When he began writing the weekly parts of A Tale of Two Cities for his new journal, All the Year Round, in 1859, Dickens complained about ‘the time and trouble of the incessant condensation’ required by this form of publication. His second attempt at ‘historical fiction’, the novel lacks the dense social atmosphere and proliferation of ‘unnecessary’ detail that characterise the ‘big books’ like Bleak House and Little Dorrit. But notwithstanding the relative tautness and economy of its narrative, A Tale of Two Cities shares the fascination with the family shown by the more expansive works. As Dickens explained in another letter recorded by Forster, part of his intention in the novel was to contrast the ‘feudal cruelties’ of the ancien régime with the ‘new philosophy’ espoused by Charles Darnay: ‘With the slang of the new philosophy on the one side, it was surely not unreasonable or unallowable, on the other, to suppose a nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas, and representing the time going out as his nephew represents the time coming in.’ This contrast involves the juxtaposition of two different conceptions of the family, as the Marquis's ‘good breeding’ (144) and concern for ‘the power and honour of families’ (145) are set against the Victorian middle-class domestic ideal to which his anglicised nephew is committed. Critical discussions of the family in the novel have often focussed upon the relationship between the Marquis St Evremonde and Charles Darnay as a version of the generational rivalry between fathers and sons that is evident elsewhere in the relations between Darnay and Doctor Manette, Carton and Stryver, and Young Jerry and his father.