if there was a Most Classic-Seeming Classic Book award...this might win

One word: Sydney.

Sentimental and predictable, in how everyone knows each other and how constructed the story works to a neat conclusion and contrast at the end, but the author his sarcastic wit helped me appreciate the book nonetheless!

Charles Dickens has a sarcastic wit in this novel and doesn’t hold back in anyway in scathing the French bourgeois and nobility, you can viscerally imagine the poverty and wretchedness based on the vivid descriptions provided. However the bourgeois English fear for a rising of the mobs is very clear as well. At its heart A Tale of Two Cities in my view is less about the French Revolution (if that interest you primarily I'd recommend A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel) perse and more about morality and how people carry themselves under extreme circumstances.

Some characters revert to an “it’s all business” sentiment and quite breezingly make it through. Other characters turn saint like and faint multiple times (looking at you Lucy). We have someone turning full on ninja assassin at a chateau, and a madam who is constantly knitting while the guillotine (almost a character in itself) "shaves off" a new pattern in the tapestry of society.

The courtroom scene, the discovery of the father in Paris, overdone love declarations and schemes reminded me a lot to a more quick (and in my opinion better executed) versions of what Victor Hugo did in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
There is a death speech (and a letter) of a chapter long at the end of the book which is probably the most over the top melodramatic writing I’ve read.
Everyone is acquainted or full on related to each other in the two metropoles London and Paris, and the overarching plot and desired symmetries completely supersede any sense of reality in the story.

Still the biting humor, and the idiosyncratic characters made this quite an enjoyable read for a book of its age. A solid three stars overall!

Not today, Chuckie!

Who-eee! Confusion reigned in A Tale of Two Cities. Even with the Cliff Notes, it was hard to grasp what was going on. While some of it can be blamed on the archaic language and the classic American ignorance of history, Charles Dickens is at least partially responsible.

Starting with the famous opening line – it is actually part of an insanely long run-on sentence!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Central to the plot is a certain unnamed family with unnamed characters – some sisters, some brothers, a mother. Then, other characters are somehow related to this situation. Gee – that’s not confusing at all.

Philip Pullman, one of my favorite authors, put it this way: “The aim must always be clarity. It’s tempting to feel that if a passage of writing is obscure, it must be very deep. […] Telling a story involves thinking of some interesting events, putting them in the best order to bring out the connections between them, and telling about them as clearly as we can; and if we get the last part right, we won’t be able to disguise any failure with the first—which is actually the most difficult, and the most important.” Daemon Voices

A Tale of Two Cities is not clear—it is a sure fire way to induce sleep. Most frustratingly, Dickens is capable of better. In other stories, Dickens will provide additional clues to help remind readers of previous connections and who the characters are and their relationships, but in this novel, Dickens didn’t deliver, and he didn’t do enough to bridge all of the gaps in the story.

And while some of the moments could have been spectacularly meaningful, these attempts stumbled and fell just short of the finish line, the full impact lost in the obscurity.

Bring back David Copperfield! ‘Till me meet again, Chuck!

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Softcover Text – $? It is the Penguin Classics version. It might be from the 40% off sale when Barnes and Nobles was closing.
Electronic Text – Free through Libby
Audiobook – Free through Libby

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This book is interesting for the wrong reasons. On the one hand there are elements that work very well and you feel confident in the author's skill but on the other hand the sequence of events that sucks one character after another back into France feels entirely unconvincing.

In Bleak House we see a bundle of characteristics taken to a negative extreme in the person of the French women Hortense. In A Tale of Two Cities this is extended here to the point that 'bad' and 'French' seem to be synonymous terms as do 'good' and 'English'. This culminates in the patriotic prize fight between the good English woman and the bad French woman.

Dickens wants to have his cake and eat it with his central plot conceit. He shows the reader that the Ancien regime was bad and evil, that the people who suffered under it were innocent victims, but equally that the people who overthrew the Ancien Regime and seek revenge are also evil while at the same time getting round the notion that all French people are evil by finding all three of the good ones and lining them up in this story. This isn't satisfying.

In the context of early Victorian Britain it paid not to look too radical and there was a ready market for anti-French & horrors of the French revolution stories. This anti-French sentiment is executed so crudely that while I'm convinced and moved by Dickens' social commentary in Hard Times, Bleak House or Great Expectations I'm entirely mistrustful of what I'm being told in A Tale of Two Cities.

