Dickens’ iconic opening to ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ captures the duality of this book so well. He claimed it to be the best of his writing and of his works I have read I would place it only below ‘A Christmas Carol’ so agree to an extent. It focuses on both sides of the French Revolution (which scores it points as such is perhaps my favourite event in history) with a blurring between the good and the evil. On the one hand Dickens in his usual fashion sympathises with the poor and writes profoundly about the sufferings in Paris, however the protagonists are upper-middle class and aristocrats that fled to London and return to France in the midst of the revolution, caught up in the relentless bloodshed of the guillotine, and the reader seems to be influenced to root for their success. I however don’t know where I was rooting, and didn’t see the Defarge’s as antagonists in the way they are established to be, just do know that the scenes in Paris were leagues above the love story set in London and I really didn’t care for such elements of the book. 

Even in a shorter work of Dickens in contrast to his frequent tomes the lack of editing due to serialised publishing meant the novel suffers. It shone in scenes such as the storming of the Bastille and in establishing ‘la guillotine’ as almost a character in its own right, however I also felt that with editing a few characters should’ve been cut due to them not serving that great a purpose but Dickens being stuck with them due to their initial early inclusion. Another random note is that I noticed Dickens tracked time using Oxford terms such as ‘Hilary’ or ‘Michaelmas’ which I just felt a need to add such observation.