A Far, Far Better Thing

How do you earn the most famous ending in Victorian literature? Atwood counts the ways, and her evidence is stranger than you'd guess. A dance Dickens calls uglier than any fight. A swap governed by a rule as old as Sumer: the count below must be kept, and fifty-two means fifty-two. A prophecy that reads like clairvoyance, until she points out that Dickens wrote it knowing exactly how history came out. And a dying line borrowed from Hamlet, because someone has to stay behind to tell the story. The square where the guillotine stood is still in Paris. You can visit. It's a garden.