A Tale of Two Cities - Dickens Assignment
AP Headliner January 10/11, 2008
A Victorian Marvel
Mrs. Friesz’s Assignments: Jan 10-Feb 19 08
Reading Log Due: G/Feb 7/W/Feb 8
Socratic Seminar: G/Feb 11/W Feb 12
MC/timed writing test: G Feb 15/W Feb 19
A Tale of Two Cities
written 1859
Dickens’ 12th novel, serialized in ALL THE YEAR ROUND in weekly parts from April 30 to November 26 1859.
CHARLES DICKENS - A Tale of Two Cities
Dickens’ ideas for A Tale of Two Cities came in small doses over twenty years. When Thomas Carlyle’s book The French Revolution was published in 1837, Dickens read it eagerly. He was so moved by Carlyle’s descriptions of the time that he wanted to set a novel in the fiery Revolutionary period. Some of the characters and plots came directly from other stories that he wrote in those years. While he worked on the short story The Battle of Life in 1846, a Christmas story about self-sacrifice, he thought about writing the story of an imprisoned man and his mental state. This same story featured a one sister sacrificing her love for her sister’s sake. So, the largest motivation came in his friendship with the writer Wilkie Collins. Collins and Dickens collaborated in stories about heroic and dedicated friendships. One of the plays they wrote together, named The Frozen Deep, describes the sacrifice of one young man, who dies to save his friend. Another actress in this play was the 18-year-old Ellen Tiernan, whom Dickens loved in the wake of his failed marriage. She played the beloved of The Frozen Deep’s heroes (Gecmek1).
The moralistic Dickens, however, was entangled in numerous scandals during the writing of A Tale of Two Cities. His marriage to the cold Catherine Hogarth ended in 1858. The rumors said that he had left Catherine for her sister Georgina, and the relationship with Ellen Tiernan did nothing to help Dickens’ image. When Dickens attempted to publish a letter that addressed these scandals, his publishers refused to run the letter. Dickens saw this as such a terrible attack that he dissolved all connections with them and began his own weekly journal, All The Year Round. To give the journal a good start, he decided to combine all the ideas of the past twenty years to create A Tale of Two Cities. Each week, more than 100,000 people bought the journal to read the next installment (1).
Since Dickens was an author who frequently drew upon his personal experiences to write, we can see the personal influences of A Tale of Two Cities. Biographical critics believe that Dickens’ revolutionary subject parallels his own social upheaval, created through the scandals of his marriage and his break from his publishers. One could also make an argument for the characters as well. Darnay’s initials are the same as Dickens’. Carton’s love for Lucie is similar to Dickens’ love for Ellen Tiernan. As a physician with a dual life, Dr. Manette resembles Dickens’ desire to heal society and create imaginary worlds through his writings(2).
A Tale of Two Cities, however, is influenced by its setting and social portraits more than its characters. Critics of the time decried the novel because it focused so much on the descriptions of the countries, and lacked any well-drawn, comic characters (a staple of Dickens’ novels). Today, critics would argue that Dickens was using the novel to bring attention to the social problems and confusion of his own time. It is one of only two Dickens novels that are not set in nineteenth-century England, yet the society of England in 1859 was remarkably like the France of 1789. (This provides an explanation for the emphasis on connections in time within the novel.) At both times, the poor were far below the upper classes, and the poor had no influence upon public affairs. The rich did nothing to help, for fear that the poor would want to better themselves when they worked better as cheap labor. He shares how the poor suffered from overcrowding, hunger, repetitive labor, and long hours of work. Thus, the prevailing thought in Dickens’ time was that the aristocrats of France persecuted the poor until they were driven to revolt. Some political thinkers of Dickens’ time thought that England needed a revolution similar to France’s. Dickens, along with most people, believed that the English people would explode into a murderous mob at any moment. A Tale of Two Cities is an attempt to remind the English of a revolution’s danger (2).
