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 citizens, as opposed to the actions of the de facto government in that year. Dickens does not spare his descriptions of mob actions, including the night Dr Manette and his family arrive at Tellson's bank in Paris to meet Mr Lorry, saying that the people in the vicious crowd display "eyes which any unbrutalized beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun". The reader is shown that the poor are brutalised in France and England alike. As crime proliferates, the executioner in England is "stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now hanging housebreaker