14: A Tale of Two Cities

A book by Charles Dickens

In Chapter Five of Charles Dickens’s 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities, our narrator makes reference to “husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil”. This is the earliest known use of the word “chips” to refer to the foodstuff Americans would now know as French fries. You know the ones; they go very well with battered fish and lashings of salt and malt vinegar. Basically, in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens invented chips. And yet, quite remarkably, that is not the crowning achievement of the book.

So what is? An excellent question. Well, to start with the obvious, what about that opening line? “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” is possibly the most famous opening line in all of English literature. There will be plenty of people who know the line and not the book or author. And it’s actually only a small part of the monumental opening sentence, all 119 words of which are reproduced here by former England hooker and noted literary critic Brian Moore:

No English teacher in the land would condone such verbosity in a student’s opening line. But when your name is Charles Dickens, you’re allowed to break the rules, and it’s stunningly effective. It’s also as alarmingly relevant to now as it was to the years preceding the French Revolution.

Four hundred-odd pages later, Dickens also delivers a killer closing line (don’t worry, not a spoiler): “‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.’” And everything in between isn’t bad either. (A bit of litotes for you there.)

A Tale of Two Cities doesn’t actually start in either of the cities of the title (London and Paris), but on the road between the English capital and Dover in 1775. A man named Jerry Cruncher (phenomenal name, slightly iffy moral compass) delivers a message to Mr Jarvis Lorry (less phenomenal name, perfectly operating moral compass), who gives the cryptic response: “Recalled to Life.” This refers to Dr Alexander Manette, a political prisoner who has been released from the Bastille after 18 years. Lorry travels to Paris with Dr Manette’s daughter, Lucie, who believed her father dead. Father and daughter are reunited in the lodgings of Monsieur and Madame Defarge, and they return to England with Mr Lorry. Five years on, Sydney Carton (“an able but idle man”) plays a key part in the acquittal of Charles Darnay, a french emigre accused of treason, and both men are subsequently revealed to be in love with Lucie Manette. This core group of characters and their entanglements represent just about all of the ensuing plot, and it’s a genuinely thrilling tale.

I had never read any Dickens before this.

In my teens I had tried with Great Expectations but abandoned early on (I’ll be going back to it sometime soon). There was never any danger of abandonment this time. A Tale of Two Cities has a quite ridiculous amount going for it. Obviously, it’s beautifully written. As a historical novel, it paints a vivid and brutal picture of the French Revolution. Dickens shows enormous compassion for the despairing poor in pre-revolutionary France and excoriates the callous upper classes. He is, though, critical of the violent and vengeful approach of the revolutionaries in the resulting Reign of Terror: "Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seeds of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind."

In its pacing, A Tale of Two Cities also excels itself. It is never plodding and nothing is wasted, but Dickens takes his time early on; building up atmosphere, introducing set-ups, and familiarising his readers with the key players and places. In the final third, he then turns things up to 11. So well has he drawn his characters, from the loathsome and despicable to the loyal and honourable, that when he throws them into a maelstrom of twists and turns and gut-wrenching stakes, the reader is left breathless and reeling. This is the crowning achievement of the book, engaging the reader so completely in the cast that even a chip butty couldn't tempt them away until the final page is turned.