Which two cities are mentioned in the novel "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens?

"A Tale of Two Cities", is an 1859 historical novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French doctor Manette, his 18-year long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie, whom he had never met. The complex plot involves Sydney Carton's sacrifice of his own life on behalf of his friends Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette. While political events drive the story, Dickens takes a decidedly antipolitical tone, lambasting both aristocratic tyranny and revolutionary excess-the latter memorable caricatured in Madam Defarge, who knits beside the guillotine (execution device).

The book is best known for its opening lines, "It was the best times, it was the worst of times," and for Carton's last speech, in which he says of his replacing Darney in a prison cell, "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known." Darney is a highly principled young French aristocrat who is caught up in the events leading up to the French Revolution and is saved from the guillotine by Sydney Carton.

Dickens draws unsettling parallels between two cities London and Paris, describing abject poverty, appalling starvation, rampant crime, ruthless capital punishment, and aristocratic greed of nobles.