Politically the timing of this novel is interesting. Dickens is writing eight years before the Second Reform Act, which extended the franchise in Britain, and he is looking back at the circumstances of the late eighteenth century. In terms of the cruelty and hardships of the best of times and the worse of times there are similarities between the two countries. Dickens is looking back over a subsequent period of slow and pragmatic reform in Britain and violent change in France. The reason he gives implicitly in his text for the different political outcomes is purely in the character of the two nations. The French are too passionate, while the phlegmatic English, and here remember Mr Rouncewell's 'Saxon' face in Bleak House contrasted with the aristocratic Dedlock, are constituently (politically and personally) capable of pragmatic change.

At once we see both political radicalism and a certain conservatism in Dickens' views. On the one hand the stress on the Saxon compared with the Frenchman takes us back to the Norman Yoke ideology, a mainstay of English political radicalism from the Levellers to the Chartists, yet the implications are conservative. Political life in Britain can change, pragmatically and effectively because of the nature of the English people. The lack of the traits that allow the English to be fundamentally democratic in the national character of the French however condemns them to being an example to avoid.

This is enormously reassuring to the comfortable classes subscribing to Dickens' periodicals. Even the still distant threat on the horizon of extending the franchise to decent working men can be weathered due to inherent English pragmatism  the product of our magnificent mucus no doubt as all affectionados of the four humours will agree. The Saxon national character will prevent the violence of a French Revolution from occurring in Britain.

At the same time Dickens' personal life was anything but phlegmatic and pragmatic. Perhaps something of the tension between the personal and the public gives the book the power it has. The fight isn't between the good Englishwoman and the bad Frenchwoman, it is Dickens at war with himself. Publicly pragmatism wins, personally, however, it is all about passion.

تا الان اینقدر با خودم کلنجار نرفته بودم که بتونم کتابی رو بخونم. نسخه‌های مختلفش رو شروع به خوندن کردم و ارتباط نگرفتم و حتی نسخه انگلیسی خلاصه شده‌ش رو نتونستم تا انتها پیش برم. فکر کنم همیشه این برام یه سوال بمونه که چه چیزی تو این کتاب اونقدر خوب بوده که عنوان پرفروش‌ترین کتاب تک جلدی دنیا رو از آن خودش کرده.
من نصفه رهاش کردم چون کتاب خوندن برای من یه سرگرمیه که ازش لذت می‌برم و خب باورم کنید یا نه، هیچ چیزی تو اون ۳۰۰ صفحه‌ای که خوندم جذبم نکرد، نه حتی یه شخصیت یا یه اتفاق، و یکی از کسالت‌بارترین کتابایی بود که خوندم.

A Tale of Two Cities was the first Charles Dickens novel I read on my own, not because an English class required it (looking at you, Great Expectations). I was going on a cross-country trip and decided this would be a good book to while away the hours.

From the first immortal words:

It was the best of times,
It was the worst of times,
It was the age of wisdom,
It was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity ...

to the very last ones, it was an absorbing story that ties in many themes, including love, loyalty, war, revolutionary fervor, justice, and sacrifice for a greater cause.

Set in the years 1775 - 1790, before and during the French revolution, this long Victorian novel follows the lovely, kindhearted Lucie Manette and the people whose lives she touches, especially her father Dr. Alexandre Manette, imprisoned in the Bastille for 18 years and driven nearly insane; Charles Darney, an emigre from France; Sidney Carlton, a cynical English barrister. We meet the infamous Defarges, a husband and wife who embrace the revolutionary cause and (especially Madame Defarge) descend into bloodthirsty proponents of Madame Guillotine.

I'll never forget reading the last pages on the plane, trying (probably in vain) to hide my tears from the strangers sitting around me on the plane.

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done ..."

128th book of 2021.

3.5. A good story but a little contrived and without Dickens' swinging sadness to wit and back again; here, only sadness and drama. I thought I'd written the full review for this already last year, but I never did. Turns out it's quite a forgettable novel, too. When I compare it to other novels of Dickens like Great Expectations or David Copperfield, I'm surprised by all the names I can recall of those, the scenes that are crystalline in my memory, and how this one has mostly faded away, save Charles Darnay and the ending.

