A Tale of Two Cities
A survey of the great ideas — not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.
The public shelf opens where Dickens opens — “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” — with a man recalled to life.
Tonight we take up the first book of A Tale of Two Cities, the movement Dickens titled “Recalled to Life.” It is a night on the Dover road and a whispered message carried by the banker Jarvis Lorry; it is Lucie Manette learning that the father she believed dead has been found; and it is Doctor Manette himself, drawn up out of eighteen years of darkness in the Bastille — buried alive, and now called back into the light.
It is a fitting place for the shelf to begin, because resurrection is the note the whole novel is tuned to. And so the reading closes, tonight, not with Dickens but with the hymn his theme keeps reaching toward — Charles Wesley's “And Can It Be”: the chains falling off, the heart set free, the prisoner rising to go forth.