A Tale of Two Cities my wife? ---Here you see me." The Penguin Classics edition of the novel notes that "Not all readers have regarded the experiment as a success." J. L. Borges quipped: "Dickens lived in London. In his book "A Tale of Two Cities", based on the French Revolution, we see that he really could not write a tale of two cities. He was a resident of just one city: London." In Dickens' England, resurrection always sat firmly in a Christian context. Most broadly, Sydney Carton is resurrected in spirit at the novel's close (even as he, paradoxically, gives up his physical life
A Tale of Two Cities modern readers), Carton disreputable but magnetic. One can only suspect whose psychological persona it is that Carton and Darnay together embody (if they do), but it is often thought to be the psyche of Dickens himself. Dickens might have been quite aware that between them, Carton and Darnay shared his own initials, a frequent property of his characters. However, he denied it when asked. The novel takes place primarily in London and Paris in the latter half of the eighteenth century. It spans a time period of roughly thirty-six years, with the (chronologically) first events taking place in December 1757