A review by hadeanstars
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

4.0

A Tale of Two Cities is really engaging, considerably more readable than I expected, and even though it goes on for a while, it kept me engrossed right until the end. Despite this though, I don;t think that Dickens is a truly top-notch writer as his characters often seem a bit caricatured. I am thinking especially of Jerry Cruncher, and Miss Pross (both of whom I loved), but they were not real people in any convincing sense. Even the lovely Lucie was altogether too perfect, too attentive, too forbearing, too demure, too reasonable, in short, an ideal, but improbable personification of femininity that does pervade a lot of Victorian lit. (Think of Mina in Dracula, who is really a copy of Lucie here). These are the limits of realism that seem to be a feature of Dickens' work. Perhaps it is just of its time (although Hardy doesn't suffer from this kind of limitation.) But even so, it seems to me that Dickens is really a storyteller, rather than an outright social commentator, even if he raised pressing issues of social injustice into wider consciousness. I feel that if you take the work in the way it's intended, it's really enjoyable. The insights into the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror were fascinating. A really good story well told.