Recommendations
Books Like A Tale of Two Cities
Best books to read after A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities has the most famous opening in English literature and one of its most celebrated self-sacrifices. If Dickens's combination of historical sweep, melodrama, and moral seriousness moved you, these books share his range: from Victorian social critique to the French Revolution to the question of what people do when the world comes apart.
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Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's most perfectly structured novel — the orphan Pip, his mysterious patron, and the eccentric Miss Havisham in a portrait of class, aspiration, and self-deception in Victorian England; the Dickens novel most recommended to readers coming to him for the first time, and the one that best shows his psychological range beneath the social comedy
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Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's most ambitious novel — the interminable Jarndyce v Jarndyce lawsuit in Chancery as the organizing metaphor for an entire social system; considered by many critics the greatest English novel of the 19th century, it is the fullest expression of Dickens's conviction that English institutions are organized around the grinding up of human beings
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Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's French counterpart to A Tale of Two Cities — a massive social novel set against French history from Waterloo to the 1832 uprising, following Jean Valjean from prison through redemption and sacrifice; the two novels are the great contemporaneous statements of the 1860s about revolution, justice, and the redemptive potential of individual moral transformation
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The Scarlet Pimpernel
by Baroness Orczy
The aristocratic English hero who rescues condemned French aristocrats from the guillotine — the most direct adventure-fiction heir to A Tale of Two Cities in its French Revolution setting and its portrait of heroism disguised as foppishness; the novel that domesticated the Dickens historical romance into pure genre entertainment
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Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel
Mantel's novel about Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII shares A Tale of Two Cities' interest in how individuals survive within the machinery of political violence; widely considered the finest contemporary British historical fiction in its combination of historical research with vivid, close-third-person interiority; the most Dickensian contemporary novel in its peopled social world and its moral seriousness
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The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
Dumas's epic revenge novel — a falsely imprisoned man emerges years later as a wealthy count to systematically destroy those who wronged him; shares A Tale of Two Cities' combination of French historical setting, the injustices of the legal and prison system, and a protagonist defined by a transformative wrongful imprisonment; one of the great plots in world literature
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David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's most autobiographical novel — the orphan David's progress from childhood poverty through various employments to literary success; Dickens called it his 'favourite child'; more comic and episodic than A Tale of Two Cities, and the Dickens novel that most directly reveals the autobiographical sources of his social critique
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The Pillars of the Earth
by Ken Follett
Follett's historical epic about the building of a medieval cathedral — the most obviously Dickensian contemporary historical novel in its large cast, its interlocking plots, its combination of social critique with melodramatic storytelling, and its conviction that evil people have names and that good people can resist them
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