118 pages • 3 hours read
Charles DickensA Tale of Two Cities
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1859A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaBook 1, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“Recalled to Life”
Book 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “The Period”
The novel opens in 1775, which the narrator describes as an era much like his own in its contradictions and divisions; rationality and optimism compete with “foolishness” and “despair" to create both a “season of Light” and a “season of Darkness” (5).
From here, the narrator moves on to compare France and England: “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” (5). In other ways, the two countries are quite similar; superstition, oppression, and violence loom large in each. The English, for instance, are preoccupied with religious prophecies and supposed hauntings even as their American colonies are on the verge of rebelling. Law and order are also in shambles, and not only because the country is plagued by highway robbers; the English courts are just as willing to execute a “wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence” as they are an “atrocious murderer” (7).
In France, meanwhile, a young man is tortured and put to death for failing to kneel to a group of passing monks. The narrator notes, however, that even as this man is being executed, the “Woodman, Fate” and the “Farmer, Death” (6) are gathering together the materials that will eventually be used to build guillotines, and to transport prisoners to them. The governments of both France and England, however, remain oblivious to these threats, even as “the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct[s] their greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures—the creatures of this chronicle among the rest—along the roads that [lie] before them” (7).
Book 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “The Mail”
One night in November, a coach carrying mail struggles along the Dover road. The journey is made dangerous by the threat of highway robbery, as well as by the bad weather; the road is so muddy that the passengers in the coach have had to get out and walk alongside it as it makes its way up a hill.
Just as the passengers are preparing to get back inside, the coach driver hears someone approaching on horseback, and the guard accompanying the coach warns the stranger that he’ll shoot if necessary. The rider—a man called Jerry—replies that he’s carrying a message for a passenger named Jarvis Lorry. Mr. Lorry confirms that he knows Jerry from his job at Tellson’s Bank in London. Lorry, who explains that he is on his way to France, then reads the message aloud: it instructs him to wait in Dover for “Ma’amselle” (12). Lorry’s response, which he entrusts to Jerry, is “recalled to life” (12).
Lorry reenters the coach, which drives on “with heavier wreaths of mist closing round it” (12). The driver and the guard discuss Lorry’s mysterious message but are unable to make sense of it. Jerry is also pondering Lorry’s response as he leads his horse down the hill: “‘Recalled to life.’ That’s a Blazing strange message. Much of that wouldn’t do for you, Jerry! […] You’d be in a Blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion” (14).
Book 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “The Night Shadows”
The narrator muses on how unknowable each individual person is to every other; ultimately, we can never fully know the thoughts and feelings even of our closest friends and family. This, he says, lies behind even the “awfulness” (15) of death, which completely forecloses the possibility of learning more about those around. However, this unknowability is also a form of equality; the narrator notes that Jerry, for example, is just as mysterious to his fellow humans as a king would be.
The narrative then picks up with Jerry, who is still talking aloud to himself about the “recalled to life” (15) message as he rides back towards London. The narrator describes him as a somewhat “sinister” (15)looking man with dark eyes and spiky black hair, and he stops at several ale-houses on his return journey.
Meanwhile, Mr. Lorry dozes in the mail coach. He is deeply aware of the fact that he is “on his way to dig some one out of a grave,” and imagines holding an entire conversation with this “spectre” (17). The man, who is roughly 45 but looks older, says that he has been “buried” (17) for 18 years, and isn’t sure whether he wants to return to life or not. He is also unsure whether he wants Mr. Lorry to bring him to see someone Lorry refers to as “her.” Lorry finally imagines digging the man out from underground, only to see him “fall away to dust” (18) before his eyes. Lorry runs through this exchange over and over again before he realizes that the sun has risen, “bright, placid, and beautiful” (18).
Book 1, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
As its title promises, the first chapter of A Tale of Two Cities provides a broad overview of the period in which the novel is set. This is important not only because Dickens is writing about an earlier era with which his readers may not be familiar, but also because A Tale of Two Cities is as much about sweeping historical forces as it is about individual characters. Specifically, the novel suggests that violence begets violence, and while this is true on a personal level, it also applies to entire oppressive regimes; as Dickens portrays it, the French Revolution (and the Reign of Terror in particular) are the inevitable reaction to centuries of exploitation and cruelty under the French monarchy (also known as the Ancien Régime). In some ways, the novel’s characters are simply at the mercy of these historical currents, as the image of the year sweeping them “along the roads that lay before them” suggests.
With that said, it’s significant that the narrator likens the era he’s describing (1775-1793) to “the present period” (5)—1859, when the novel was published. The point here is not to encourage despair, but to draw the reader’s attention to the choices that ultimately made the French Revolution inevitable—in particular, the complacency of the upper classes, which Dickens suggests was (and is) just as much a problem in England as in France. Among other things, A Tale of Two Cities is a wake-up call to Victorian Britain, which was, like pre-revolutionary France, an extremely unequal and often exploitative society.
Chapters 2 and 3, meanwhile, introduce one of the novel’s other central themes: the possibility of redemption, rebirth, and resurrection. These interrelated ideas take multiple forms in A Tale of Two Cities, two of which are hinted at in these chapters. First, and most clearly, Mr. Lorry imagines digging out someone who has been buried alive. In the following chapters, it becomes clear that he is traveling to meet a man who has been imprisoned for nearly two decades in a French prison—which is why Lorry sometimes pictures himself digging with “a great key” (18)—and whom Lorry hopes to restore to some semblance of his former life. This parallel Lorry draws between imprisonment and death (or at least burial) is significant because it begins to link the novel to specifically Christian concepts of redemption and resurrection, including the idea of death as a fate that Jesus’s crucifixion has “freed” humanity from.
Mr. Lorry’s comment about “recalling to life” also causes Jerry Cruncher to speculate on the consequences literal, physical resurrection would have for him. Cruncher, it eventually emerges, is a grave-robber, and Dickens repeatedly reminds his readers that the slang for this job is a “Resurrection-Man.” In other words, Cruncher’s morally questionable activities function as a humorous distortion on the Christian worldview that informs much of the novel.
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