Sentence No. 61 · 27 May 2026
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.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens — A Tale of Two Cities (1859) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
The sentence is built entirely on anaphora — the same opener "it was the" repeats to launch each clause. Whenever you see that repeated anchor phrase, it signals a parallel series: each following phrase pairs a noun with its contrasting twin.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 6 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. The novel opens with its famous meditation on the age of revolution. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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