Abstract
Abstract: This essay assesses the long history of political disappointment with Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities , including George Orwell's description of the novel as a counterrevolutionary text that depicts the French Revolution as "no more than a pyramid of severed heads" (59). It suggests instead that the novel's nested use of prophecy and hindsight, borrowed to a certain extent from Thomas Carlyle, supports a reading of revolution as the natural and inevitable result of injustice. Thus the novel can be read along a line of development from Walter Scott's historical novel Waverley , which sees the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion as a foolish mistake, to William Morris's News from Nowhere , in which the protagonist's desired socialist revolution is seen from the far future to have succeeded. Sydney Carton's final prophecy takes part in a vision of the post-revolutionary future that is permitted to omniscient narrators, but usually forbidden to literary characters.
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