Who read A Tale of Two Cities help me please: Novelists often bring life

Novelists often bring life to major events of history by focusing on an individual or family and the way in which the great event affected their lives. Such is surely the case in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. How does the approach of the novelist make the French Revolution seem more real, more immediate, and thus enable the reader to enter into it more fully than could be accomplished by a mere historical narrative?