In what is quickly becoming my favorite way to read 19th-century literature, earlier in the year I discovered and subscribed to Dickens Daily, which had just started reading A Tale of Two Cities. In another move that is very on-brand for me, I had been carrying a battered Signet Classics paperback of A Tale of Two Cities from apartment to apartment for well upwards of a decade and hadn’t ever gotten around to reading it. Clearly, it was time to do the readalong, but to read along in hard copy so that I don’t have to read more emails than necessary. Also, about a fifth of the way in I decided to buy a Peebles Classic Library hardcover version off eBay or Etsy or one of those e-sites and put the long-suffering paperback in a sidewalk library. I yam who I yam.

Anyway! Enough about my personal journey with The Book As Object. A Tale of Two Cities is possibly Dickens’ most classic classic after A Christmas Carol! Many cool and respectable people name it as their favorite Dickens or even as their favorite novel.

Going into this one, I was aware of a few of the most famous lines and phrases, although I did not necessarily know they were all from this book. I knew the famous opening lines were; I had not realized that this was where the also famous closing lines came from. I was familiar with the bit about telling the wind and the fire because I have also spent a decade sitting on a copy of Sarah Rees Brennan’s Tell the Wind and Fire, a YA retelling of this book that I’ve been putting off reading until I read the original so that I can be properly judgmental.

I also knew that the two cities were London and Paris, but I couldn’t have told you what about London and Paris, other than that I knew it happened when Paris was having a revolution.

One thing that was fun about this is that it was a piece of historical fiction at the time it was written. Dickens wrote it in the 1850s (it was first published in 1859) but it takes place mainly in the 1780s, which was a good 75 years previously and thus makes it a period piece, but since the 1850s are also now historical times to modern readers (indeed, they are a good 175 years previously to now, which is longer ago than the French Revolution was to this book’s publication date), it’s extremely funny and charming to read the amount of “BACK IN THOSE DAYS…” stuff Dickens writes. Like, it’s well handled, and it hasn’t aged poorly, and I think it’s probably good for a lot of modern readers to be reminded that the 1780s and the 1850s were actually quite different times. There is a bit where one character says something to the effect of “I think one day General George Washington will be even more famous than [whoever the fuck was running England at the time]” and all the other Englishmen are Very Offended, which is just as good a joke now as it was then. A lot of the other historical fiction place-setting involves stressing just how much everybody drank at the time, which is an interesting peek into the history of English drinking culture.

Anyway. The plot! This story mainly revolves around three French people who, at various times and for various reasons, are living in England. One of them is an old doctor who was for many years imprisoned at the Bastille, and is eventually quietly released and spirited away to England, a transaction handled largely on the French end by a wine-shop owner named Defarge and on the English end by a representative of the doctor’s bank, Tellson’s. The representative, Mr. Lorry, is clearly fond of the doctor and his English-raised (but definitely actually French) daughter Lucie Manette, but has a lot of emotional constipation about it and keeps insisting that it is Just Business as he is a Man of Business, and generally sounding like Sam Eagle as Headmaster Hutchinson in A Muppet Christmas Carol.

The Doctor and Lucie cross paths with another French emigre, who goes by the name of Charles Darnay, although this is an alias because, as our noble hero, Darnay is actually a French aristocrat who has left France in disgust at the general behaviors of the aristocratic class and also because he uhh may have murdered his uncle the Marquis. Don’t worry, the Marquis deserved it. All the Marquises deserved it. It’s when La Guillotine starts getting fed with people who aren’t just unrepentant Marquises but basically anyone that has ever had any kind of tie to any of the Marquises or complains about anything that things go really off the rails. But that is later. For a while, things are reasonably nice in England! Charles Darnay is put on trial for being a spy for bullshit reasons, but gets off on an almost equally bullshit reason, which is that he looks so suspiciously like a useless drunken English lawyer named Sydney Carton that the witnesses can’t actually be sure that the person they definitely saw doing definitely spy stuff was Charles Darnay at all. Darnay then marries Lucie, and Carton periodically visits them in between bouts of drinking his feelings about it.

Over in France, things are bad. Mr and Mrs Defarge, along with their friends The Vengeance, Jacques, Jacques, and Jacques, storm the Bastille and inaugurate a revolution. This is all very understandable given the situation France was in, but eventually some people who didn’t really do anything all that wrong get caught up in the peasantry’s fervor for guillotining all traces of the old regime away, and Charles Darnay has to put on his real name and go to France to try to fish somebody out of prison. This, as you might imagine, risks going poorly for him, and he ends up being followed by eventually all of our England-based characters–the Doctor, Lucie, their children, Mr. Lorry, Lucie’s old governess Miss Pross, Mr. Lorry’s odd-jobs-man Mr. Cruncher, and eventually even Sydney Carton–all at at least some risk to their lives, since France isn’t really super into letting anyone either in or out at this point. It is here that all sorts of further horrifying old secrets of aristocratic France are revealed, all pointing toward the same question: Is our noble, heroic Charles going to have to pay for the sins of his ancestors with his life?

I’m not going to answer that for you, but if you know how stories work you may be able to guess part of where this is going!

I ended up really loving this book and getting super excited every time I saw a chapter land in my inbox. The secondary characters are classic Dickens, very silly but in a way that doesn’t detract from the gravity of the story, and never are they sillier than when they are being clumsily, obstinately heroic. The Defarges are genuinely sinister but also sympathetic. The heroes are a little boring because they are nineteenth-century heroes, but everything else makes up for it. The language is really fun–you can roll around in the long nineteenth-century sentences, the descriptive language and the outdated eye-dialect, but it’s not all that dense or difficult to get through except for a handful of nineteenth-century pop culture references I had to look up (“Who is the Cock-lane ghost? Am I supposed to know this? Am I going to get porn if I Google it?”). The use of repetition is really, really good, giving the book both a poetic quality and, at times, reflecting various sinister motifs like Madame Defarge’s knitting. It makes me wish I had read this in school so that I could have dug deeper.

We are on to Bleak House in March, which I am excited for even though I know it will be, as the title implies, a downer. It’s also seeming to me like Dickens had a bit of a preoccupation with courts and legal systems, and after our forays into both the revolutionary tribunals and the Old Bailey in this volume, I’m excited to explore the stifling bureaucracy of Chancery Court next.