A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities was published in 1859 and is Charles Dickens's historical novel about the French Revolution, set in London and Paris in the years before and during the Terror. Dickens had visited Paris and was working in the middle of his career, and the book was published in serial form before appearing as a volume. It was one of the first novels by a major English writer to treat the Revolution as history rather than as a warning about England.

The novel's method is the parallel between the two cities that its title promises. Dickens cuts between courts, streets and prisons on both sides of the Channel, and the political machinery of the French state and the English legal system are shown in the same book. Doctor Manette's eighteen years of imprisonment by royal letter gives the story its grievance, and the description of Paris under the Revolution is written from the perspective of people whose lives are being reorganised by committees.

It is one of Dickens's shorter novels and one of the two or three most widely read. It has been filmed and adapted for television and the stage repeatedly, and its closing lines are among the most-quoted sentences in English fiction. It is a standalone, and it sits between the historical romances and the novels of social record that make up its half of the shelf. The two halves of the plot are joined by a resemblance between two men who have never met, and the device lets Dickens move the story between London and Paris twice before the trial that finally brings them into the same room, with the reader holding information that the court does not have and the witnesses cannot supply.