Is it more than a potboiler?: Tale of Two Cities

On recommendation of friend and pro poet AF and remembering comments from the online conversation WS started on the quality of Dickens, I started A Tale of Two Cities last night, a novel I hadn't read since college or maybe high school. AF had described it to me recently as a classic best-seller, which is just what I wanted - I think. For years, Tale has been largely dismissed, even by those who don't dismiss Dickens, as a plain old potboiler - paling beside the monumental Bleak House and Little Dorritt, the near-perfect Great Expectations, the very accessible Hard Times, the personal testimonial of Copperfield, the popularized Oliver Twist, and even the impenetrable (the only on on this list I couldn't finish) Our Mutual Friend. But take Tale for what it is: if not a potboiler, certainly a pot-stirrer, and perhaps his only work not set in England? Of course it's way over the top - not just the famous opening passages but even the first chapter, pushed onto the stage by the near-hysterical writing (unlike say Great which is pushed on stage by an incredibly powerful, active opening scene). But as the novel settles down, we have some truly memorable Dickensian scenes: the night coach struggling to climb Dover hill and overtaken by a messenger, and the fear everyone has of highwaymen and brigands; locating M. Mannette, surfaced in a small lodging in Paris, obviously traumatized by his 18 years in prison, hovering over a workbench and imagining he's a shoemaker. We don't know yet how these scenes will come together, and it almost feels like Dickens isn't sure yet himself - I can't figure out why the dramatic overtaking of the night coach was even necessary, but let's leave logic aside - but his job was to get readers to buy the next issue of the magazine, and no one was better at that.