Poco se puede decir de este clásico que no se haya dicho ya mil veces. Escrito en 1859, es una de las dos obras de ficción histórica que nos dejó este gran autor. En sus páginas se describen tanto Londres como Paris, en la convulsa época de la Revolución Francesa, intentando mostrar, bajo su punto de vista, la causa de dicha Revolución. Se dice que Dickens visitó Paris en repetidas ocasiones para inspirar su obra, a través de los restos históricos que fue encontrando en sus viajes.
Yo creo que lo de menos es la narración concerniente a los personajes, el abogado Sydney Carton o el supuesto espía francés Charles Darnay, o Lucie, o el resto de los que desfilan por sus páginas. Es simplemente una obra que conviene leer en algún momento de tu vida. Quizás le falte una mayor profundización de los personajes, y algo de la ironía que desprende en “Grandes Esperanzas”, para mí su mejor obra. La primera vez la leí en castellano, y no hace mucho que la releí en inglés, aunque no es una lectura fácil. También hay adaptaciones en un inglés más comprensible y moderno, pero, si se puede, conviene leerlo en su versión oficial. Ha dejado pasajes que permanecen en la memoria colectiva, sobretodo en la cultura anglosajona, y también adaptaciones cinematográficas memorables. Si eres lector de buena literatura, no esperes más y comienza a leerla. No es una novela que enganche desde sus primeras páginas, pero el esfuerzo merece la pena.

About 30 pages into this book, I was struck with a moment of panic:

WHAT'S GOING ON HERE? WHERE THE HELL IS GARFIELD?!?

Had the lasagna-loving feline been uncerimoniously behead on the guillotine before the happenings of page 1? Without my favorite cartoon cat's wry, laid-back sense of wit these are surely THE WORST OF TIMES!

That is when I realized I was reading the classic text A Tale of Two CITIES, by Charles Dickens and not watching the 2006 cinematic masterpiece Garfield: A TAIL of Two KITTIES!

Holy crap! How embarrassing!

Against my better judgement, I decided to keep reading, hoping that at some point Garfield would pop up and say something hilarious about hating Mondays. Well, fellow readers, he doesn't. I repeat: GARFIELD IS NOT IN THIS BOOK! AT ALL!

Instead, Dickens (is that his real name? LOL!) crafts a tale of sacrifice and redemption set against the bleak background of the French Revolution.

Overall, I guess it's an okay book, if you're into the "classics" sort-of thing, but I believe in my heart of hearts that this novel really could've benefitted by AT LEAST a cameo from Jon Arbuckle or something.

The tale is one of the best-known stories from one of the world's best-loved novelists, and yet somehow it always maintains its freshness and its vigour, no matter how many times a reader takes it up anew. Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), his epic recounting of the French Revolutionary period in Paris and London, shows the great novelist applying his talents to the genre of the historical novel – a genre he did not delve into very often – to singularly powerful effect.

By the time he wrote A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens had already spent 20 years atop the hierarchy of British novelists. Pre-eminent among the books that had enthralled the reading public in Great Britain, and worldwide, were Oliver Twist (1839), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1850), and Bleak House (1853). His works were marked by vivid characterization, an amazing eye for detail, and a heartfelt sense of sentiment (or, for some readers, sentimentality) – all of it combined with an impassioned denunciation of social injustice. People who ordinarily would not have cared a fig for the situation of the poor and the dispossessed suddenly found that they did care, after reading Dickens.

What made A Tale of Two Cities something different within Dickens’s oeuvre, though, was that the great novelist had generally applied his gifts for observation and social criticism to the time in which he lived. He had not written much within the genre of the historical novel – with the exception of Barnaby Rudge (1841), a novelistic account of the anti-Catholic “Gordon Riots” of 1780. Dickens may have found part of his inspiration for writing A Tale of Two Cities in his reading of Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History (1837), but he went beyond his sources in telling a story that could be a tale of any period of turbulence.

Returning to A Tale of Two Cities now, after many prior readings of the book, I find that it may be the most well-written of all Dickens’s books. Dickens was sometimes criticized for writing too quickly, and in too prolix a manner – tendencies that may have been exacerbated by the fact that he was often publishing his novels in serial format – but A Tale of Two Cities is marked by countless passages of careful, graceful composition that make it a real pleasure to read. A good example of mellifluous writing that makes a vitally important thematic point is the novel’s justly famous introduction:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way… (p. 1).

