A TALE OF TWO CITIES

A STORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

By Charles Dickens

Book the First — Recalled to Life

CHAPTER I: The Period

It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times. It was an age of wisdom, and it was an age of foolishness. It was a time when people believed deeply, and a time when people doubted everything. It was a season of light and a season of darkness, a spring full of hope and a winter full of despair. We seemed to have everything ahead of us, and yet we seemed to have nothing ahead of us. Some of us felt sure we were headed straight to Heaven, while others felt sure we were headed the opposite way. In short, this period was so much like our own that its loudest experts insisted it could only be described using extremes — either wonderful or terrible, with nothing in between.

England's throne held a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face. France's throne held a king with a large jaw and a queen with a pretty face. In both countries, the powerful people in charge of the nation's wealth and comfort were completely convinced that everything was settled forever and would never change.

It was the year 1775. England, back then, believed strongly in messages from the spirit world—just as some people do today. A woman named Mrs. Southcott had just turned twenty-five, and a soldier who claimed to see the future had announced that big things were coming: he said London and Westminster were about to be swallowed up. Even the famous "Cock-lane ghost," which had supposedly knocked out secret messages from beyond the grave, had only been proven fake about twelve years earlier—and other spirits were still busy "knocking out" their own unoriginal messages that very year. Meanwhile, real and much more important messages had reached the King and people of England from a meeting of British colonists in America. Strangely enough, these ordinary human messages turned out to matter far more to history than anything the ghosts had "said."

France, which believed less in spirits than England did, was sliding downhill smoothly—printing paper money it didn't have and spending it freely. Guided by church leaders, the country also carried out cruel punishments. For example, a young man was sentenced to have his hands cut off, his tongue ripped out, and his body burned alive—all because he had not knelt down in the rain to show respect to a passing group of monks, even though he had been standing more than fifty yards away. It's likely that, deep in the forests of France and Norway, trees were already growing that would one day be cut down and turned into the wooden frame, rope, and blade of the guillotine—the terrible execution device of the Revolution. It's likely, too, that in muddy farm sheds near Paris, rough wooden carts—splashed with mud, sniffed at by pigs, and used as chicken roosts—were already waiting to become the death-carts of the Revolution. But these coming disasters, like a woodcutter and a farmer quietly at work, made no noise as they crept closer. Nobody heard them coming, and anyone who dared suggest that trouble was brewing was called disloyal or godless.

England, meanwhile, had little to be proud of when it came to law and order. Armed robberies happened in London every single night. Families were warned not to leave the city without moving their furniture into storage for safekeeping. A man might be a friendly shopkeeper by day and a highway robber by night—one such "gentleman," recognized by a fellow tradesman he was robbing, simply shot him dead and rode off. Mail coaches were ambushed by armed gangs; in one case, seven robbers attacked, the guard killed three of them before being killed himself, and the mail was calmly robbed afterward. Even the Lord Mayor of London was robbed in broad daylight by a single highwayman, right in front of his own servants. Prisoners fought their jailers, and law officers fired loaded guns into crowds of them. Thieves snatched jewelry off noblemen at royal court events. Soldiers searching for smuggled goods in poor neighborhoods traded gunfire with angry mobs. None of this was considered unusual. Through it all, the executioner stayed constantly busy—hanging criminals of every kind, burning people's hands as punishment, and burning banned pamphlets outside government buildings. One day he might execute a horrible murderer; the next, a poor thief who had stolen a few coins from a farm boy.

All of this—and a thousand things like it—happened in and around the year 1775. While kings and queens ruled with great pride and enormous power, the quiet forces of coming disaster (the "Woodman" and the "Farmer" of fate) kept working unnoticed. And so that year carried forward its rulers, and countless ordinary people—including the characters in this story—down the roads that lay ahead of them.

CHAPTER II: The Mail

It was a Friday night in late November, and the road to Dover stretched out ahead of the first character in our story. For him, the road existed only as far as the Dover mail coach could carry him, and right now that coach was struggling slowly up Shooter's Hill. He walked alongside it through the mud, just as the other passengers did—not because anyone enjoyed walking in such weather, but because the hill was steep, the mud was thick, and the coach was so heavy that the tired horses had already stopped three times. Once, they had even tried to drag the coach back down toward Blackheath. But the driver's reins and whip, along with the coachman and guard working together, had convinced the horses—as if reminding them of army orders—that stopping wasn't allowed. The horses gave in and got back to work.

Heads drooping and tails twitching, the horses trudged through the deep mud, stumbling now and then as though they might collapse. Each time the driver paused them with a careful "Whoa there!", the lead horse on the left shook its head hard, as if arguing loudly that the coach could never make it up the hill. Every time the horse did this, the nervous passenger jumped, startled, and grew even more uneasy.

Thick fog filled every low spot in the road and had crept up the hill like a restless ghost, damp and bitterly cold, searching for a place to rest but finding none. It rolled through the air in slow waves, one following another like ripples on a dirty sea. The fog was so thick it blocked out everything except the coach's lamps and a few yards of road, and the hot breath of the tired horses seemed to add to the fog itself.

Besides the first passenger, two others were also walking alongside the coach up the hill. All three were bundled up to their cheekbones and wore heavy boots. None of them could see clearly what the other two looked like, and each man kept his thoughts as hidden as his face. In those days, travelers were very careful about trusting strangers quickly, since anyone on the road might turn out to be a robber—or working with one. In fact, since almost every inn along the road had someone secretly working for highwaymen, from the owner down to the stable boy, this was a very real danger. The guard riding on the Dover mail coach that Friday night in November 1775 knew this well. As the coach struggled up Shooter's Hill, he stood at his post, stamping his feet to stay warm, keeping one hand near a loaded gun and a stack of loaded pistols and a sword stored in a chest in front of him.

As usual, everyone on the Dover mail coach suspected everyone else. The guard suspected the passengers. The passengers suspected each other and the guard. Everyone suspected the world in general. The only thing the coachman felt completely sure about was his horses—and he was sure they were much too worn out for this journey.

"Whoa!" called the coachman. "There we go! One more good pull and you'll be at the top—and good riddance, because you've given me nothing but trouble getting here! Joe!"

"Yes?" the guard called back.

"What time do you make it, Joe?"

"A little past eleven."

"Blast it all!" the annoyed coachman muttered. "And we're still not at the top of Shooter's Hill! Come on now, move!"

The stubborn horse, snapped sharply into obedience by the whip, scrambled forward, and the other three horses followed. Once again, the Dover mail coach lurched onward, the passengers' boots squelching through the mud beside it. They had stopped whenever the coach stopped and stayed close beside it the whole way. If any one of the three had been bold enough to suggest walking ahead alone into the fog and da...