In some ways, I think this is bloated, over-written, and in places so saccharine it makes your teeth ache. But the emotion in it is so finely drawn, and drawn, too, from Dickens' unending sympathy with the poor and the socially abandoned, that in the end the flaws just don't seem to matter. Part of the attraction, too, is the doubling that crops up again and again - not just in the cities, but in the characters and in the histories and permutations of plot. At times these are too closely related; I've always been a little suspicious of stories that rely this heavily on coincidence, but, as I said before, ultimately it doesn't matter. The identity of Madame Defarge, while not at all surprising, matters less in that she is a stand-in for any number of blighted individuals - just one of the tens of thousands of people ground down by the actions of the aristocracy pre-Revolution. As sympathetic as her back story is, however, Dickens is careful not to excuse her actions, which admittedly are arguably justifiable... but only up to a point. She is, however, a far more interesting character, grotesque as she is, to the milquetoast Lucie, who is another one of the Dickensian angels of the home that were far more interesting for him to write than for me to read.

All of this sounds like but but but... and it's true that there are a lot of things here that make the book imperfect. It is still no Bleak House, which is as close to perfect as Dickens ever got as far as I'm concerned, but A Tale of Two Cities, ultimately, is more than the sum of its flawed and sometimes staggering parts.