"A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) by Charles Dickens

Dickens’s second and best-known (and last) historical novel, the one that starts off with the famous opening lines "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, . . .".

This is one of his shortest novels and also his most overtly political one (with Hard Times), centred as it is on the violent injustices of the French revolution and on the despotism of the ancien régime that Dickens sees as having inevitably led to that momentous upheaval.

Not that Britain escapes unscathed from his acerbic political pen, as the book opens with a description of an Old Bailey treason trial that decrees on the flimsiest of grounds the most horrifying and inhumane punishment imaginable for treason, based moreover on a well-known real-life trial.

Because of its relatively short length and dramatic story line this is a good introduction to Dickens for young people, although there are fewer typically Dickensian offbeat characters than usual and the villains are more caricatural and less well-rounded than in his other novels. But the terrifying terrorism of mob rule and the bloodthirsty brutality of revolutionary justice in the dark Terror period of the French Revolution are most starkly and impressively portrayed

A Tale of Two Cities was first published in 31 weekly instalments in Dickens’s own literary periodical "All the Year Round" from April 1859 to November 1859, without illustrations.
It was also published in parallel in the USA in eight instalments between June and December1859, with the 16 captioned illustrations by Phiz (Hablot Browne) that are included here.

(136,000 words)

An e-book, with the illustrations by Phiz, is available for downloading below.

A Tale of Two Cities (e-book)