ABSTRACT
If Little Dorrit is Dickens's greatest novel, the one that follows it is his worst. A Tale of Two Cities has patches oflively writing and it is by no means without interest. But for all that it is not very good. We may say that it picks up Barnaby Rudge's concern with revolution, but we have to add that in the later novel Dickens seems almost to regard violence as the one way to bring about social change. It is as though a weary disgust with his society has led him into wishing it could be wiped out. No doubt that puts the matter too crudely, yet there is a perfunctoriness about the vision of the future at the end of the novel which suggests that Dickens is not really concerned with doing justice to the probabilities. Carton's prophecy of the 'long ranks of new oppressors, risen on the destruction of the old' who will themselves be destroyed, is near enough to the historical fact ofRevolutionary France. But the same can hardly be said for his claim to envisage
a beautiful city and a brilliant people arising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.
