A Tale of Two Cities

Between London and a Paris sliding into revolution, Dickens weaves the fates of the recalled prisoner Dr Manette, his daughter Lucie, the aristocrat Charles Darnay and the wasted lawyer Sydney Carton, toward a sacrifice at the guillotine. The novel maps two real cities: Tellson's Bank and the Old Bailey in London, and in Paris the wine-shop of Saint-Antoine, the stormed Bastille, and the Place de la Révolution where the blade falls.

Lucie

Tellson's Bank, London

Recalled to life

In London, the banker Jarvis Lorry and the devoted Lucie receive her father Dr Manette, 'recalled to life' after eighteen years in the Bastille, and slowly draw him back from madness in their quiet Soho corner. Dickens sets the ordered, comfortable English city against the France to come, the peace whose price is the memory of another country's buried wrong.

Book the First

explicit The London of Tellson's Bank and the Manettes' Soho home is the real city where the recalled Dr Manette is nursed back to life; sited in the West End.

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