Read A Tale of Two Cities by email.
You have started this book before. This time you will finish it.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. A prisoner is recalled to life after eighteen years in the Bastille; a Paris wine-shop keeps a register of the doomed, knitted in wool; and two men with the same face love the same woman as the Revolution gathers. Dickens's shortest major novel, with the most famous first and last lines he ever wrote.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Eight months from now, you will have read Dickens.
250 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1859
- Installments
- 250
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 135,489
- Reading time
- 9 hours 25 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 3.5 months
- At 10 minutes a day
- 8 weeks
- At 20 minutes a day
- 4 weeks
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read A Tale of Two Cities?
A Tale of Two Cities is Dickens with the brakes off: no subplots, no comic detours that outstay their welcome, just a single story swinging between London and Paris as the French Revolution builds from murmur to Terror. He wrote it in weekly installments and it reads like it — nearly every chapter ends on a turn, and the three Books (Recalled to Life, The Golden Thread, The Track of a Storm) tighten like a spring.
It is also the Dickens novel people quote without knowing it: the opening sentence, the knitting women counting heads at the guillotine, and an ending so famous that we are contractually obliged to say nothing about it except that readers have been arguing for a century and a half about whether it is the most moving thing he ever wrote. (It is.)
We serialize the complete novel in Dickens's original text, broken at his own chapter seams — every installment's subject line carries Dickens's own chapter title, from “The Period” to “The Footsteps Die Out Forever” — with a “Previously” recap on every installment.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read A Tale of Two Cities?
About ten hours straight through (135,489 words). By email, it's 250 daily installments of 2–3 minutes each — about eight months, or faster at a premium pace of two or three installments a day.
Do I need to know French history?
No. Dickens assumes nothing — the Revolution arrives the way it would have arrived for his characters, as rumor, then dread, then the mob at the gate. Everything you need is on the page.
What is it about, without spoilers?
A French doctor is released after eighteen years of unjust imprisonment and rebuilt by his daughter's devotion in London. Around them: a French émigré with a dangerous name he has renounced, a brilliant, wasted English lawyer who looks exactly like him, and a wine-shop in Saint Antoine where an implacable woman knits. Then 1789 comes.
Is the ending really that famous?
The last line is one of the half-dozen most quoted sentences in English fiction, and the recaps are written so that nothing about the final movement reaches you early. If you somehow don't know how it ends, we envy you the last week of installments.
Which edition is this?
Dickens's original English text in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition, drawn from the public-domain text. His short 1859 preface is omitted so installment 1 opens on the famous first sentence.
How does it arrive?
One email a day at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous installment at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.