A TALE OF TWO CITIES
A STORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
By Charles Dickens
Book the First—Recalled to Life
CHAPTER 1.
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. Missis
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 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-tradesman whom he stopped in
his character of "the Captain," gallantly shot
him through the head and rode away; the
mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the
guard shot three dead, and then got shot
dead himself by the other four, "in
consequence of the failure of his
ammunition:" after which the mail was
robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate,
the Lord Mayor of London, was made to
stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by
one highwayman, who despoiled the
illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue;
prisoners in London gaols fought battles
with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the
law fired blunderbusses in among them,
loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves
snipped off diamond crosses from the necks
of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms;
musketeers went into St. Giles's, to search
for contraband goods, and the mob fired on
the musketeers, and the musketeers fired
on the mob, and nobody thought any of
these occurrences much out of the common
way.
In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy
and ever worse than useless, was in constant
requisition; now, stringing up long rows of
miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a
housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken
on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at
Newgate by the dozen, and now burning
pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall;
to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer,
and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had
robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence.
All these things, and a thousand like them,
came to pass in and close upon the dear old
year one thousand seven hundred and
seventy-five. Environed by them, while the
Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded,
those two of the large jaws, and those other two
of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir
enough, and carried their divine rights with a
high hand. Thus did the year one thousand
seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their
Greatnesses, and myriads of small
creatures—the creatures of this chronicle
among the rest—along the roads that lay before
them.
CHAPTER 2.
The Mail
It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday
night late in November, before the first of
the persons with whom this history has
business. The Dover road lay, as to him,
beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up
Shooter's Hill.
He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the
mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not
because they had the least relish for walking
exercise, under the circumstances, but because
the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the
mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had
three times already come to a stop, besides
once drawing the coach across the road, with
the mutinous intent of taking it back to
Blackheath.
Reins and whip and coachman and guard,
however, in combination, had read that
article of war which forbade a purpose
otherwise strongly in favour of the
argument, that some brute animals are
endued with Reason; and the team had
capitulated and returned to their duty.
With drooping heads and tremulous tails,
they mashed their way through the thick
mud, floundering and stumbling between
whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at
the larger joints. As often as the driver
rested them and brought them to a stand,
with a wary "Wo-ho! so-ho-then!" the near
leader violently shook his head and
everything upon it—like an unusually
emphatic horse, denying that the coach
could be got up the hill. Whenever the
leader made this rattle, the passenger
started, as a nervous passenger might,
and was disturbed in mind.
There was a steaming mist in all the hollows,
and it had roamed in its forlornness up the
hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding
none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it
made its slow way through the air in ripples
that visibly followed and overspread one
another, as the waves of an unwholesome
sea might do. It was dense enough to shut
out everything from the light of the
coach-lamps but these its own workings, and
a few yards of road; and the reek of the
labouring horses steamed into it, as if they
had made it all.
Two other passengers, besides the one,
were plodding up the hill by the side of the
mail. All three were wrapped to the
cheekbones and over the ears, and wore
jack-boots. Not one of the three could
have said, from anything he saw, what
either of the other two was like; and each
was hidden under almost as many
wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as
from the eyes of the body, of his two
companions. In those days, travellers were
very shy of being confidential on a short
notice, for anybody on the road might be a
robber or in league with robbers.
As to the latter, when every posting-house and
ale-house could produce somebody in "the
Captain's" pay, ranging from the landlord to the
lowest stable non-descript, it was the likeliest
thing upon the cards.
So the guard of the Dover mail thought to
himself, that Friday night in November, one
thousand seven hundred and seventy-five,
lumbering up Shooter's Hill, as he stood on his
own particular perch behind the mail, beating his
feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on the
arm-chest before him, where a loaded
blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded
horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum of
cutlass.
The Dover mail was in its usual genial
position that the guard suspected the
passengers, the passengers suspected one
another and the guard, they all suspected
everybody else, and the coachman was sure
of nothing but the horses; as to which cattle
he could with a clear conscience have taken
his oath on the two Testaments that they
were not fit for the journey.
"Wo-ho!" said the coachman. "So, then! One
more pull and you're at the top and be damned
to you, for I have had trouble enough to get you
to it!—Joe!"
"Halloa!" the guard replied.
"What o'clock do you make it, Joe?"
"Ten minutes, good, past eleven."