A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
Contents
Introduction
Book the First: Recalled to Life
I. The Period
II. The Mail
III. The Night Shadows
IV. The Preparation
V. The Wine-Shop
VI. The Shoemaker
Book the Second: The Golden Thread
I. Five Years Later
II. A Sight
III. A Disappointment
IV. Congratulatory
V. The Jackal
VI. Hundreds of People
VII. Monseigneur in Town
VIII. Monseigneur in the Country
IX. The Gorgon’s Head
X. Two Promises
XI. A Companion Picture
XII. The Fellow of Delicacy
XIII. The Fellow of No Delicacy
XIV. The Honest Tradesman
XV. Knitting
XVI. Still Knitting
XVII. One Night
XVIII. Nine Days
XIX. An Opinion
XX. A Plea
XXI. Echoing Footsteps
XXII. The Sea Still Rises
XXIII. Fire Rises
XXIV. Drawn to the Loadstone Rock
Book the Third: The Track of a Storm
I. In Secret
II. The Grindstone
III. The Shadow
IV. Calm in Storm
V. The Wood-Sawyer
VI. Triumph
VII. A Knock at the Door
VIII. A Hand at Cards
IX. The Game Made
X. The Substance of the Shadow
XI. Dusk
XII. Darkness
XIII. Fifty-two
XIV. The Knitting Done
XV. The Footsteps Die Out For Ever
Introduction
DICKENS was, without exaggeration, a literary giant of epic proportions. Unlike those who must struggle lengthily for recognition, success came to him early at the age of twenty-three, and remained until his premature death at fifty-eight. Even more than a century after his death, his books remain among those most widely read throughout the world.
Born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, Charles Dickens was the second of eight children. His parents, John and Elizabeth, were middle class, genteel, but spectacularly improvident: his father, though respectably employed by the Navy Pay Office, was frequently in debt; his mother was high-spirited yet rather aloof. For a while, the family lived in Chatham, where Dickens had very pleasant experiences, and where he later returned to live at the height of his success.
In 1824, disasters occurred which were to haunt Dickens the rest of his life. His father’s debts suddenly caught up with him and he was thrown into Marshalsea Prison. After selling off everything they could, the family went to live at the prison, to await a more beneficent stroke of fate.
Young Charles, however, had already been found a room elsewhere and employment in Warren’s blacking factory, at the invitation of his cousin James Lamert. There, in a bleak environment, he worked with boys of the lower classes, securing the tops on bottles of blacking and slapping labels on them.
These brushes with dire poverty—his father’s imprisonment and his own apprenticeship—so mortified Dickens that, in later life, he could only bring himself to tell a handful of people about the experience. However, the personal memories which he sought to conceal found their way time and again into his work, where he could make others feel the shame and despair that he had felt.
Soon after his incarceration, his father was released from the Marshalsea. He removed Dickens from the blacking factory and placed him at Wellington House Academy for two years of formal education, during which time Dickens flourished.
After Wellington, Dickens clerked in a law office, but studied shorthand and, a year and a half later, launched his literary career. He started as a freelance journalist, first in the court of Doctors’ Commons, then haunting the House of Parliament for the Morning Chronicle, whose staff he joined in 1834. His articles, Sketches by Boz, were widely admired and later published in book form.
In 1836, he was asked by the publisher Chapman and Hall to write a serial based on a number of sporting plates by Robert Seymour. Thus began The Pickwick Papers, completed in 1837. It also began what was to be Dickens’s lifelong success.
Although it is cynical to imply that one may be well-served by adversity, it often happens that this is the case. Dickens the writer was able to command the unhappy incidents of his childhood into strong and emotional fiction. He used the characters that peopled his own childhood over and over again in various ingenious ways; he cast his mother and father myriad times into as many characters.