A Tale of Two Cities

This stirring tale of resurrection, renunciation and revolution is one of Dickens’s best and most popular novels.

Superficially it appears the least Dickensian of all his novels. However, George Woodcock points out that, written at a point of crisis in Dickens’s life, it was closely linked with past and present matters of deep personal importance to him. As such, this novel becomes the embodiment of Dickens’s own passions, fears and forebodings: the revolution which engulfs the characters symbolises his own psychological revolution, both as man and artist.

The three main characters, Charles Darneay, Sydney Carton, and Lucie Manette, become projections of Dickens himself. And the title, which contains the whole sweep of the author’s vision, suggests the basic dichotomy on which the novel rests: the choice between changing society and changing oneself; the gulf between revolutionary ideals and methods; and the duality in the human heart externalised by the Darnay-Carton relationship.