The use of anaphora (repetition as a rhetorical device) in this passage is poetic, well-known, and effective – and yet the reader will be missing an important point if they do not attend to what follows: “[I]n short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only” (p. 1). Writing in 1859, at a time when Great Britain had been experiencing a good deal of political, religious, and social tension, both on the home island and throughout the Empire, Dickens wanted to remind his readers that the time of the French Revolution is an important time, but is not so much a time of superlatives that the reader cannot turn to a serious consideration of the problems of their own time. The late 18th century was “the best of times” and “the worst of times.” The year 1859, when this novel was written, was also “the best of times” and “the worst of times.” So is today.

Many readers and critics have remarked on the idea that A Tale of Two Cities seems to be among the darker and grimmer of Dickens’s novels – an inevitability, perhaps, considering the serious subject matter. Certainly, from the novel’s prologue that is set in the year 1775, Dickens successfully establishes an air of menace.

As the novel begins, bank manager Jarvis Lorry has just received a message from one of his employees, Jerry Cruncher. “He opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and read – first to himself and then aloud: ‘Wait at Dover for Ma’amselle.…Jerry, say that my answer was, RECALLED TO LIFE’” (p. 11). The person who has been “recalled to life” is Dr. Alexandre Manette, a great physician who has been imprisoned for 18 years by France’s royal government because he denounced two members of the aristocratic Evrémonde family for their cruelty.

Jarvis Lorry accompanies Dr. Manette’s grown daughter Lucie Manette to Paris to see her father. The newly released Dr. Manette shows signs of the trauma of his imprisonment – when under stress, he will turn to obsessively making shoes, as shoe-making was the occupation forced upon him during his imprisonment – and Jarvis Lorry brings Dr. Manette and Lucie back to London for their own safety.

The action of the novel then moves forward five years, to 1780, when Charles Darnay, a Frenchman who has moved to Great Britain because of his opposition to the cruel policies of the French regime, is falsely accused of treason against the British Crown. His defence attorney demolishes the perjured testimony of a prosecution witness, and thereby the prosecution’s entire case, by directing assistant barrister Sydney Carton to take off his wig, showing that Carton looks just like Darnay! Well! I’ll wager they don’t teach that legal tactic at Oxford or Cambridge!

Carton and Darnay make an interesting pair, a study in contrasts. Darnay is straightforward, gentlemanly, and correct; Carton seems neglectful and studiedly rude, although the alert reader will notice Carton’s constant concern for others. One sees these characteristics of both men after Darnay’s acquittal at the treason trial, when Carton notices that Darnay is feeling faint, and takes him to a nearby pub: “Drawing his arm through his own, he took him down Ludgate Hill to Fleet Street, and so, up a covered way, into a tavern. Here, they were shown into a little room, where Charles Darnay was soon recruiting his strength with a good plain dinner and good wine: while Carton sat opposite to him at the same table, with his separate bottle of port before him, and his fully insolent manner upon him” (p. 86).

The pub to which Carton takes Darnay is widely identified as the Cheshire Cheese Pub (145 Fleet Street, London EC4A 2B), a favourite hangout of Dickens; under glass is a copy of the novel, opened to this passage. If you’re a fellow fan of the novel, check it out; the fish-and-chips are first-rate, and would go well with a Bass Ale.

Darnay’s past is complex. He is the nephew of an Evrémonde marquis who embodies the arrogance and cruelty of the ancient regime; but Darnay has rejected his aristocratic heritage, choosing instead to make a modest living teaching French in England.

Darnay has also found love with Lucie Manette – and one of the many affecting features of the novel is Sydney Carton’s unrequited love for Lucie Manette. In a moving passage, Carton asks to be able to visit from time to time with the Darnay family, like a sort of poor relation. Telling Lucie that she is the source of what little good he sees in himself, Carton adds that “For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything. If my career were of that better kind that there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for you, and for those dear to you” (p. 158). The foreshadowing in this passage is self-evident.

