A Tale of Two Cities A Tale of Two Cities A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a historical novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie, whom he had never met. The story is set against the conditions that led up to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Dickens's famous opening sentence introduces the universal approach of the book, the French Revolution, and the drama depicted
A Tale of Two Cities the end of the novel, Dickens foresees a resurrected social order in France, rising from the ashes of the old one. Hans Biedermann writes that water "is the fundamental symbol of all the energy of the unconscious—an energy that can be dangerous when it overflows its proper limits (a frequent dream sequence)." This symbolism suits Dickens's novel; in "A Tale of Two Cities", the frequent images of water stand for the building anger of the peasant mob, an anger that Dickens sympathizes with to a point, but ultimately finds irrational and even animalistic. Early in the book, Dickens suggests this