In this seminar, we’ll go beyond the best and worst of times and examine the wisdom/foolishness, belief/incredulity, Light/Darkness, hope/despair, etc. in a story that attempts to encapsulate a cataclysmic historical event, told by an author at the top of his abilities who had also just turned his life upside down with a series of personal decisions: abandonment of his wife; a young secret mistress; shuttering of his long-running magazine; start of a new magazine; and his first public reading tour. In effect, Dickens himself was leading a kind of small-r revolution against himself at the time he was writing about Revolution.