A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Plot Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character List
NEWCharacter Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Vocabulary
Essay Topics
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Charles Dickens on A Tale of Two Cities
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why he wrote it
A stage role that became a novel’s moral spineThe seed of the novel was planted on stage, not at a desk. While performing in Wilkie Collins’s play The Frozen Deep, Dickens took the role of a man who gives up his life for a rival and was struck by the emotional force of that act of self-destruction. That experience, fused with his reading of Thomas Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution, produced Sydney Carton and the novel’s entire moral architecture. When he finally sat down to write, he had a precise name for the historical world he was entering.
that terrible time
Two words from the preface, but they carry a specific weight: Dickens was not reaching for spectacle. He wanted readers to feel the human complexity behind the upheaval, the suffering that made revolution inevitable and the violence that made it catastrophic.
His own childhood gave him a direct line into the French peasants’ desperation. His father’s imprisonment for debt in 1824 had sent the twelve-year-old Dickens to labor in a blacking warehouse, labeling bottles, and that experience of economic humiliation he kept largely secret for decades. By the time he wrote A Tale of Two Cities, he had spent over twenty years embedding that knowledge into his fiction. The novel let him articulate what that kind of deprivation does to a population over generations, and why it produces what it produces.
Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest. I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.
justbrowsingopl.wordpress.com, “Author Interview: Charles Dickens | Just Browsing”How he wrote it
Poring over Carlyle, week by weekThe historical research was not background reading. Dickens interviewed people who had personally lived through the Revolution and cross-checked their accounts against documentary evidence. His central reference throughout the writing was Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, a book he returned to repeatedly to keep the novel’s depiction of events accurate. A Tale of Two Cities is one of the very few Dickens novels built around a specific historical event rather than contemporary social conditions, and Carlyle’s history made that level of precision possible. By the project’s end, the immersion had its own cost.
[By the project’s end, Dickens relayed having felt as though he had lived and suffered through the Revolution himself, such was the intensity of his research] [paraphrased from his preface and notes]
The novel ran in weekly installments in his own journal, All the Year Round, from April to November 1859, which meant Dickens was producing copy under continuous pressure for seven months. He wrote this letter to Wilkie Collins, the very man whose play The Frozen Deep had given him the novel’s premise, during a period when both men were working at pace. The letter is a direct rebuttal of anyone who imagined serialization was a lesser or easier form.
Only jolter-headed, conceited idiots suppose that volumes are to be tossed off like pancakes and that any writing can be done without the utmost application, the greatest patience, and the steadiest energy of which the writer is capable.
When a young novelist’s father wrote to Dickens seeking advice for his nineteen-year-old daughter, the reply went straight to the craft conditions that sustained serious fiction. The letter names four requirements before it names anything about story or style, and the order is deliberate: the external conditions of the work come first, the internal courage to reject the easy answer comes last.
Guard her against supposing that successful Fiction is to be written easily. Patience, attention, seclusion, consideration, courage to reject what comes uppermost, and to try for something better below it.
That last phrase, “to try for something better below it,” is the most demanding item on the list. It names the specific failure he most wanted to prevent: settling for the first thing that surfaces rather than going back down for what the scene actually needs.
Dickens understood the difference between assembling a plot and bringing characters to life as a philosophical problem about the nature of love and making. He came to this distinction long before A Tale of Two Cities, but it governs the novel’s central gamble: that Sydney Carton, dissolute and apparently wasted, could still be genuinely loved by the reader before his redemption was complete.
The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.
justbrowsingopl.wordpress.com, “Author Interview: Charles Dickens | Just Browsing”What he wants us to sit with
Whether the wasted life can still matterThe novel refuses a simple verdict on the Revolution. Dickens shows the brutality of the aristocracy and the genuine desperation of the peasants, then shows what that desperation becomes once it holds power. The question the book poses without resolving is whether revolutionary violence, however justified at its origins, can contain itself before it consumes the innocent alongside the guilty. His preface signals that he wanted readers to arrive at complexity, not at a verdict.
[In his preface, Dickens expressed his hope that the novel would offer readers a greater understanding of the social complexities surrounding the Revolution] [paraphrased from his preface]
At the individual level, the novel’s structural spine is resurrection. The first section is titled “Recalled to Life,” and Carton’s final walk is the novel’s answer to whether transformation is genuinely available to even the most apparently wasted life. Dickens knew this territory from the inside: the warehouse years had felt like a kind of burial to him, and he had made himself anyway. He described his own animating principle in his autobiographical writings, and it reads as an implicit gloss on Carton’s last choice.
Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.
justbrowsingopl.wordpress.com, “Author Interview: Charles Dickens | Just Browsing”Carton, for most of the novel, has done none of this. His final act is the only moment he meets that standard, and Dickens frames it as enough.
London sits in the novel as the stable pole against a Paris in revolutionary convulsion, and Dickens’s authority to render that contrast depended on decades of walking the city’s streets at all hours. He was not writing from research alone when he set scenes in London’s courts, taverns, and prisons. He was writing from accumulated knowledge of a specific place.
I suppose myself to know this large city as well as anybody in it.