Dickens give us a melodrama of one extended family to illustrate his view of the French Revolution as an inevitable tragedy, a horror. In some aspects it indulges in conventions of Gothic ridiculousness, yet overall it shows the bloody reality of the violence unleashed by revolution in the form of La Guillotine in a spellbinding way.

Dickens' use of the English language is, as well, bloody amazing. I do believe he could write wittily and entertainingly about anything.

All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

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