A Tale of Two Cities: A Penguin Enriched eBook Classic

Front Cover
Penguin, Oct 7, 2008 - Fiction - 544 pages
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known' After finishing A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens said 'it has greatly moved and excited me in the doing'. One of his most haunting novels, it has, since its first serial publication in 1859, continued to exert a grip on the popular imagination. Set during the French revolution in a lethal, vengeful Paris and a leafy, tranquil London, the two cities of the title are only a part of the novel's stark dichotomies, which are continued as Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay - their lives touched by the same woman - are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris only to fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine.

Enriched eBook Features Editor Kristie Allen provides the following specially commissioned features for this Enriched eBook Classic:

* Filmography for Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities

* Filmography for Dickens’s Novels

* Early Reception of A Tale of Two Cities

* Suggested Further Reading

* What is “Dickensian”?

* Psychology in A Tale of Two Cities

* Dickens and Melodrama

* Dickens and Alcohol

* The Gothic in A Tale of Two Cities

* Dickens and Prisons

* Dickens and Servants

* Dickens Sites to Visit in England

* Illustrations of Eighteenth-Century Fashion and Culture and Dickens’s Victorian World

The enriched eBook format invites readers to go beyond the pages of these beloved works and gain more insight into the life and times of an author and the period in which the book was originally written for a rich reading experience.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Acknowledgements
A Dickens Chronology
A Note on the Text
On the Illustrations
Running Titles Added in 18678
PENGUIN ENRICHED EBOOK CLASSICS FEATURES
What Is Dickensian?
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2008)

Charles Dickens was born in a little house in Landport, Portsea, England, on February 7, 1812. The second of eight children, he grew up in a family frequently beset by financial insecurity. At age eleven, Dickens was taken out of school and sent to work in London backing warehouse, where his job was to paste labels on bottles for six shillings a week. His father John Dickens, was a warmhearted but improvident man. When he was condemned the Marshela Prison for unpaid debts, he unwisely agreed that Charles should stay in lodgings and continue working while the rest of the family joined him in jail. This three-month separation caused Charles much pain; his experiences as a child alone in a huge city–cold, isolated with barely enough to eat–haunted him for the rest of his life.

When the family fortunes improved, Charles went back to school, after which he became an office boy, a freelance reporter and finally an author. With Pickwick Papers (1836-7) he achieved immediate fame; in a few years he was easily the post popular and respected writer of his time. It has been estimated that one out of every ten persons in Victorian England was a Dickens reader. Olive Twist (1837), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) were huge successes. Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) was less so, but Dickens followed it with his unforgettable, A Christmas Carol (1843), Bleak House (1852-3), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1855-7) reveal his deepening concern for the injustices of British Society. A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-1) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) complete his major works.

Dickens’s marriage to Catherine Hoggarth produced ten children but ended in separation in 1858. In that year he began a series of exhausting public readings; his health gradually declined. After putting in a full day’s work at his home at Gads Hill, Kent on June 8, 1870, Dickens suffered a stroke, and he died the following day.

Bibliographic information