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 true story related by Voltaire in a famous pamphlet, "An Account of the Death of the Chevalier de la Barre".) So riled is Dickens at the brutality of English law that he depicts some of its punishments with sarcasm: "the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action". He faults the law for not seeking reform: "Whatever is, is right" is the dictum of the Old Bailey. The gruesome portrayal of quartering highlights its atrocity. Dickens wants his readers to be careful that the same revolution that so damaged France will not happen in Britain,