A Tale of Two CitiesCharles Dickens
About A Tale of Two Cities
Dickens wrote with Carlyle's history of the French Revolution beside him, and the novel carries Carlyle's thesis into fiction: the Terror was made by the regime it destroyed. The Marquis St. Evrémonde runs a child down in the street with his carriage and throws a coin to the father. That act, together with the older crime buried in Dr. Manette's Bastille testimony, sets in motion everything the Defarges do in the second half of the book.
The structure is symmetrical. Manette is released after eighteen years of unjust imprisonment in France and recalled to life in London. Charles Darnay, who renounced the Evrémonde name and the estate with it, returns to Paris and is jailed by the Revolution on the strength of his blood. Madame Defarge knits the names of the condemned into her register with the patience of a bookkeeper, and when the account comes due it makes no distinction between the guilty and the family of the guilty. Dickens grants the revolutionaries their grievance entire and denies them this way of collecting on it.
Sydney Carton, a barrister who has thrown away his gifts, goes to the guillotine in Darnay's place because he has Darnay's face and because he loves Lucie. The last pages are inside his head on the scaffold, looking forward to a France past the killing.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." The opening sentence states the method. Two cities, two prisoners, two men with one face, and a revolution that is at once the reckoning owed to the old regime's victims and a tyranny of its own.