SOURCE: “The Promise of a Better Future: Dickens and A Tale of Two Cities,” in Readings on A Tale of Two Cities, edited by Don Nardo, Greenhaven Press, 1997, pp. 14-27.

In the following essay, Nardo discusses Dickens's background and its influence on his writing.

The scene is a scaffold in Paris during the French Revolution. A large crowd of spectators has gathered to watch the brutal beheading of a group of condemned prisoners, most of them French aristocrats or persons condemned as sympathizers or accomplices of the nobility. In one of the carts heading for the scaffold stands a man holding a young girl's hand. “Down Evrémonde!” comes a cry from the bloodthirsty crowd. “To the Guillotine all aristocrats! Down Evrémonde!”

But unbeknownst to the crowd, the man in the cart is not Charles Darnay, relative of the now dead but still much hated Marquis St...