What the Dickens?: Great novel, if you can get beyond the class biases and the jingoism

Darney traveling to Paris in 1790 is immediately spotted as an aristocrat and first made to hire two escorts and an extortionist price and then, when they get him to the gates of Paris, he's grabbed by some of the "citizens" and escorted to one of the prisons where he's confined to small cell with no space, no writing paper, and no hope. Will it surprise you that all the citizens are cold-blooded and bitter, that the only one who seems to have a bit of an individual life and personality is the revolutionary leader Defarge, he of the fake wine-shop, of the wife who knits while heads get chopped off, and who actually sheltered the original prisoner, Mannette, whom we met in the first chapter of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. And will it surprise you that the prisoners that Darney meets briefly as he's being escorted to his lonely cell are kind and thoughtful and interested in his story - because, hey, they're aristocrats so even if they're French they can't be all bad. Dickens is just relentless in his class biases and, to a lesser extent, in his jingoism. If you can get beyond that, however, and just accept the novel for what it is, it's pretty entertaining and well written - whether accurate or not, Dickens's depiction of a society in the midst of complete social upheaval is pretty chilling and makes you understand how dangerous it is for an outsider to pass through a country in revolution. Today, we have eyes and ears and witnesses everywhere, but still reporters and others venturing into the civil wars in Africa or Eastern Europe are brave souls whose experiences - total uncertainty about whom to trust and about everyone's motives and connections - must be a modern-day echo of Darney's experience of Paris during the French Revolution.