Still reading "Tale of Two Cities". It gets a lot better in part three, where 'we' travel to France and Dickens gets to froth at the mouth about the sweaty, blood-stained savages sharpening their swords on the grindstone, etc. The fickle, sentimental, savage populace, the madness of crowds. The only downside being we lose the comic caricaturist at this point, for the most part.
He writes equally if not more savagely about the aristocracy, so he's not on the anti-revolutionary 'side'. In many ways he's as cynical and misanthropic as Flaubert is in 'Sentimental Education', except his protagonists are rescued from his misanthropy, which Flaubert would never countenance.
Anyway, he's an amazing writer when he gets in the swing of things, these big rhetorical crescendos he does—and a relish in language that often tips over into something on-the-nose and tasteless, but at its best reminds me of Shakespeare.
Also for 'Ulysses' fans he uses the word 'metempsychosis'.
