A Tale of Two Cities

1. What do you already know about the French Revolution, and where did that knowledge actually come from - a class, a film, a musical, a meme? How reliable do you think it is?
2. Dickens opens by describing his era entirely through pairs of opposites. Try it for your own time: write three pairs that capture the present decade, and explain why a single description would not do.
3. In a society divided sharply by class, what do people with power owe to people without it? Does the answer change if the powerful person inherited the power rather than earning it?
4. How much of a person's identity comes from where they were born, and how much from where they later choose to live?
5. Why do we trust some strangers instantly and distrust others on sight? What are we actually reading in them, and how often is it wrong?
6. The title puts two cities side by side rather than naming a hero. What might a novelist gain by building a story around two places instead of one person?

• Recalled to life: Dickens titles his first section around the idea of restoration, so track every kind of burial, waiting, and return that the novel offers you.
• Doubles and pairings: the book is built out of matched halves - two cities, two nations, two trials, two men - and it constantly invites you to compare things it has deliberately placed side by side.
• Imprisonment in all its forms: notice the literal cells, and also the debts, silences, habits, and family duties that hold people in place just as firmly.
• The imagery of red: wine, blood, and firelight recur so insistently that they function as an argument rather than decoration - ask each time what the colour is doing.
• Crowds versus individuals: watch how Dickens's language changes when he moves from describing one person to describing many, and what he suggests happens to people inside a crowd.
• Patient handwork and record-keeping: the novel keeps returning to hands busy at repetitive tasks and to people who keep count of things, so pay attention to who is counting and what they are counting.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was the most popular English novelist of his century and, by most measures, the most influential. His own childhood turned sharply when his father was imprisoned for debt and twelve-year-old Charles was sent to paste labels on jars in a blacking warehouse; the experience left him with a lifelong anger about poverty, debt, and the way institutions treat the powerless, and prisons appear in nearly everything he wrote. He published almost all of his novels in serial parts, writing under deadline while the earlier chapters were already in readers' hands, which is why his books are so full of hooks, coincidences, and characters you can recognise in a single line. A Tale of Two Cities appeared in 1859 in All the Year Round, the weekly magazine he founded and edited, and it is one of only two historical novels he wrote.

The novel spans the years from 1775 to the early 1790s, moving between Georgian England and a France sliding toward the Revolution of 1789. In pre-revolutionary France the aristocracy and clergy were largely exempt from the taxes that fell on everyone else, and a nobleman's power over the peasants on his land was close to absolute; the storming of the Bastille prison in July 1789 became the moment that symbolised the whole system giving way. The years that followed brought the fall of the monarchy and then the period known as the Terror, when the new revolutionary tribunals sent thousands to the guillotine, often on evidence that would not have convicted anyone anywhere. Dickens wrote seventy years later, from a Britain that was watching its own working class organise and that remembered the Revolution with a mixture of horror and fascination. His principal source was Thomas Carlyle's history The French Revolution, and his sympathies are genuinely divided: he shows the cruelty that produced the uprising and the cruelty the uprising produced.