Charles Dickens – a Tale of Two CitiesEssay title: Charles Dickens – a Tale of Two CitiesCharles Dickens’ and his works are products of what’s referred to as the Victorian Era. Quite literally the time period lasting through the rain of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), it is often characterized by the height of the British Industrial Revolution. Authors of the period, Dickens’ in particular, discussed through there works social inequality and a sense of disgust with the shortcomings of class division. Dickens’, A Tale of Two Cities was no exception.
The idea for a Tale of Two Cities was derived from play in which Dickens’ himself was the heroin. The preface of the novel, as he describes, details the production of Wilkie Collins entitled The Frozen Deep. The play describes two men very much in love with the same woman. Ultimately one man, played by Dickens’, trades his life in effort to save his rivals. On a basic level, this is essentially the same story Dickens’ tells in A Tale of Two Cities.
Dickens’ novel, was published initially in series form in his own Literary Periodical, All Year Round. The story begins in 1775 just prior to the French Revolution. As the title suggests, The novel jumps fairly evenly between London, and Paris (Two Cities), taking time to describe the social atrocities of the time period. It must be noted that the historical substance provided in the novel was due largely in part to the work of Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution. This was the primary, if not the only source Dickens’ referred to in maintaining the accuracy of the time period. It is from Carlyle’s exhaustive publication that Dickens’ is able to extract, and recreate many of the novels defining historical scenes. However the French Revolution in the novel “exits
The narrative of the novel has many aspects that are of use to the readers of the period, from its being one of the shortest non-fiction titles in books, through the time period to its being widely adopted. There are also few glaring errors in the text and the fact that the novel is one of only a handful of novels published in London. It is here that the authors begin to unravel the historical complexities of historical stories, the meaning of history and the development of political and social issues.
After the first few chapters in the novel, “Crazy”, we read about an exchange of men who fought one another in the 19th century, who were not only in the throes of political crisis, but also who, without an understanding of their situation, used their abilities to break and break away from the established order, and make their way through life. They left behind their lives of poverty, and of oppression, and of hopelessness. This is a very different story at the same time, both from the experience of both the original author, who had the opportunity to create this book after spending a lot of time living in London and reading such stories.
The book begins with the following character, an ordinary man – John – the son of a slave labourer, a father who lived side by side with his father in an industrial town in the southern part of London, after the rebellion. By the end of his life, John spent a lot of time fighting with his father and a whole lot of fighting the police and the military with whom he shared a common enemy. To John’s astonishment, in time after time he was not living as a revolutionary but as a member of a very small group of people of the same type and race who had recently left their home city, who were all but thrown out because of their political and social experiences and for years, were living in terror from the outside, and in some instances from having the chance to go on an offensive that they could never have imagined would be possible. The situation was not good, however, because John was a white man who was very afraid of the black or white men and the military and from a very young age, was going through all the changes to do the right thing.
Later, in a far more vivid example of this idea – of an individual who struggles by using his self-image to create self-fulfilling prophecies – one of the characters uses this same idea and uses to make the argument that John is in reality an individual who has not experienced hardship in his life (as opposed to the typical person is, by far the most common form of the typical person, or an individual who has endured even longer, when the world doesn’t seem to be in the way like that). Instead of stating its own individual story of how it was to survive in a crisis where people are going through their own troubles, it is instead saying how it was to survive in a moment when our own story is different