Read this if you…
- want Dickens with a tighter, more propulsive plot than his usual sprawl
- want an Englishman hating on France
- want to read the most-printed novel in English
Skip this if you…
- didn't like great expectations or david copperfield
The 
Take
Solid plot but took a while to get going. Backdrop of the reign of terror was nice. I liked it better than bleak house but not nearly as much as copperfield. Some of the characters weren’t that believable
Depicted in Art
Saint Antoine peasants crowd the Defarges' Paris wine shop as a broken cask floods red wine across the cobblestones.
Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), 1859
Dr. Manette and Lucie sit in the Soho parlor with Charles Darnay, a quiet domestic moment before the Revolution.
Charles Edmund Brock
Dr. Manette, white-haired and hollow, sits at his shoemaker's bench in a cell deep in the Bastille.
Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), 1859
A London mob seizes the coffin of the supposed spy Roger Cly and parades it riotously through the streets.
Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), 1859
At Darnay's London trial, Sydney Carton and the prisoner are seen side by side, their uncanny likeness exposed.
Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), 1859
Lorry and Lucie find Dr. Manette in the Defarges' garret, bent over his cobbler's last, no longer remembering his name.
Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), 1859
Recommended Editions
Penguin Classics
2003
Richard Maxwell's Penguin tracks how much Dickens lifted from Carlyle's French Revolution and grounds the 1850s politics behind the book. Clean text, smart notes, the natural reading edition.
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Notable Quotes
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…
Screen & Stage
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Vincent van Gogh, Dutch post-impressionist painter, 1853–1890: "Dickens's London and Paris (Tale of two cities) … one could choose such splendid subjects for drawings from that period of the Revolution."
- Christopher Nolan, filmmaker, 1970–: "What Dickens does in that book … was exactly the tone we were looking for."
- Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, President of China, born 1953: ""It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" — Dickens's words for the world after the Industrial Revolution."
- Oprah Winfrey, media executive, television host, 1954–: Made A Tale of Two Cities a Book Club pick, calling its opening one of the greatest first lines ever written.
- George Orwell, English novelist & essayist, 1903–1950: "A Tale of Two Cities is a very good and fairly simple story."
- Harold Bloom, Yale literary critic, author of "The Western Canon", 1930–2019: "No nineteenth-century novelist, not even Tolstoy, was stronger than Dickens, whose wealth of invention almost rivals Chaucer and Shakespeare."
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