A Tale of Two Cities

London and Paris before and through the Terror, organised around a man who lets himself be executed in another’s place. Dickens took most of his history from Carlyle’s The French Revolution and wrote the book in weekly instalments, which shows in the pacing — it is his tightest novel and his least funny.

It is among the best-selling novels ever published, and the first and last sentences are quoted more often than the plot is remembered.

Context: Charles Dickens (1812-1870) wrote A Tale of Two Cities for the first run of his own weekly, All the Year Round, in 1859. It is one of only two historical novels he wrote.

Connections

• Charles Dickens — the author.
• Great Expectations — the novel he serialised in the same weekly two years later, also on this list.
• Literature