Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities in weekly installments in 1859, opening it with the sentence: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." The novel is set in London and Paris in the years surrounding the French Revolution of 1789, and follows Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat by birth who has renounced his name and title out of guilt over his family's history of cruelty, and Sydney Carton, a brilliant but dissolute London barrister who resembles Darnay closely enough to serve as his legal double in more than one sense. Both men love Lucie Manette, daughter of a doctor who was imprisoned in the Bastille for seventeen years by the family Darnay rejected.
Dickens researched the Revolution through Thomas Carlyle's 1837 history, borrowing Carlyle's rhetorical energy and his ambivalence toward the popular violence he documented. The novel does not celebrate revolutionary violence; the Reign of Terror is shown as transforming the legitimate grievances of the oppressed into an indiscriminate machinery of revenge in which Darnay can be condemned simply for carrying the name of an aristocratic family. The character of Madame Defarge, who knits the names of condemned aristocrats into her work and pursues Lucie's family past any proportionate justice, embodies how historical injury, when not addressed, accumulates into something that destroys the innocent alongside the guilty.
The novel is often assigned in schools primarily for its historical content, which can obscure what it actually does well: the interplay between the social forces of revolution and the specific destinies of individual characters, and the portrait of Carton as someone who has spent his intelligence in the service of causes and people he considered unworthy of it. The famous final lines, "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done", are convincing not because they are rhetorically polished but because Dickens has spent the preceding novel establishing the emptiness they replace.
Charles Dickens walked up to 20 miles a night through London streets gathering material for his novels.
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