A Tale of Two Cities (Penguin Clothbound Classics)
Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil lanes of London, they are all drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror and soon fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine.
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Community Reviews
Charles Dickens is a master of the english language. The cohesivness and symbolizm in his stories is second to none!
Okay... so they're done with kings! But the French Republic is arguably more tyrannical than any king for a while.
This book is very close to my heart. I loved the storyline of each of the characters. In simple words its a wonderful book.
A Tale of Two Cities is the first full novel by Charles Dickens, I have read. It was very popular in the 19th Century (Tomalin 308). I found the novel to be very readable today. Dickens was a Francophile (Tomalin 154, 213). Dickens walked the streets of both the British capital of London and the French capital of Paris (Tomalin 22, 154). The Tale of Two Cities covers the era around the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror (Tomalin 308). The characters of A Tale of Two Cities are all interconnected. All of the characters seem to know each other. A Tale of Two Cities was heavily influenced by the work of the Scottish Historian Thomas Carlyle on the French Revolution (Tomalin 307). Dickens and Carlyle were good friends (Tomalin 307). A Tale of Two Cities is also interesting if a person is interested in the historiography of the French Revolution. The artist William Powell Frith described seeing Dickens when he was writing A Tale of Two Cities. According to Dickens’ biographer Claire Tomalin, Frith said Dickens “muttered, grimaced, and walked about the room, pulling his beard "while writing the novel (Tomalin 305). Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities is a readable 19th Century novel as mentioned earlier.
Works Cited:
Tomalin, Claire. 2011. Charles Dickens: A Life. New York: Penguin Press. Kindle.
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