inhuman Marquis, abhorred by everybody, and specially abhorred by his nephew, who is in the line of succession to his rank and land,—a rank degraded by crime, and land blasted by infamous exactions on its tenants to pay the debts of profligacy and riot;—all these are indisputable characters, each having an individual interest. It may be said, however, that Charles Darnay, the philanthropic nephew of the monster aristocrat, a man who becomes the central object of interest in the story,—the lover and husband of Lucie Manette, who wins the greatest blessing that life affords, a tender and intelligent wife, in whom affection rises to the height of genius,—is drawn with the faintest colors of the artist’s pencil. Brave, honorable, noble as he is, his qualities are didactically rather than dramatically expressed, and one feels that he is insufficiently individualized when his prominence among the characters is considered. Still, the particular persons of the tale, whether attractive or repulsive, whether strongly or feebly delineated, are all drifted to and fro in the storm of events, representing the uprising of an oppressed people, blind and mad in selecting both its favorites and victims. In this revolutionary tempest Darnay and his wife, with all their surroundings, are but autumn leaves, swept hither and thither by a hurricane which regards neither reason nor justice in its wide, remorseless sweep.

    The character which rises above all storms of circumstance in this exigency is Sydney Carton. It is useless, he knows, to save the victim doomed to the guillotine by any demonstration of his innocence. All he can do is to take the victim’s place. He succeeds in this by an exercise of skill, forethought, and elaborate contrivance, which other men may have equalled in attempts to save their individual existence, but which none ever employed with similar coolness and intelligence in the effort of sacrificing it. He has sworn to Lucie, for whom he has a far-off, ideal affection, altogether removed from any stain of the sensuality and recklessness on which his own turbid life had been wrecked, that if the time ever came when he could do her a service, it should be done at any cost to himself. Accordingly, when all means have been exhausted to save her husband’s life, he steps in, not precipitately but deliberately; not in a rash, wild way, but in a way which calls forth all his alertness of intellect, and contrives to be Darnay’s substitute for the justice of the guillotine. The scene in which this sacrifice is consummated is pathetic and noble, beyond almost any other in Dickens’s work.

    Richard Grant White, a writer who has wandered over a wide field of criticism,—from an intelligent scrutiny of the text of Shakespeare to the minutest questions springing up from the popular use or misuse of common words,—was the first critic who called attention to the singular beauty, the exceptional sublimity, of the character of Sydney Carton. After weighing his words, which at first seem exaggerated, one is impelled at last to agree with him, that Carton stands out as one of the noblest characters in the whole literature of fiction. The more the character is studied, the more we are impressed with the depth of Mr. White’s criticism. As to the work itself, he says, that its portrayal of the noble-natured castaway makes it almost a peerless book in modem literature, and gives it a place among the highest examples of literary art. . . . The conception of this character shows in its author an ideal of magnanimity and of charity never surpassed. There is not a grander, lovelier figure than the self-wrecked, self-devoted Sydney Carton, in literature or history; and the story itself is so noble in its spirit, so grand and graphic in its style, and filled with a pathos so profound and simple, that it deserves and will surely take a place among the great serious works of imagination. The only remark to be made in qualification of this eulogy is, that Carton’s failure in life had made him not only indifferent to life, but heartily disgusted with it; there was no prospect of possible self-amendment rising before his eyes to check in the least his design of self-immolation; and he seized on the heroic form of suicide, presented to him by the distress of the woman he loved, as a means at once of blessing her existence and of extinguishing his own.

    The Paris scenes in this Tale of Two Cities’’ are more vivid and impressive than those which occur in London, yet the English incidents are not without special merit and interest. Most English novelists have exerted their talents in describing legal trials, affecting the lives or fortunes of their leading personages. Perhaps the account, in Warren’s Ten Thousand a Tear, of the trial by which Tittlebat Titmouse wins the estates of Mr. Aubrey, is not the least exciting of the incidents of that novel, even to unprofessional readers; and Wilkie Collins so delights in this method of provoking curiosity that a suspicion prevails that he pays heavy fees to eminent lawyers to guide him in matters of law, when, as in Man and Wife and The Law and the Lady," much of the interest depends on the decisions of judges and the verdicts of juries. Dickens delights both in the comic and serious presentation of judicial proceedings; but, throughout his works, it would be vain to find a parallel in force and interest to the account of the trial of Charles Darnay for high treason, as narrated in the present romance. The period is 1780, when Great Britain was at war with France and her own colonies. The opening speech of the Attorney General, the examination and cross of the government spies, the reluctant testimony of Lucie Manette, the speech of the prisoner’s counsel, and all the minor incidents of the varied scene, are presented in

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