How and why does Dickens change from the past tense to present tense and from third-person to first-person narration in A Tale of Two Cities?What...

Dickens'  twelfth novel "A Tale of Two Cities" appeared in
weekly installments between April 1859 and November 1859.  The novel uses the French
Revolution as a backdrop to foreground Sydney Carton's unfulfilled romantic attachment
and love to Lucie Manette. Dickens researched all the details of the French Revolution
meticulously before starting to write "A Tale of Two Cities." His main source for the
historical information was Thomas Carlyle's "History of the French
Revolution."

Being an historical novel it was inevitable
that Dickens intertwined the historical past with narrative present of the main plot of
the novel. The novel is divided into three sections - Recalled to Life, The Golden
Thread and The Track of a Storm.

Dickens begins his novel
in the first chapter with a narrator giving his readers the necessary historical
information in the past tense:

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It
was the best of times, it
was the worst of times, it was the age
of wisdom, it was the age of
foolishness, it was the epoch of
belief, it was the epoch of
incredulity, it was the season of
Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it
was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we
had nothing before
us,

The plot of the novel
begins in Ch.2  with a dramatic incident in the vivid present which serves to
immediately capture the attention of the readers - Jerry Cruncher's heroic and
successful attempt in giving the note to Mr.Jarvis Lorry at the nick of the moment. The
chapter ends with Jerry Cruncher wondering aloud what Mr.Jarvis Lorry's reply to the
note - RECALLED TO LIFE -  meant. The dramatic incident which is played out then and
there right in front of the eyes of the readers concludes
with

"he
[Jerry Cruncher] turned to walk down
the hill.]

This sentence is
in the third person past .

But the very next chapter begins
with the narrator directly addressing his readers  in the first person present as he
wonders what secrets lie hidden in the bosom of each citizen of a
metropolis:

A
solemn consideration, when I enter a
great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses
encloses its own secret; that every
room in every one of them encloses its
own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is,
in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest
it!

This rapid change of
tense from past to present and objective third person narration to the first person
present foreshadows the most important
incidents of the novel - Dr. Manette's grim past and Charles Darnay of the Evremonde
family becoming coincidentally his son in law in the sequence of incidents in the plot
being enacted in present time.