Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) opens in 1775, a year remembered, as he indicates, not for events in France but for the outbreak of revolution in Britain’s North American colonies. Time passes, however, and soon we become witnesses to the storming of the Bastille in 1789, and to the frenzy of public executions that followed in the centre of Paris during the Reign of Terror. In 1848, eleven years before Dickens’s novel was published, France had been rocked by another political earthquake when the monarchy that had ruled since 1830 was overthrown by the Second Republic. Four years later, in 1852, the republic’s President, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, declared himself King and Emperor, remaining in power until 1870. Dickens loved France, and spent as much time there as he could; but he was under no illusions about the consequences to a society so divided over competing Utopias, and he was no less anxious about cocksure Britain in the heady days of Queen Victoria’s spreading Empire.
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