Book 32: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (100 Great Books)
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness"
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Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities in 1859, serializing it in his own literary journal, All the Year Round. By that point, he had already secured his reputation as the defining voice of Victorian social conscience, having produced Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and David Copperfield. The novel arrived during a period of considerable European anxiety, with revolutions still raw in cultural memory and class tensions simmering across the continent. Dickens drew directly from Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, a history he claimed to have read hundreds of times, and from his own stage performance in Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep, a play about self-sacrifice that seeded the moral core of the story. A Tale of Two Cities remains among the best-selling novels in recorded publishing history, and one that speaks to the times we live in.
The novel opens in 1775 with one of the most famous sentences in the English language.
“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.”
