Impact: A Tale of Two Cities

Who Was Dickens When He Wrote This

By 1859, Charles Dickens was the most famous writer in the English-speaking world, and he was also, by his own private assessment, something of a wreck. He had just ended his marriage of twenty-two years to Catherine Hogarth in a separation that generated considerable scandal — he published an open letter in his own magazine defending himself, which mostly made things worse. He had fallen for a young actress named Ellen Ternan, eighteen years old to his forty-five. He was restless, dissatisfied, and burning with the particular energy of a man who has everything and feels it amounts to nothing.

He had also just launched a new weekly magazine, All the Year Round, and needed a strong serialized novel to anchor it. A Tale of Two Cities was that novel. He wrote it while also staging and performing in an amateur theatrical production — a melodrama called The Frozen Deep, written by his friend Wilkie Collins, in which Dickens played a man who sacrifices his life for a romantic rival. The parallels to Sydney Carton are not subtle. Dickens was, in some sense, writing himself into the story — or writing the self he wished he could be.

A Sensation, Then and Now

A Tale of Two Cities ran in weekly installments from April to November 1859 and was a commercial hit from the start. Dickens claimed in a letter that circulation for All the Year Round reached around 100,000 readers per week — an enormous number for the period. The novel was published in book form the same year and sold steadily. It did not make the kind of critical splash that, say, Bleak House had made, and some reviewers found it thin on the social observation that had defined his earlier work. But readers loved it, and they kept loving it.

What is remarkable is how little its readership has declined. It was already a staple of school curricula by the early twentieth century, which guaranteed it a kind of immortality through assignment if nothing else — but the 200 million copies figure suggests something well beyond captive students. It became, and has remained, the rare canonical novel that people actually finish.

What the Book Is Actually About

The setup is deceptively simple: an English lawyer named Charles Darnay, secretly a French aristocrat who has renounced his title, is caught in Paris at the worst possible moment — the Reign of Terror, when the Revolution devoured itself and the guillotine worked day and night. His life depends on a man named Sydney Carton, an alcoholic English barrister of extraordinary intelligence and almost zero self-regard, who happens to look exactly like him. That physical resemblance is the novel's hinge.

But the book Dickens actually wrote is far more interested in violence and memory than in any love triangle. The Manette family — Lucie, her father the shoemaker-prisoner Doctor Manette — carry trauma that resurfaces at the worst moments. Madame Defarge, one of Dickens's most frightening creations, sits knitting by the guillotine, encoding the names of the condemned into her stitchwork, and she is not a simple villain: she has actual reasons for her rage that the novel takes seriously. The chapter titles themselves map the arc — from 'Recalled to Life' and 'The Golden Thread' to 'The Track of a Storm,' 'Darkness,' and 'The Knitting Done.' Dickens was plotting a tragedy, and he knew it.

The first paragraph — 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times' — is so famous that it is easy to miss how precise it is. Dickens is making a point, not just a rhetorical flourish: that every age believes itself to be the most extreme age, the most pivotal, the most unprecedented. The joke is that this is always true and always an illusion. He wrote it about the 1770s and published it in 1859, and it has been accurately applied to virtually every decade since.

The Resurrection Theme Running Through Everything

Dickens organized A Tale of Two Cities around a single recurring idea that he was almost unusually explicit about: resurrection. Book One is called 'Recalled to Life.' Doctor Manette is released from the Bastille after eighteen years and has to be, in effect, recalled to himself. Sydney Carton's transformation in the final chapters is framed as a kind of spiritual rebirth — his last words, which he imagines as he goes to the guillotine, are among the most famous in literature: 'It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.'

This is not accidental Victorian moralizing. Dickens had been reading Thomas Carlyle's massive history The French Revolution, which he called his 'wonderful book' and kept on his desk throughout the writing. Carlyle saw the Revolution as a kind of apocalyptic cleansing — terrible and necessary — and Dickens absorbed that framework whole. The guillotine in A Tale of Two Cities is not just a historical detail; it is a symbol of what happens when a society tries to be reborn through blood rather than grace. Carton's voluntary death is the counter-argument: one person choosing sacrifice freely, and meaning it.

The Cultural Footprint

Few novels have been adapted as many times or across as many media. There have been at least five major film versions, including a celebrated 1935 Hollywood production starring Ronald Colman as Carton and a 1958 British version that is still considered one of the better literary adaptations of the era. There have been stage musicals, radio dramas, graphic novels, and a long-running musical adaptation that played London's West End in the 1990s. The BBC has dramatized it repeatedly.

The novel's language has worked its way into the general vocabulary in ways that most people don't track back to Dickens. 'The best of times and the worst of times' is deployed in newspaper headlines, graduation speeches, and political commentary with a frequency that borders on the reflexive. More seriously, the image of Madame Defarge and her knitting has become a cultural archetype for cold, implacable vengeance — her name is sometimes used as a shorthand in discussions of mob justice and revolutionary terror. The 'knitting done' chapter title, with all its finality, resonates because it captures something true about how revolutions end: not with liberation, but with a list.

Why It Still Matters

There is a version of the criticism of A Tale of Two Cities that is partially fair: it is not Dickens at his most novelistically complex. It lacks the labyrinthine social architecture of Bleak House or the autobiographical depth of David Copperfield. Its plot is propulsive in the way of a thriller, and some of its characters — Lucie Manette in particular — are more emblems than people.

But what it does, it does with tremendous force. It takes a historical catastrophe and insists that individuals still matter inside it — that one choice by one person can mean something even when history is grinding everything into paste. That is not a comfortable or fashionable argument right now, and that is precisely why it is worth making. The Reign of Terror chapters — 'The Grindstone,' 'The Shadow,' 'Fifty-two' — are as good as anything Dickens wrote anywhere: taut, dark, genuinely frightening. And Sydney Carton, a man who has wasted his life and knows it, who loves someone he cannot have and does the hardest thing anyway, remains one of the great self-aware tragic figures in English fiction. He is not redeemed because he deserves it. He is redeemed because he chooses it. That distinction is the whole book.

Further Reading & Resources

Related Works in Our Library