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Cover of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens

  • 388 pages · about 6 hours
  • First published 1859
  • 2,059 editions
  • Free to read
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1 About this book

A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859, is Charles Dickens's novel of London and Paris in the years before and during the French Revolution. In 1775 Doctor Manette is released after eighteen years in the Bastille and brought to England by his daughter Lucie, who had believed him dead. Their lives become bound up with two men who look strangely alike: Charles Darnay, a French emigrant with ties to the aristocracy, and Sydney Carton, a clever, dissolute English lawyer. In Paris, meanwhile, anger against the nobility is building toward an uprising, and when the Revolution comes it pulls all of them back to France.

  • Classics
  • Historical fiction
  • French Revolution
  • France, history
  • London, history
  • Revolutions
  • Political refugees
  • Juvenile Nonfiction

2 What to expect

A historical novel set in London and Paris around the French Revolution, about a family caught up in the Terror and two men who look alike. It is shorter and more tightly plotted than most Dickens, with fewer comic characters and more melodrama, and its themes are sacrifice, renewal and the violence of both tyranny and the mob. The Victorian prose takes some effort and the first part is slow to gather, but the last third moves fast.

Good for readers who want: a classic historical novel, the French Revolution, and a story of sacrifice.

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4 About Charles Dickens

1812–1870

Charles John Huffam Dickens ( ; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and journalist. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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