we will remember the darkness more fondly. Great writers do not keep the darkness out. They require of us as we experience their art that we invite the darkness in. Despite the stilted nobility of the novel’s ending, as Dickens rows his musical prose toward the light, his sorrowing genius cannot help but assert itself. If we question the inhuman beauty and patience of Lucie, we can relish the sardonic bleakness of Carton, his brilliance during Darnay’s trial, his courage throughout. We can appreciate the power of nightmare, whatever its political bias, as Dickens streaks his pages with the revolution’s blood. And we can laugh with him—he cannot help finding the monstrous or wonderful or ludicrous within the everyday—as Jeremiah and Jerry Junior engage in their own grotesque version of resurrection.
In fact, I think it likely that a serious hope for resurrection, or spiritual revival, for change, may lie behind the writing of A Tale of Two Cities. I think it possible that, several years earlier, Dickens’ despair about such transformation may have been signaled when he resorted to the false—the acted—heroic self-sacrifice to which he could not resist being attracted: when he makes believe in Wilkie Collins’ play, before an audience including the woman he would have given his life to possess, on a stage in his house, that he dies in order that others might live.
His character Carton, as he goes to his death, sees Lucie’s infant, “that child who lay upon her bosom and bore my name,” grow up to become “a man winning his way up in that path of life that once was mine.” As the author of A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens sought a way to be released from the prison of self, to be reborn as a happy child, destined for a happy manhood he might, outside his novel’s pages, never quite believe he had achieved.
—Frederick Busch
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
The text of this volume is taken from the “Charles Dickens” Edition of 1868-1870, which Dickens himself revised for the press, striking out or altering occasional words and making other minor changes. A few obvious errors that escaped his eye have been corrected.
Dickens originally published the novel in weekly installments in All the Year Round from April 30 to November 26, 1859, and cannily made an extra profit by also bringing it out from June through December in monthly numbers bound in his customary green paper covers. In this Signet Classics edition the end of a weekly installment is indicated by a row of asterisks, the end of a monthly installment, by a ruled line.
PREFACE TO
THE FIRST EDITION
WHEN I was acting, with my children and friends, in Mr. Wilkie Collins’s drama of The Frozen Deep, I first conceived the main idea of this story. A strong desire was upon me then to embody it in my own person; and I traced out in my fancy the state of mind of which it would necessitate the presentation to an observant spectator, with particular care and interest.
As the idea became familiar to me, it gradually shaped itself into its present form. Throughout its execution, it has had complete possession of me; I have so far verified what is done and suffered in these pages, as that I have certainly done and suffered it all myself.
Whenever any reference (however slight) is made here to the condition of the French people before or during the Revolution, it is truly made, on the faith of trustworthy witnesses. It has been one of my hopes to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, though no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle’s wonderful book.
TAVISTOCK HOUSE, LONDON
November, 1859
BOOK THE FIRST
Recalled to Life
1
The Period
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.