They'd probably put my head in a guillotine: Tale ofTwo Cities

On the plus side, Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities continues to be solidly entertaining in its potboiler manner right up toward the end, as the now-elderly banker Lorry and his troupe - the reformed bad-buy Carton, the evil and mean Cruncher who is now becoming a sentimental and loyal vassal - strive to free the noble (in both senses) Darney from imprisonment. It's had to keep the strands of the plot clear in mind, at least for me, but that's not really necessary, as this novel rolls on towards its conclusion, like a snowball tumbling down a hill. Also, some very find passages in the later chapters - Paris at night during the Revolution, and the fear of walking the streets, the fear of chance encounters; Lorry reflecting back on his solitary life and wondering if he has made a difference to anyone. All that said, the incredible jingoism of Tale is even more appalling by the end than early on - as all of the English characters, one after another, turn out to be good guys, atoning for their faults, working together to free Darney (and to protect the assets of the bank, Tellson's, I guess) and the French are universally horrid - the nobility, the people, the judges, the juries, the spies, the people on the street, everyone. Where is this coming from? Dickens may be stirring up some patriotic sentiment in a crass bid for readership and reader sympathy. This xenophobia may also be deeply embedded in Dickens's character: his deep-seated fear of social upheaval, his sense or his fear - typical, perhaps, of the self-made man, who clawed his way out of poverty - that all he has won and earned could be pulled away from him suddenly and unjustly. He must have felt that, as a writer and celebrity, he was always on trial and was, figuratively if not literally, a step away from the guillotine. It's perhaps surprising that his vitriol is especially fierce against working classes and the oppressed - whereas in most of his fiction he treats the working classes with a lot of sympathy and tends to satirize or criticize the touts, the strivers, and the phonies (Dorritt, Great X, Hard Times, Copperfield, Twist - to cite major examples) and the bureaucrats (Bleak). But something about the violence of the French Revolution touch Dickens deeply and steered his fiction onto a different course - one that he did not pursue in further works, fortunately.