ELECBOOK CLASSICS
A TALE
OF TWO
CITIES
Charles Dickens
ELECBOOK CLASSICS
ebc0014. Charles Dickens: A Tale Of Two Cities
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A TALE OF TWO
CITIES
Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities
CONTENTS
(Click on number to go to chapter)
BOOK THE FIRST: RECALLED TO LIFE
Chapter I. THE PERIOD.....................................................................8
Chapter II. THE MAIL.......................................................................12
Chapter III. THE NIGHT SHADOWS ............................................20
Chapter IV. THE PREPARATION ..................................................26
Chapter V. THE WINE SHOP ..........................................................41
Chapter VI. THE SHOEMAKER......................................................56
BOOK THE SECOND: THE GOLDEN THREAD
Chapter VII. FIVE YEARS LATER.................................................71
Chapter VIII. A SIGHT......................................................................79
Chapter IX. A DISSAPOINTMENT................................................88
Chapter X. CONGRATULATORY .................................................106
Chapter XI. THE JACKAL..............................................................115
Chapter XII. HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE......................................123
Chapter XIII. MONSEIGNEUR IN TOWN..................................139
Chapter XIV. MONSEIGNEUR IN THE COUNTRY.................151
Chapter XV. THE GORGON’S HEAD...........................................158
Chapter XVI. TWO PROMISES.....................................................173
Chapter XVII. A COMPANION PICTURE ..................................184
Chapter XVIII. THE FELLOW OF DELICACY..........................189
Chapter XIX. THE FELLOW OF NO DELICACY......................198
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
Chapter XX. THE HONEST TRADESMAN................................204
Chapter XXI. KNITTING................................................................218
Chapter XXII. STILL KNITTING.................................................233
Chapter XXIII. ONE NIGHT .........................................................247
Chapter XXIV. NINE DAYS...........................................................254
Chapter XXV. AN OPINION ..........................................................263
Chapter XXVI. A PLEA...................................................................273
Chapter XXVII. ECHOING FOOTSTEPS...................................278
Chapter XXVIII. THE SEA STILL RISES..................................293
Chapter XXIX. FIRE RISES..........................................................300
Chapter XXX. DRAWN TO THE LOADSTONE ROCK............310
BOOK THE THIRD: THE TRACK OF A STORM
Chapter XXXI. IN SECRET...........................................................326
Chapter XXXII. THE GRINDSTONE..........................................341
Chapter XXXIII. THE SHADOW..................................................350
Chapter XXXIV. CALM IN STORM.............................................357
Chapter XXXV. THE WOOD-SAWYER.......................................364
Chapter XXXVI. TRIUMPH...........................................................372
Chapter XXXVII. A KNOCK AT THE DOOR.............................381
Chapter XXXVIII. A HAND AT CARDS .....................................388
Chapter XXXIX. THE GAME MADE...........................................405
Chapter XL. THE SUBSTANCE OF THE SHADOW ................421
Chapter XLI. DUSK.........................................................................440
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
Chapter XLII. DARKNESS ............................................................445
Chapter XLIII. FIFTY-TWO ..........................................................456
Chapter XLIV. THE KNITTING DONE.......................................472
Chapter XLV. THE FOOTSTEPS DIE OUT FOR EVER..........488
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
BOOK THE FIRST
RECALLED TO
LIFE
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
Chapter I
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. Mrs. 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
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
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
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
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
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
Westminster Hall; today, taking the life of an atrocious murderer,
and tomorrow 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 there
Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures—the creatures of this
chronicle among the rest—along the roads that lay before them.
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
Chapter II
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 uphill
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.
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
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
nondescript, 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
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
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.”
“My blood!” ejaculated the vexed coachman, “and not atop of
Shooter’s yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with you!”
The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided
negative, made a decided scramble for it, and the three other
horses followed suit. Once more, the Dover mail struggled on, with
the jack-boots of its passengers squashing along by its side. They
had stopped when the coach stopped, and they kept close
company with it. If any one of the three had had the hardihood to
propose to another to walk on a little ahead into the mist and
darkness, he would have put himself in a fair way of getting shot
instantly as a highwayman.
The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The
horses stopped to breathe again, and the guard got down to skid
the wheel for the descent, and open the coach-door to let the
passengers in.
“Tst! Joe!” cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking
down from his box.
“What do you say, Tom?”
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
They both listened.
“I say a horse at a canter coming up, Joe.”
“I say a horse at a gallop, Tom,” returned the guard, leaving his
hold of the door, and mounting nimbly to his place. “Gentlemen!
In the King’s name, all of you!”
With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and
stood on the offensive.
The passenger booked by this history, was on the coachstep,
getting in; the other two passengers were close behind him, and
about to follow. He remained on the step, half in the coach and
half out of it; they remained in the road below him. They all looked
from the coachman to the guard, and from the guard to the
coachman, and listened. The coachman looked back and the guard
looked back, and even the emphatic leader pricked up his ears and
looked back, without contradicting.
The stillness consequent on the cessation of the rumbling and
labouring of the coach, added to the stillness of the night, made it
very quiet indeed. The panting of the horses communicated a
tremulous motion to the coach, as if it were in a state of agitation.
The hearts of the passengers beat loud enough perhaps to be
heard; but at any rate, the quiet pause was audibly expressive of
people out of breath, and holding the breath, and having the
pulses quickened by expectation.
The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the
hill.
“So-ho!” the guard sang out, as loud as he could roar. “Yo
