Charles Dickens- A Tale of Two Cities.pdf

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens

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A Tale of Two Cities

Book the First—Recalled to Life

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The Period

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was

the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the

epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the

season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the

spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had

everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were

all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the

other way—in short, the period was so far like the present

period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its

being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative

degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a

plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king

with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the

throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than

crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and

fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven

hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were

conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this.

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Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-

twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in

the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by

announcing that arrangements were made for the

swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the

Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of

years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this

very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality)

rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of

events had lately come to the English Crown and People,

from a congress of British subjects in America: which,

strange to relate, have proved more important to the

human race than any communications yet received

through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters

spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled

with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper

money and spending it. Under the guidance of her

Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with

such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have

his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his

body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in

the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks

which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or

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sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of

France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that

sufferer was put to death, already marked by the

Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards,

to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a

knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the

rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent

to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very

day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about

by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer,

Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the

Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though

they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard

them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather,

forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were

awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and

protection to justify much national boasting. Daring

burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took

place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly

cautioned not to go out of town without removing their

furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses for security; the

highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light,

and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-

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