A Tale of Two Cities

by Charles Dickens

In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting.

“What did you make of it, Tom?” “Nothing at all, Joe.” “That’s a coincidence, too,” the guard mused, “for I made the same of it myself.”

The air among the houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be dipped in the sea.

Thus, Tellson’s, in its day, like greater places of business, its contemporaries, had taken so many lives, that, if the heads laid low before it had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately disposed of, they would probably have excluded what little light the ground floor had, in a rather significant manner.

When they took a young man into Tellson’s London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him.

(Mr. Cruncher himself always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it.)

It was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old institution, that inflicted a punishment of which no one could foresee the extent; also, for the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action; also, for extensive transactions in blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom, systematically leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be committed under Heaven. Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of the precept, that “Whatever is is right;” an aphorism that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.

He had never been suspected of stealing a silver tea-pot; he had been maligned respecting a mustard-pot, but it turned out to be only a plated one.

If you’ll excuse me, as very much your elder, for saying so, I really don’t know that it is your business.” “Business! Bless you, I have no business,” said Mr. Carton. “It is a pity you have not, sir.” “I think so, too.” “If you had,” pursued Mr. Lorry, “perhaps you would attend to it.”

“Do you imagine—” Mr. Lorry had begun, when Miss Pross took him up short with: “Never imagine anything. Have no imagination at all.” “I stand corrected; do you suppose—you go so far as to suppose, sometimes?” “Now and then,” said Miss Pross.

I have sometimes sat alone here of an evening, listening, until I have made the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming by-and-bye into our lives.” “There is a great crowd coming one day into our lives, if that be so,” Sydney Carton struck in, in his moody way.

And who among the company at Monseigneur’s reception in that seventeen hundred and eightieth year of our Lord, could possibly doubt, that a system rooted in a frizzled hangman, powdered, gold-laced, pumped, and white-silk stockinged, would see the very stars out!

He described it as if he were there, and it was evident that he saw it vividly; perhaps he had not seen much in his life.