It took me three weeks to finish A Tale of Two Cities. I put it aside halfway, went back to get reacquainted with the characters, and then kept going. Honestly, that’s not really how you’re supposed to read Dickens – his plots are meant for one sitting. But I got through it. One late night, I turned the last page, finished the scene where Carton goes to the guillotine, closed the book, and just sat there for a long time.
The line “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”gets quoted way too often. But after reading the whole book and looking back, I realized it wasn’t just fancy writing – it’s the skeleton of the whole novel. The best and the worst, the wisest and the most foolish, the brightest and the darkest – those opposites are always there at the same time.
And that’s exactly how the revolution feels: both the destruction of the oppressors and the frenzy of the mob. Dickens doesn’t take a side. He understands the anger of the French people. When those kids who’d been run over by aristocratic carriages storm the Bastille with knives, you can’t really blame them. But he also shows you the guillotine running day and night, innocent people stepping up one after another, hatred turning into another kind of tyranny.
And of course, you can’t overlook Sydney Carton. A drunk, a depressed legal assistant who thinks his life is worthless – and then he trades it for another man’s life. The line “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done” is engraved in almost every reader’s memory.
But Dr. Manette got to me even more. He was locked up in the Bastille for eighteen years. When he got out, he only knew how to crouch on the floor making shoes, calling himself “One Hundred and Five, North Tower.” Lucie brought him back to England, and slowly, he recovered. But when Charles Darnay – the heir of the marquis who’d imprisoned him – showed up, Dr. Manette relapsed and started making shoes again. He’s neither a pure victim nor a pure forgiver. He can heal, but the wound always has a weak spot. Dickens honestly shows you a man who’s half recovered but can slip back any moment.
Lucie is more like a lamp in the book – everyone revolves around her. She’s kind and strong, but there’s not much inner conflict. Honestly, she’s more of an idealized figure. A lot of Victorian novels have that problem. But Lucie’s flatness is balanced out by Carton’s depth.
I read the passage of Carton walking through the streets of Paris late at night several times. He can hear the guillotine at work and imagines that he’ll be there tomorrow. Dickens gives him no inner monologue, no backward glance at his own life. He just walks, listens, keeps walking. Carton didn’t decide to sacrifice himself at that moment – he’d already decided long before.
Madame Defarge sits in the tavern, knitting. The name of every person condemned to die is knitted into her register. Her hatred has plenty of cause, but in the end she gets killed by her own pistol, ending up in the violence she helped create. Dickens doesn’t condemn her, but he shows you that once hatred becomes a machine, it eats its maker.
Here’s what the book tells you – a simple, terrible truth: some people’s lives get exchanged for others’. Darnay survives because Carton takes his place in prison, and Darnay walks free. But you can’t help asking: why does someone have to die? Dickens doesn’t answer that. Instead, he just shows you, through the story, that this kind of exchange happens every day – only it’s rarely as dramatic as the guillotine.
The ending is famous. On their way to death, a young seamstress takes Carton’s hand and asks if he’s going to die because of her. He says no – it’s for love. Then she says that if she holds his hand, she won’t be afraid. The first time I read that passage, I thought it was sentimental. But later I thought, maybe we’re just not used to people saying things that direct and unsarcastic. In the moment Carton climbs the scaffold, he’s no longer a failure. He has become the choice itself.
So let me go back to that famous opening line – the best of times and the worst of times happen at the same time. Carton’s death is both the best and the worst of all: the best, because he finally finds a way to give his life meaning; the worst, because a society has to let an innocent man die to prove that something is still worth living for.
Maybe every era is like those two cities in Dickens’s novel – the best and the worst have never been separate.
