Dickens wrote to the audience of his day, so the settings, events, objects, etc. are all taken for granted without any explanation. It’s basically like if you wrote a novel about a roadtrip today, you wouldn’t bother describing what getting a flat tire is, you would just say they got a flat tire. Now picture a society two-hundred years from now zipping around in spaceships and having virtual reality vacations reading your novel and being very confused about what a flat tire is. That’s basically what it is like reading a book written in 1859 that takes place in the late 1700’s. All of the common place objects he describes were unfamiliar to me. I went into this book knowing very little about 18th century England or France and essentially nothing about the French Revolution other than the fact the guillotine was involved. In fact, the entire sum of my knowledge could be explained by this meme:
In order to fully understand what I was reading, I found myself stopping pretty frequently to look up everything from how many pence are in a shilling to what it meant to travel by the mail. Personally, I find this sort of thing fascinating, so I dove down many a rabbit hole. I stumbled upon the immensely helpful Discovering Dickens: A Community Reading Project, which had a very handy Glossary of Historical Things and Conditions that detailed some of the more esoteric tidbits. As I studied, I learned that A Tale of Two Cities is less a work of fiction, and more a historical novel, as a majority of the events, places, and people are real or based on real events, places, and people. For example, Dr. Manette is based on an actual prisoner who was wrongly held in the Bastille for decades.
I spent about as much time reading the novel as I did diving into rabbit holes. About halfway through the book as events of the French Revolution really start picking up I dove headfirst into learning about it, and let me tell you, it is COMPLEX. Way more complex than the American Revolution we were taught in school that basically boiled down to “No taxation without representation.” There were a lot of moving parts involved, and the societal pressures leading to it were decades in the making. I learned enough kn0w there is still very little I understand about it. I am even now listening to an audiobook on the events from an analytical point of view. The interesting thing in studying about it were the many parallels I found between pre-revolutionary France and our current U.S. society. I am hesitant to describe these since that is the realm of political opinion and such things have a tendency to turn nasty. Instead I leave it to you to study them and make your own conclusions should you be so inclined.
Anyone with a meme-based knowledge of the events of the French Revolution, like I had, know that a lot of people wound up dead, and it seemed like anarchy. It is easy to look at the mass arrests and executions that took place and assume it was due to circumstances unique to that time and place, or to a few disaffected rabble-rousers, but any civilization that experienced the slow build up and culmination of events would inevitably reach the same outcome. Dickens himself aptly makes this point in the final chapter of the book:
Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.”
Desperate times and desperate measures is putting it mildly. Sadly, actions like these repeat themselves over and over again in history. As was aptly stated in Battlestar Galactica: “All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.”
Without knowing the ending of the book, other than that I was pretty sure one of the main characters would wind up dead, it was pretty obvious to me what would happen the moment Carton made his appearance to Miss Pross and her brother in France. I think we have probably all felt as Carton did at one time or another: That we haven’t done anything meaningful with our life, or that we could have done so much more. We are often our own harshest critic, and for Carton, his sacrifice was a cathartic penance to redeem himself in his own eyes. Hopefully such a choice will never need to be presented to us, but I think we would all meet our eternal fate a little lighter knowing we had made a difference, that we did our best, and that our best was better than anyone hoped.
This book was much harder to satirize than my previous narration of Pride and Prejudice as it dealt with much darker subject matter. I wrote my summary as I read, but I often found myself transcribing a basic summary of events then going back in and adding flourish and humor, since it was hard to find humor in the situation while I was intensely sucked into the story. Even knowing the ending I found I couldn’t put the book down for the last fifty pages as I wanted to know how it would all play out. It wasn’t all dark, and there are moments when I couldn’t have done better than Dickens’ own wry humor. I hope you found some amusement in my review, and I would say that the status of classic is well deserved for this book.