The novel threads a continuous dualism through the story, a dualism both in plot and characterization. (The French Middle-Class, which began and ended the Revolution in reality, are nowhere to be found in the novel) Dickens situates the tensions of the period in the characters of the story: Charles Darnay, scion of the aristocracy but determined to atone for his family’s sins Sydney Carton, a dissolute English barrister drawn to a plan of redemptive self-sacrifice to give his life to save Darnay, the husband of the woman Carton loves Lucy Manette, the pure personification of saintly womanhood and the woman both men love and a duo of comedic characters of a kind more familiar to Dickens’s readers, the shrill Miss Pross and the hapless “resurrectionist,” Jerry Cruncher.

It is very much a tale of good versus evil, with Dickens essentially realizing in fiction the historian Thomas Carlyle’s now-discredited interpretation of the French Revolution as a struggle between oppressed poor and monstrous aristocrats.

The moralism so typical of Dickens is much in evidence, however, as the author stages his story in the most violent period of the revolution, the Reign of Terror (1792-1794). Unusual among his novels, A Tale of Two Cities relies heavily on plot rather than characterization.

Dickens tells the story of a wide range of characters in London and Paris whose lives intersect in the turbulence of the revolution. Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities is a novel that views the eighteenth century French Revolution through the lens of nineteenth century Victorian Romanticism.

A tale of two cities by charles dickens