"It was the best of times" — Dickens's most famous sentence, unpacked
Fourteen paired opposites. One unresolved sentence. Dickens opens A Tale of Two Cities (1859) with a rhetorical structure that suspends the reader between contradictions — and then mocks anyone who thinks their own era is uniquely dramatic. A close read of the passage, its key terms, and a reflection question.
The passage
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book the First, Chapter I: "The Period" (1859) 1
Gloss
Epoch — from Greek epochē, a fixed point in time that marks a new era; Dickens uses it alongside "age" and "season" to layer three different scales of time (geological, generational, annual) into a single sentence.
Incredulity — the state of being unwilling or unable to believe something. Paired with "belief," it names the intellectual schism of the late eighteenth century: the Enlightenment's faith in reason ran alongside — not after — a surge of religious and political zealotry.
The superlative degree of comparison — a dig at pamphleteers and preachers of the 1780s–90s who declared their own moment uniquely catastrophic or uniquely blessed. Dickens is mocking a habit he sees alive in his own 1850s readership.
Close read
The sentence is one long coordinated list, fourteen clauses long, and it never resolves. That is the point. Each noun — best, worst, wisdom, foolishness, Light, Darkness — is immediately canceled by its opposite, so the reader is suspended between contradictions rather than carried toward a conclusion.
The rhetorical device is antithesis: paired opposites placed in parallel grammatical slots. But Dickens does something subtler than mere balance. The pairs escalate in abstraction: from quality (best/worst) → intellect (wisdom/foolishness) → metaphysics (belief/incredulity) → symbol (Light/Darkness, capitalized, almost biblical) → physical sensation (spring of hope / winter of despair) → total possession (everything / nothing) → eschatology (Heaven / the other way). The list rises toward the cosmic and then cuts off — with a dash and an ironic shrug.
That shrug, "in short," is Dickens twisting the knife. He has just conjured the sublime, then deflated it: the noisy authorities of every age claim the same superlatives. The sentence is both about the French Revolutionary period and a joke at the expense of the reader who assumed their own era was exceptional.
Structurally, the sentence functions as a thesis statement in disguise: it will not tell you what the novel is about, only what the world always is — divided, simultaneously catastrophic and radiant, and convinced of its own uniqueness.
Reflection question
Dickens wrote this in 1859, describing events of 1775. Every generation since has felt the description fit their own decade. Which pair of antitheses — belief/incredulity, hope/despair, Light/Darkness — rings most precisely for the world right now, and why does that pairing feel different from Dickens's time even if the words are identical?
References
- 1A Tale of Two Cities — Project Gutenberg
gutenberg.org
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