A Tale of Two Cities

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 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 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 mall 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 mall 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 fire