A Tale of Two Cities Pdf book download A Story of the French Revolution By Charles Dickens.

 A Tale of Two Cities Pdf book download
A Story of the French Revolution
By  Charles Dickens.

Book: A Tale of Two Cities

A Story of the French Revolution

Author: Charles Dickens

Release Date: November 28, 2004

Last Updated: March 4, 2018

Language: English.

(✍️ This article is collected from this book 📚 (All Credit To Go Real Hero The Author of this book 📖) 🙏 Please buy this book hardcopy from anyway.)

🔍In This Book You Find__________________

Sidney Carton is almost the only case in which Dickens has drawn a hero on the true heroic scale, and his famous act of self-sacrifice is unmatched in fiction. The book must be ranked very high among the great tragedies in literature.

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 fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of s

🧾Front Page Of This Book_______________

I. The Period

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 mail 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 mail 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 fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences

much out of the common way. 

In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and

ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows

of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had

been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the

dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day,

taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer

who had robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence.

All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the

dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them,

while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large

jaws, and those other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough,

and carried their divine rights with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand

seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small

creatures—the creatures of this chronicle among the rest—along the roads that

lay before them.

II. The Mail

It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the

first of the persons with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay, as

to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter's Hill. He walked up

hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not

because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances,

but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so

heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once

drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back to

Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in combination,

had read that article of war which forbade a purpose otherwise strongly in favour

of the argument, that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team

had capitulated and returned to their duty.

With drooping heads and tremulous tails, 

they mashed their way through the

thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to

pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested them and brought them to

a stand, with a wary “Wo-ho! so-ho-then!” the near leader violently shook his

head and everything upon it—like an unusually emphatic horse, denying that the

coach could be got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the

passenger started, as a nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.

There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its

forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A

clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples

that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an

unwholesome sea might do. 

It was dense enough to shut out everything from the

light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road;

and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all.

Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the side of

the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the ears, and wore

jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from anything he saw, what

either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many

wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of his two

companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of being confidential on a

short notice, for anybody on the road might be a robber or in league with

robbers. As to the latter, when every posting-house and ale-house could produce

somebody in “the Captain's” pay, ranging from the landlord to the lowest stable

non-descript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard of the Dover

mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November, one thousand seven

hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter's Hill, as he stood on his own

particular perch behind the mail, beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a hand

on the arm-chest before him, where a loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or

eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum of cutlass.

The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected the

passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all

suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but the horses;

as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have taken his oath on the

two Testaments that they were not fit for the journey.

“Wo-ho!” said the coachman. “So, then! One more pull and you're at the top

and be damned to you, for I have had trouble enough to get you to it!—Joe!”

“Halloa!” the guard replied.

“What o'clock do you make it, Joe?”

“Ten minutes, good, past eleven.”

“My blood!” ejaculated the vexed coachman, “and not atop of Shooter's yet!

Tst! Yah! Get on with you!”

The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative, made a

decided scramble for it, and the three other horses followed suit. Once more, the

Dover mail struggled on, with the jack-boots of its passengers squashing along

by its side. 

They had stopped when the coach stopped, and they kept close

company with it. If any one of the three had had the hardihood to propose to

another to walk on a little ahead into the mist and darkness, he would have put

himself in a fair way of getting shot instantly as a highwayman.

The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses stopped to

breathe again, and the guard got down to skid the wheel for the descent, and

open the coach-door to let the passengers in.

“Tst! Joe!” cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down from his

box.

“What do you say, Tom?”

They both listened.

“I say a horse at a canter coming up, Joe.”

“I say a horse at a gallop, Tom,” returned the guard, leaving his hold of the

door, and mounting nimbly to his place. “Gentlemen! In the king's name, all of

you!”

With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and stood on the

offensive.

The passenger booked by this history, was on the coach-step, getting in; the

two other passengers were close behind him, and about to follow. He remained

on the step, half in the coach and half out of; they remained in the road below

him. They all looked from the coachman to the guard, and from the guard to the

coachman, and listened. The coachman looked back and the guard looked back,

and even the emphatic leader pricked up his ears and looked back, without

contradicting.

The stillness consequent on the cessation of the rumbling and labouring of the

coach, added to the stillness of the night, made it very quiet indeed. The panting

of the horses communicated a tremulous motion to the coach, as if it were in a

state of agitation. The hearts of the passengers beat loud enough perhaps to be

heard; but at any rate, the quiet pause was audibly expressive of people out of

breath, and holding the breath, and having the pulses quickened by expectation.

The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the hill.

“So-ho!” the guard sang out, as loud as he could roar. “Yo there! Stand! I shall

fire!”

The pace was suddenly checked, and, with much splashing and floundering, a

man's voice called from the mist, “Is that the Dover mail?”

“Never you mind what it is!” the guard retorted. “What are you?”

“Is that the Dover mail?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I want a passenger, if it is.”

“What passenger?”

“Mr. Jarvis Lorry.”

Our booked passenger showed in a moment that it was his name. The guard,

the coachman, and the two other passengers eyed him distrustfully.

“Keep where you are,” the guard called to the voice in the mist, “because, if I

should make a mistake, it could never be set right in your lifetime. Gentleman of

the name of Lorry answer straight.”

“What is the matter?” asked the passenger, then, with mildly quavering

speech. “Who wants me? Is it Jerry?