When discussing the backdrop of the novel, it is also important to take into account the time in which Dickens was writing. He published the novel 60 years after the end of the French Revolution, but there were a series of revolutions and revolts in Europe in the late 1840s and early 1850s (1848 is often referred to as the "year of the revolutions" in Europe), and Dickens feared that the political unrest would spread to England. It is likely that he wanted to remind his readers of how dangerous revolutionary movements can be. Think about the novel's famous first sentence, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." and remember that he ends that opening by stating that, "in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." Dickens is saying that revolutionary France had experienced many of the same issues that were currently facing Victorian Britain.