Description: Set in London and Paris at the time of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities (1859) sees the causes and effects of that great social upheaval from an essentially private point of view. Dickens's characters are fictional, their responses individual, their political activity minimal, but all are caught up in a web woven by their own activities and responsibilities, and all are drawn to the Paris of the Terror. A Tale of Two Cities is Dickens's second historical novel, which he considered 'the best story I have written'; it has his tightest and most shapely plot, and shows great narrative daring and experiment. This edition includes extensive notes on the background to the Revolution. Two appendices give variant readings and historical and fictional chronologies for the novel.
Review Quotes: "No writer of the age was more beloved than Dickens." --Tina Jordan, The New York Times
"[A Tale of Two Cities] has the best of Dickens and the worst of Dickens: a dark, driven opening, and a celestial but melodramatic ending; a terrifyingly demonic villainess and (even by Dickens' standards) an impossibly angelic heroine. Though its version of the French Revolution is brutally simplified, its engagement with the immense moral themes of rebirth and terror, justice, and sacrifice gets right to the heart of the matter...for every reader in the past hundred and forty years and for hundreds to come, it is an unforgettable ride." --from the Everyman's Library introduction by Simon Schama