Dickens conceived the main idea of A Tale of Two Cities from Wilkie Collins’s drama of The Frozen Deep and embodied it in the form of historical novel on the basis of Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution. But A Tale of Two Cities has been regarded by some critics as lacking the social vision and criticism common to the other later novels. The critics have judged it a failure as a historical novel and dismissed it as intellectually superficial. They have argued that Dickens recognized the end of the old system but could not embody a new in his novel. But Dickens shows clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen because of the oppression and exploitation of the French aristocracy and repeats this over and over again throughout the novel. One of the deepest impressions we get in this novel is the abhorrence on oppression. In spite of the obvious hatred for the mad and uncontrollable fury of the crowd, Dickens attributes all kinds of social evil to its leaders. He acknowledges the justification of the repressed people’s fury and resistance, and it is a strong evidence of his recognition of the inevitability of the revolution. Dickens’s later novels reveal subversive instinct, and this instinct is clearly at work in A Tale of Two Cities.