★★★★☆ | Literature | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I have started and stopped reading this novel at least three times. I was initially stalled by my lack of knowledge about the French Revolution. Having recently read Durant’s excellent Rousseau and Revolution, I felt ready for the challenge. I’m now glad I waited.
Easing into a Dickens novel takes patience. The vocabulary and strange setting are initially bewildering. Before long, though, the story took hold, and I found my footing through the twists and turns. There are some delightful characters in the novel, some bordering on stereotypical, some surprising. The last fifty pages had me turning pages as if this were a modern-day thriller.
Dickens wrote this as a warning that polarization, the corruption of power, the awful propensity for human barbarity, and the refusal to address legitimate grievances can lead to catastrophic consequences. He implies that a bloody revolution isn’t confined to 18th-century France, 19th-century England, or, for that matter, 21st-century America.
Favorite Highlights
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 …
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
Related: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Bleak House by Charles Dickens