Famous First Sentences: A Tale of Two Cities

It is interesting to note that the idea of the French Revolution at first captured the imagination of many English Romantic poets and thinkers. The idea of liberty, equality, and fraternity ("a brotherhood of man," as John Lennon would later put it) was fascinating to imagine. And the stakes were high: the monarchy had spent so much money on foreign wars that the national debt was obscenely high, plus the campaigns themselves were mismanaged. Veterans coming back from these wars were ignored and left to starve. Bad harvests contributed to severe food shortages, while a minority of the aristocracy were still able to collect rents and engage in high lifestyles that outraged ordinary folk with no money to buy bread. Food prices soared. Unemployment numbers soared. Something had to change.

But the process of change turned out to be bloody, bloody, mayhem.

The French Revolution (1789-1799) tore the country apart in a quest for fair and appropriate human rights. The quest was a noble one; but -- as is the case with many a quest -- it entailed killing the beast, the dragon hoarding the gold, i.e. the monarchy.

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.

Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities in 1859, approximately fifty years after the execution of Louis XVI (1793), an act that was voted on by the new National Convention (361 for; 288 against) for "conspiracy against the public liberty and the general safety."

The consequences shocked the Western world. Parties and factions jockeyed for power and direction: Robespierre's Reign of Terror (1793-1794) was at the time, perhaps, an inevitable backlash against those who had perpetrated high crimes against humanity -- and the first in a series of power-grabbing moves that blighted the course of the revolutionary wars over the next five years. Over 16,000 people were guillotined for counter-revolutionary acts. The numbers of prisoners also executed without trial eventually rose as high as 40,000, according to some historians.

It was the best of ideas; it was the worst of times.

As in several parts of western Europe at the time, the biggest landowner in France was still the Roman Catholic Church. The new constitutional purpose of the revolutionary proto-governing bodies was to eradicate this ownership (the Church also taxed the people independently of the monarchy) and remove The Church from The State. Peasants revolted against the revolutionaries at this blasphemy. It was the winter of despair.

In short, as Dickens concludes, the only words to use are extremes -- superlatives rather than mere comparative terms -- of wisdom and foolishness; belief and incredulity; Light, Darkness, hope,despair, good or evil: it was the best and the worst of every noble human aspiration and every sad inhuman depravity.

Dickens deliberately builds this first cumbersome sentence into a series of opposites -- and keeps going when other, more polite and less passionate sentences would have been content to stop after a few such polar observations. The whole heft of this sentence is itself a superlatively powerful introduction to everything we need to know as we read the novel: that the revolution inspired nobility and cowardice, but that Dickens intends to show us the best and worst of the times themselves.