A Tale of Two Cities [Signet Classics] pdf Charles Dickens Free Download

As a child, Charles Dickens (1812-70) came to know not only hunger and privation, but also the horror of the infamous debtors’ prison and the evils of child labor. A surprise legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and “slave” factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years’ formal schooling. He taught himself shorthand and worked as a parliamentary reporter until his writing career took off with the publication of Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837). As a novelist and magazine editor, Dickens had a long run of serialized success through Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). In later years, ill health slowed him down, but he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fiction to an adoring public, which included Queen Victoria. At his death, The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained unfinished.

Distinguished writer, teacher, and critic Frederick Busch is the author of more than twenty works of fiction, including North, Girls, and The Mutual Friend, a novel about Charles Dickens.

A. N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has held a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. Among his acclaimed biographies are Lives of Sir Walter Scott (John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Tolstoy (Whitbread Award for Biography), C. S. Lewis, Hilaire Belloc, and Iris Murdoch. The Victorians, his study of the Victorian Age, and its sequel, After the Victorians, were both published to the widest critical acclaim, and he is the award-winning author of such novels as My Name Is Legion and The Healing Art.

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Published by Signet Classics, an imprint of New American Library,
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First Signet Classics Printing, February 1960

First Signet Classics Printing (Wilson Afterword), February 2007

eISBN : 978-1-101-04367-7

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THIS TALE IS INSCRIBED
TO THE
LORD JOHN RUSSELL
IN REMEMBRANCE OF
MANY PUBLIC SERVICES AND
PRIVATE KINDNESSES

INTRODUCTION:

THE MEASURE OF SEPARATENESS

Although most first readers of A Tale of Two Cities know its rough outlines—the father locked away in the Bastille, the beautiful, dutiful daughter who helps him to find comfort once he is released, the frenzied slaughter of the revolution, Carton the Gothic hero, handsomely imperfect, who finds real life in his sacrificial death (the “far, far better thing that I do . . .” under the blade of the Guillotine)—these readers might believe that they are opening the pages of a political or, say, historical novel. Its title sounds geographical, as if the novel were about size and distance. Like most of Dickens’ novels, it begins in the past, so it seems to be concerned with history. And the first words intoned by the narrative voice make up that famous sentence about the times, the age, the epoch, the season, and the fate of people in general—the “we” who regarded life as either bleak or salvational. Royalty is speared on the nib of Dickens’ pen—“a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face”—and Dickens swats at the governing bodies in Paris and London. He then tightens his focus, from the fate of all humankind to the fate of the characters in his novel. And then, tightening further, he conjures Jarvis Lorry who, as his last name suggests, is to be a vehicle for the conveyance of characters and plot between England and France.

But to Dickens, all life is domestic, no matter on what scale he writes it, and no matter its political or historical context. As with all his work, the novel begins in him. And we can see it in the privacies of his writing notes and the intimacies of his emotional life.

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