A Tale of Two Cities

First published in 1859, this novel is set in London and Paris in the years before and during the French Revolution. Doctor Manette, released after long imprisonment in the Bastille, is reunited in England with his daughter Lucie. Around them gather the French émigré Charles Darnay, who has renounced a cruel aristocratic house, the cynical lawyer Sydney Carton, and the Parisian wine-shop keepers the Defarges. The plot turns on resemblance, old grievances, and the reach of revolutionary justice across the Channel. It is a historical novel about private lives caught between two cities and two political orders.

Bound in cream cloth printed with a montage of Keeping’s illustrations from the text, with dark red spine-label. Dark red endleaves. Dark red slipcase, with Dickens’s signature in gold.