How can the English fend off such a revolution? The individual can have a great influence upon the halting or continuing of a revolution. For instance, Lucie is able to win the hearts of many people, from her insane father to the curmudgeonly Carton to the genteel Darnay, and she can influence them through her concern for their welfare. Yet, the individual is not the only thing that can stop it after all, Dr. Manette could not save Darnay through his own good influence, while Madame Defarge is able to lead the mob to the carnage of the Bastille single-handedly. Logically, the second thing needed to stop the revolution is love. It is not necessarily a romantic love, although Carton’s love for Lucie is romantic on a certain level. Rather, it is more a universal, Christian love. Just as Christ gave himself up in death because of his for the world and desire to take its sins, Carton sacrifices himself for the sins of the Evremondes (which suggests “every man” or “every world”) and for his idealized love of Lucie. In the end, the anarchy of revolution can only be tempered by the individual who acts with Christian charity towards his fellow man (3).
Gecmek, C. “Charles Dickens.” 2006. December 8, 07.
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A Penny for your Thoughts:
1. The tales of Charles Dickens have been popular for over a century. What is it about Dickens’s work that makes it so enduring and memorable?
2. Charles Dickens’s work coincided with the height of the Industrial Revolution. How did this historic era influence Dickens’s life and work?
3. How did Dickens’s relationship with his parents and his boyhood influence his writings?
4. Charles Dickens created some of the most memorable characters in the history of the written word. How did Dickens get the ideas for these characters? Are they purely fictional?
5. The first works of Dickens were published as serials. How did this method of publication contribute to Dickens’s popularity and success as a writer?
6. Today the Yuletide traditions of Christmas trees and gift-giving are well established. But in they were just becoming popular in nineteenth century England. How did Dickens’s endearing work, A Christmas Carol, contribute to the establishment of Yuletide traditions?
7. Charles Dickens’s success was everything he had dreamed of as a boy and more, yet he was an intensely unhappy man. What made Dickens so unhappy? How did his melancholy influence his work?
8. How did Dickens internalize the world around him?
9. What is the legacy of Charles Dickens? How did his life change the world?
10. Dickens’ style of writing is full of epigrams. His use of allusions especially to Shakespeare’s characters reflect his respect for other writers. Seek and find these allusions for - depth in Dickens writing.
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A Peek at his Characters: Guess Who?
“Well, my sweet,” said Miss Pross, nodding her head emphatically, “the short and the long of it is, that I am a subject of His Most Gracious Majesty King George the Third;” Miss Pross curtseyed at the name; “and as such, my maxim is, Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks, On him our hopes we fix, God save the King!” (Dickens ___).
“For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by many remembrances that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young mother (and I so old!), and by many associations of the days when what we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed in me” (Dickens __).
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. NY: Barnes & Nobles Inc., 2003.
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Some Vocabulary to Assist with His writings. Define:
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abyss acute
articulate
assuage
bourgeoisie
charismatic
cosmopolitan
docile
eidetic
eminent
epigraph
explicitly
expulsion
geniality
haggard
hypothesis
improvidence
laborious
loathe
monotonous
phenomenon
psyche
quell
remonstrate
scathingly
subsequent
temperamental
volatile
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Themes - Challenge Yourself-Discover the
Wisdom of Dickens!
life and death
love and sacrifice resurrection
war and revolution
justice and revenge
dualism (twins)
family
money and power
the strife of the poor
revenge
faithfulness
peace and war
causes of revolution
power and abuse of Power
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Paradoxically, Dickens starts his novel with: “It was the best of times - It was the worst of times” (Dickens 7), to draw attention to the separation of classes within his society; where the aristocrats, as parasites, increase their wealth at the expense of the ever- fading middle class poverty and powerless lower class. This inhumane situation calls for rebellion and he warns England in A Tale of Two Cities to seek social reform, before heads literally start to roll, to quench oppression’s hunger.
Some Suggested Sites:
http://www.victorianweb.org/dickens/charov.html
This site from Victorian web contains a number of well-written undergraduate student essays under the direction of Professor George Landow.
