Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities as a weekly serial in 1859. He was forty-seven, at the height of his powers, and had become obsessed with the French Revolution after reading Carlyle. The novel opens with one of the most quoted sentences in English: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The two cities are London and Paris. The book moves between them across eighteen years.
An English bank clerk named Jarvis Lorry crosses the Channel to retrieve a doctor named Manette who has been buried alive in the Bastille for eighteen years and is now in a Paris attic, sewing shoes and answering only to a prison number. The doctor is brought to London, slowly recovers, and watches his daughter Lucie marry an emigrated French aristocrat named Charles Darnay. Across the Channel, the Revolution begins. Darnay is summoned back to Paris, arrested, and sentenced to the guillotine — partly because his uncle was a man named Évrémonde and partly because Madame Defarge has been knitting names into a register for fifteen years. The man who saves him is not a Frenchman.
The B1 adaptation runs across twenty short chapters and keeps every set-piece: the buried doctor, the night ride to Dover, the Bastille letter, Madame Defarge's knitting, the trial, the substitution at the prison, the tumbril, the famous last line spoken on the scaffold. Dickens' English in this novel is unusually direct — fewer of his usual subordinate clauses, more dialogue, more silence.
Dickens was writing this novel on a deadline of 5,000 words a week and his sentences are tighter than in David Copperfield or Bleak House. The B1 adaptation tracks the original's natural rhythm: short chapters, scene-driven prose, dialogue that does most of the work. The famous opening and closing sentences are kept as written. The vocabulary is concrete and the chronology is clear — every chapter is one journey, one trial, one decision.
Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. A Tale of Two Cities was originally written in English, but you choose your reading language when you start.
B1. Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
A Tale of Two Cities is rated B1, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
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