A Tale of Two Cities — Revolutionary Madness and Moral Rebirth

Abstract

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is usually regarded by critics as being a curiosity, lacking the social vision and themes common to the other completed later novels, a sport or holiday fiction outside Dickens’s main novelistic line of development. One critic has called it ‘superficially … the least Dickensian of all the novels Dickens wrote’,¹ and most critics in attempting to marry it into the Dickens canon stress the links with Barnaby Rudge (1841), the earlier tale of London mob violence during the ‘No Popery’ Gordon riots, rather than A Tale’s relation to those novels which precede and follow it.