《A Tale of Two Cities》 Book1 CHAPTER I The Period
by Charles Dickens
It was the best of times, it was the
worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age offoolishness, 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, a sat 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 comedown 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 old some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to
Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, be spattered 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, for as much 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 insight 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 house-breaker 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 laces, 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. |
