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It’s 1775. Trouble is a-brewin’ in the14 French countryside. Apparently, the folks out there don’t like to be starved and taxed to death. Who would’ve guessed it, eh?

As our novel starts, a very businessman-like British gentleman makes his way into the heart of Paris. He’s on a very unsettling mission. In fact, it’s almost enough to make a businessman cry. You see, eighteen years ago, aFrench doctor was imprisoned without any warning (or any trial). He’s been locked up in the worst prison of all prisons, the Bastille. After almost two decades, he was released – again without any explanation – and he’s currently staying with an old servant of his, Ernst Defarge. Today, Mr. Lorry (that’s our British businessman) is on a mission to the French doctor back to England, where he can livein peace with his daughter.

Dr. Manette may be free, but he’s still a broken man. He spends most of his time cobbling together shoes and pacing up and down in his dark room. Too accustomed to the space of a prison to understand that he can actually leave his room, Dr. Manette seems doomed to live a pitiful life.

Fortunately for Dr. Manette (and for Mr. Lorry, now that we think about it), hehappens to have the World’s Perfect Daughter. Lucie, the child he left eighteen years ago, is now a grown-up, smiling, blond, perfect ray of sunshine. Everything she touches seems to turn to gold. Vomit if you’d like, but Lucie is indeed perfect. And she’ll need every ounce of that perfection to restore her father back to health.

Of course, she does manage to bring Dr. Manette back into theeveryday world. We never doubted her for a second. Within the space of five years (that’s 1780, for those of you who are counting), Dr. Manette is a new man. He’s a practicing doctor again; he and Lucie live in a small house in Soho. They don’t have much money (Dr. Manette’s cash was all seized in France), but Lucie manages to shine her rays of wonderfulness over their lives. In other words,they’re pretty happy. And they’ve adopted Mr. Lorry as a sort of drop-in uncle.

As we pick up the story in 1780, Dr. Manette and Lucie have been called as witnesses in a treason case. Apparently, a young man named Charles Darnay is accused of providing classified information to the French government. English trials at the time resemble smoke-and-mirror tricks: Dickens takes great delight in mockingthe "esteemed" members of the court. Thanks to Lucie’s compassionate testimony and some quick work by a man who looks strangely like Charles Darnay, however, our man Charles is off the hook.

A free man, Charles Darnay immediately realizes just how perfect our perfect Lucie actually is. He sets up shop in the Manette house, coming to visit almost every day. The Charles look-alike, a disreputable(but, let’s face it, really likable) guy called Sydney Carton, also takes a liking to Lucie. If Charles is shiny and good and perfect, Sydney is… not any of those things. He also likes to beat himself up a lot. (In fact, we’re thinking that he could really use one of those twelve-step esteem boosting programs.)

Sydney loves Lucie with all his heart, but he’s convinced that he could neverdeserve her. What does he do? Well, he tells her precisely why she could never love him. Surprise, surprise: she agrees. She’d like to help him be a better person, but he would rather wallow in his misery. After all, wallowing sounds like so much fun, doesn’t it? Wallow, wallow, wallow. That’s Sydney in a nutshell.

Charles, meanwhile, fares a little bit better. He marries Lucie. On the day of hiswedding, he tells Dr. Manette a secret: he’s actually a French nobleman in disguise. A very particular French nobleman, as a matter of fact: the Marquis Evrémonde. Because everything in a Dickens novel has to fit into a neat pattern, it’s no real surprise that the Evrémondes were the evil brothers who locked Dr. Manette up in the first place. The good doctor is a bit shocked, of course, but he...