So far, so good. Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette raise their daughter in peace, and look after Lucie’s much-recovered father – albeit under humble circumstances – and Sydney Carton hangs about the house from time to time, enjoying vicariously the domestic peace that is not his to enjoy. But then the French Revolution intervenes.

There is plenty of foreshadowing of what is to come in the Revolution. In a rough part of Paris, the reader is taken into the wine-shop of a couple named Defarge. Monsieur Defarge, with his brag and bluster, makes much of planning to cut aristocratic throats when the Revolution comes; but it is his wife Madame Defarge, always at her knitting, who emerges as the true figure of menace. It quickly becomes apparent that Madame Defarge’s knitting is not simply the work of a dutiful French wife; rather, it is G-2, counterintelligence, a chronicling of every bit of titled, “noble” misbehaviour that Madame Defarge intends to see repaid in blood. Madame Defarge is much feared, even by her fellow revolutionaries, and for good reason.

Dickens, as mentioned above, seems to have depended much upon Thomas Carlyle’s three-volume The French Revolution: A History (1837) in his depiction of that tumultuous period of modern history. A number of scholars have pointed out how the passages of A Tale of Two Cities dealing with the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 show Carlyle’s influence – but Carlyle or no Carlyle, these passages show Dickens’s gift for conveying scene and action in exceptionally vivid language, as a “raging sea” of revolutionaries converges on the feared prison that once embodied the old regime’s power to inflict torment and misery:

Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke, but, still the deep ditch, the single drawbridge, the massive stone walls, and the eight great towers. Slight displacements of the raging sea, made by the falling wounded. Flashing weapons, blazing torches, smoking wagon-loads of wet straw, hard work at neighbouring barricades in all directions, shrieks, volleys, execrations, bravery without stint, boom smash and rattle, and the furious sounding of the living sea; but, still the deep ditch, and the single drawbridge, and the massive stone walls, and the eight great towers…. (p. 224)

It is widely known nowadays, of course, that only seven prisoners were liberated when the Bastille fell; but Dickens makes a point of noting that the “Seven prisoners released” are complemented by “seven gory heads on pikes” (p. 230) – a foretaste of the much greater bloodshed that is to come. And in the aftermath of the fortress’s fall, Monsieur Defarge makes a fateful discovery that will threaten the lives of many of the novel’s characters.

Darnay, although safe in England, feels obliged to return to Paris to seek relief for a minor member of the Evrémonde household who has been detained on Darnay’s behalf. The entire family proceeds to Paris, with Doctor Manette confident that, as a former prisoner of the regime, with unimpeachable Revolutionary credentials, he will be able to protect Charles and Lucie and their little daughter. His invocation of his past sufferings frees Charles from detention once, but then Charles is re-arrested, and Doctor Manette is told that his history is no longer relevant: “Citizen Doctor…ask no more. If the Republic demands sacrifices from you, you as a good patriot will be happy to make them. The Republic goes before all. The People is supreme” (p. 303).

Madame Defarge expresses her intent to bring about not only Darnay’s death but that of his wife and child as well. For her, clearly, only a Carthaginian peace will do; the innocent must die to settle the blood-guilt of their elders. And Sydney Carton – hard-drinking, ill-mannered Sydney Carton, who has always despised himself as someone whose personal weaknesses blasted his considerable potential – sees that he may be the only one with the power to preserve the good.

The concluding line of the novel is one of the most famous, and one of the best, in all of 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” (p. 389).

I returned to A Tale of Two Cities in the context of a recent visit to Paris. Whilst there, I seized the opportunity to take the Eurostar train under the English Channel and up to London. There have been many times in history when travelling between these two cities was a risky thing, for a variety of reasons. Today, by contrast, a journey from Gare du Nord railway station in Paris to St. Pancras International in London takes 2 hours and 18 minutes. So often these two great cities, London and Paris, have been linked in history and culture; and my rail journey through the “Chunnel” reminded me of the most famous, and to my mind the greatest, literary linkage of Paris and London – Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.

Some how my review of this got deleted which is good because I think after sitting a while I can appreciate the book more. When I read it it was confusing and slow and then towards the end really picked up and I was kind of disoriented but it gives a really good view into things in the period before the French Revolution. Learning about it was one thing but reading this made me very sympathetic of the peasants and angry on thier behalf, honestly surprised they didn't start rioting sooner.