A Tale of Two Cities(1859) is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution.
The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same time period. It follows the lives of several protagonists through these events. The most notable are Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton. Darnay is a French once-aristocrat who falls victim to the indiscriminate wrath of the revolution despite his virtuous nature, and Carton is a dissipated British barrister who endeavours to redeem his ill-spent life out of his unrequited love for Darnay’s wife, Lucie Manette.
It has been considered to be Dickens’ finest along with David Copperfield. As the name suggests, it is the story of two cities-London and Paris-from England to France and back again, setting down finally in France and the French Revolution. Because of the intensity of his involvement, A Tale Of Two Cities has an intense dramatic sense, sometimes melodramatic, which probably explains why it remains the most widely read of all his novels. Like all great novels where no story is told as if it is the only one, this, too, has many elements-love, humour, pathos, fate, romance out of which is woven the story of Darnay and Manette, the unselfish, hopeless devotion to the heroine of the drunken, dissolute, nonchalant advocate, Sidney Carton. But for all the elements, the chief picture left with the reader in the end is the story of self-sacrifice-not of Manette or Darnay but of Sidney Carton, mounting the scaffold in place of the husband of the woman whom he loved.