Historical · Drama
A Tale of Two Cities
London and Paris, love and revolution, and a man who discovers what his life is worth.
Five levels, about 80 languages
- A2ElementaryShort sentences and everyday words.
- B1IntermediateYou follow clear stories about familiar things.
- B2Upper intermediateLonger sentences, richer vocabulary.
- C1AdvancedClose to the original, lightly condensed.
- C2ProficientThe complete novel.
One purchase is one book, in one language, at one level: $4.99. Another level of a book you own is $1.99. Editions nobody has asked for yet are written on request: chapter 1 in a few minutes, the rest while you read. How the levels work.
About the book
Recalled to life
In 1775 a bank clerk, Jarvis Lorry, travels from London to Paris to bring home Dr Manette, who has just been released after eighteen years in the Bastille, and to reunite him with the daughter who believed him dead, Lucie. Years later in London, a young Frenchman, Charles Darnay, is tried for treason, and saved partly by Sydney Carton, a brilliant, dissolute lawyer who happens to look just like him. Both men fall in love with Lucie. Across the Channel, in the Paris wine shop of Monsieur and Madame Defarge, people are counting the injustices of the aristocracy, and Madame Defarge is knitting. Charles Dickens published it in 1859, in weekly installments in his own magazine.
Why it works for learners
The story is powerful and the set pieces are unforgettable: a broken wine cask in a Paris street, a trial at the Old Bailey, the storming of the Bastille. The vocabulary moves between the two cities: bank, court, trial, prison, crowd, revolution, wine, knitting, love, sacrifice. And everyone knows the opening, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, a sentence that works as a lesson in contrast in any language.
But this is also one of Dickens’s most compressed plots, with secrets that connect characters across decades. The early chapters move slowly and drop many threads that are picked up much later.
Which level to start at
B2 is the best start for most learners: the plot needs room, and the themes reward it. B1 makes the story clear if you want it straight. At C1 and C2 you meet Dickens’s grandest style, rhetorical and dramatic, especially in the last chapters, where sentence-by-sentence mode lets you take the long sentences one at a time.
Read next
- The Scarlet Pimpernel, the Terror as an adventure story
- Les Misérables, Paris, barricades and conscience
- Great Expectations, Dickens’s next novel