Dickens begins the novel by describing this year with one of the most famous sentences in literature: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of timesÅ " In short, despite the rapturous joy or painful suffering that everyone seems to feel, the time is really no less different than our own. It is filled with people who think "in the superlative degree of comparison only," and who believe that the world is not going to change. The narrator describes the goings-on in England and France. In England, ghost sightings and prophets holding seances are common. Highwaymen by night live as honest tradesmen by day, and thieves run rampant. In France, people are tortured for not paying homage to monks walking fifty yards away, and already there are rumblings of the terrible time that is to come. In short, the kings and queens of both countries rule, while the world of the commoners continues beneath them. .
Analysis: .
Dickens first tries to set us up in relation to the past here. Before giving us the year, he gives us a number of sweeping generalizations that could apply to any given time. In this way, he makes us realize that the historical past could very well be our own present. The Revolution was not so long ago in Dickens' time: therefore, Dickens could be telling his English audience to pay attention to this historical time, or else they are doomed to repeat it. .
Resurrection and revolution, the other main themes of the novel, are also introduced here. In England, the emphasis is on seances with ghosts, a type of resurrection of dead spirits. In France, revolution waits and watches. Fate is portrayed as a woodman, coming to saw down the trees that will eventually make the guillotine. Death becomes a farmer, carrying his own wares on the tumbrils that carried the aristocrats to the guillotine. Yet no one notices them. Both these themes, along with the importance of connections over time, will all come to dominate the book.