Introduction

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...' So begins, with its famous parallel clauses, this story of Paris and London before and during the French Revolution. Doctor Manette, unjustly imprisoned in the Bastille for eighteen years for exposing a nobleman's crime, comes out with his mind clouded; his daughter Lucie takes him to London. Charles Darnay, a young French aristocrat who loathes his family's cruelty, renounces his title, comes to England and marries Lucie. When the Revolution breaks out he returns to Paris to save an old servant, but is seized by the angry crowd and condemned to death. Then Sydney Carton, a dissolute English lawyer who looks just like him, secretly takes Darnay's place on the guillotine for the sake of Lucie, whom he loves. 'It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done...' Dickens's most dramatic novel, it is among the best-selling novels in the world.