A Tale of Two Cities Summary: Dickens, Revolution and Sacrifice
What A Tale of Two Cities is about
Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities in 1859. It is a historical novel set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, and it is his best known work of historical fiction. At its centre is Doctor Alexandre Manette, a French physician held in the Bastille for eighteen years, and his daughter Lucie, who grew up believing he was dead.
The story opens in 1775. Jerry Cruncher, an employee of Tellson's Bank in London, stops the night mail-coach on the road to Dover to deliver a message to Jarvis Lorry, one of the bank's managers. Lorry sends back a reply of three words: "Recalled to Life". The phrase refers to Manette, newly released from prison. Lorry meets Lucie and her governess Miss Pross at Dover and takes Lucie to France to find the father she has never met. They discover him in a garret in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, lodged above the wine shop of his former servant Ernest Defarge and Defarge's wife Therese. Manette spends his days obsessively making shoes, a trade he learned in captivity. They bring him back to England.
The second part of the novel moves between the two cities. In 1780 a French emigre named Charles Darnay stands trial in London for treason. He is acquitted after his defence points out that the lawyer Sydney Carton, sitting in the same courtroom, looks remarkably like the prisoner, which destroys the credibility of the spy John Barsad. In France, Darnay's uncle, the Marquis St. Evremonde, has his carriage driven at speed through crowded streets and kills a child. He throws the father a coin. The coin is thrown back. That night the Marquis is stabbed in his sleep.
Darnay has rejected the family name and taken an anglicised version of his mother's maiden name. He marries Lucie in London and they raise a family there. Then the Revolution arrives. In July 1789 the Defarges help lead the storming of the Bastille, and Defarge searches Manette's old cell. Chateaux burn across the countryside. In 1792 Lorry travels to Paris on bank business, and Darnay, who has received a desperate letter from a former family servant imprisoned by the revolutionaries, follows him without telling his wife who he really is. He is arrested on the way.
The main characters
Doctor Manette is the broken centre of the book, a man whose mind returns to the shoemaker's bench whenever the past reaches him. Lucie Manette is the thread that holds the household together. Charles Darnay is an aristocrat by birth who wants nothing of the inheritance and is ruined by it anyway. Sydney Carton is the drifting English lawyer who loves Lucie, knows she does not love him, and tells her he would "embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you". Jarvis Lorry is the dry, decent man of business who becomes family. Miss Pross guards Lucie fiercely. Ernest and Therese Defarge run the wine shop that becomes a revolutionary headquarters.
The themes
Justice and revenge are tangled all the way through. The Marquis states the aristocratic creed plainly: "Repression is the only lasting philosophy." The book then shows what repression produces, and refuses to make the result comfortable. The crowd that storms the Bastille has real grievances, and the terror that follows is still terrible.
Class runs alongside it. Darnay's name is an inheritance he cannot refuse. A dead child in a Paris street and a coin flung back into a carriage say more about the old order than any speech.
Then there is resurrection, announced in the title of the first book, "Recalled to Life". Manette is recalled from the grave of the Bastille. The question Dickens builds the novel towards is whether a wasted man like Carton can be recalled too. The resemblance between Carton and Darnay is planted early and carefully, and the promise Carton makes to Lucie is not decoration.
Why it still matters
The opening sentence, beginning "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times", is one of the most quoted lines in English. The novel is said to be among the best selling of all time, and in 2003 it was ranked 63rd in the BBC's Big Read poll. It has been adapted repeatedly for film, television, radio and the stage.
It lasts because it does two difficult things at once. It tells a tight story about a handful of people who love each other, and it sets that story inside a political catastrophe that neither side can control. Readers who find Dickens's longer novels sprawling often find this one the exception. It is shorter, faster and darker, and it ends on a choice rather than a settlement.
