At Book Riot, Kathleen Keenan does a deep dive into the famous "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" line -- doing us all a great favor, as there's a regrettable tendency for modern writers to quote the line without thinking about its meaning. And boy, does it have meaning. As Keenan says,
Looking back on a turbulent era of history, Dickens is aware that we all tend to claim our current era is the most difficult, the most unsettled, the most interesting. But, this sentence points out, his contemporary Victorian readers aren’t the first to think that way. Why, not so long ago, in the 1780s, look at how people thought of the times they lived in, this sentence seems to suggest. This is one way Dickens uses to create a parallel between his readers and these figures of the past. At the end of this very long sentence, he even says it explicitly: “the period was so far like the present period” in this regard.
That’s one reason why this line holds up so well: every new generation thinks their struggles are uniquely difficult.
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