Illustration for A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (engraving)

A Tale of Two Cities is one of two historical novels by Charles Dickens (Barnaby Rudge is the other). His main source was The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle's view is that history cycles through destruction and resurrection, which influenced the novel's account of the effects of the overthrow of the French monarchy. Anglo-French relations were a concern of Shakespeare's histories, and in this novel Dickens comes nearest to Shakespeare's social and political concerns in his history plays about the impact of broad national movements on individuals.

Shakespeare shows us the usurpation of the English throne of King Richard II by the "Lancastrian" Bolingbroke in the second English tetralogy, and the "Yorkist" counter-movement it evokes, as he had already shown in his first tetralogy. Neo-Aristotelian compactness of plot was rejected in this broad Shakespearean pattern, which was imitated in the drama of Victor Hugo, and his novel, Les Miserables, with its modern musical derivative. Picture and some data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia)