When the starving French masses rise in hate to overthrow a corrupt and decadent government, both the guilty and innocent become victims of their frenzied anger. Soon nothing stands in the way of the chilling figure they enlist for their cause—La Guillotine—the new invention for efficiently chopping off heads.

Dickens’s classic morality tale of a starving orphan caught between opposing forces of good and evil is a powerful indictment of Victorian England’s Poor Laws.