A Tale of Two Cities

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.' Doctor Manette is released after eighteen years in the Bastille, his mind broken, and brought to London by his daughter Lucie. She marries Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat who has given up his family's name and lands in disgust at their cruelty, and she is also loved, hopelessly, by Sydney Carton, a brilliant but dissolute lawyer who looks remarkably like Darnay. When the Revolution breaks out, Darnay returns to Paris to save an old servant and is thrown into prison, while Madame Defarge knits the names of those she wants to see guillotined.

Dickens published the novel in weekly parts in 1859, drawing on Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution, and it is often listed among the best-selling novels ever. Carton's final words, 'It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done', are among the most famous in fiction. Dickens's other historical novel is Barnaby Rudge, set in the London riots of 1780.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) worked in a boot-blacking factory as a boy while his father was in a debtors' prison, and poverty and wronged childhood run through his novels, from Oliver Twist to the largely autobiographical David Copperfield.

Published in instalments, books such as A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol mixed comedy and social protest.