Contains: Criticism, Commentary
From: Victorian Web
Charles Dickens: A Critical Study
http://lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/GG-CD.html
“Dickens is an author by whom Gissing had been deeply influenced.”
Contains: Criticism
Author: George Gissing
From: London: Blackie, 1898
Charles Dickens — Literary Relations
http://www.victorianweb.org/dickens/litrel.html
This site from Victorian web contains a number of well-written undergraduate student essays under the direction of Professor George Landow.
Contains: Criticism, Commentary
From: Victorian Web
Charles Dickens — Social and Political Contexts
http://www.victorianweb.org/dickens/societyov.html
This site from Victorian web contains a number of well-written undergraduate student essays under the direction of Professor George Landow.
Contains: This site from Victorian web contains a number of well-written undergraduate student essays under the direction of Professor George Landow.
From: Victorian Web
The City of Dickens
http://books.iuniverse.com/viewbooks.asp?isbn=1583482237
“The worship of hearth and home that culminates in the nineteenth century, and which survives in our own lives, is not fully explicable without the pressures that the modern city has brought to bear upon it. Alexander Welsh treats The City of Dickens both as a historical reality and as a metaphor that provides a context for values and purposes expressed by the English novel.”
Contains: Criticism
Author: Welsh, Alexander
From: iUniverse Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971.
Dickens
http://www.bartleby.com/223/index.html#10
This lengthy analysis of the author’s life and work includes sections on “Early life “, “Oliver Twist “, “Nicholas Nickleby “, “David Copperfield “, “A Tale of Two Cities “, and “Great Expectations .”
Contains: Extensive Bio, Criticism, Bibliography
Author: George Saintsbury
From: The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume XIII: English, The Victorian Age, Part One, The Nineteenth Century, II
Access Restrictions:
Dickens, theater, and the making of a Victorian reading public
http://library.northernlight.com/LW19980506030002083.html
“The novels of Charles Dickens should be read as theatrical texts.”
Contains: Criticism
Author: Vlock, Deborah M.
From: Studies in the Novel Vol. 29 No. 2 Pg. 164
Access Restrictions: NL
Ethical narrative in Dickens and Thackeray
http://library.northernlight.com/LW19980701030000244.html
“Works by Micael M. Clarke and John Reed explore the different visions of good and evil in the fiction of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray.”
Contains: Criticism
Author: Fisher, Judith
From: Studies in the Novel Vol. 29 No. 1 Pg. 108
Access Restrictions: NL
The Immortal Dickens
http://lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/GG-Dickens.html
Contains: Criticism
Author: George Gissing
From: 1925
In Defense of Flat Characters: A Discussion of Their Value to Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Leo Tolstoy
http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/IFR/bin/get.cgi?
directory=Vol.27/&filename=Clay.htm
The paper’s author argues that these authors have each “found an invaluable use for flat characters, one that could not have been accomplished without them. “
Contains: Criticism
Author: George R. Clay
From: International Fiction Review 2000; 27 no. 1-2:20-36
19th Century Gallery
http://members.cruzio.com/~varese/dickens/gallery.html
A compilation of comments by Dickens’ contemporaries, as well as some by 20th century authors. Includes comments by: Alcott, Chesterton, George Eliot, Emerson, Hardy, Henry James, Longfellow, Shaw, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Twain, Queen Victoria (among others).
Contains: Criticism, Commentary, Pictures
Author: Philadelphia Branch of the Dickens Fellowship
Keywords: contemporary criticism
Reading Style in Dickens
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/philosophy_and_literature/20.1alter.html
“Despite the great length of his major novels, Dickens deserves to be read slowly, with delectation, with occasional pauses to reread a choice passage, because he is one of the most inventive and vigorous stylists in the whole range of English literature. Style, as we know, has many facets, and Dickens’s powerful rhythms, his supple patterns of alliteration, the hammer-blows of the anaphoric insistence he often favors, the cunning interplay of different linguistic registers he sometimes introduces, are all worthy of attention. But he is above all the great master of figurative language in English after Shakespeare, and what I want to concentrate on here is how I focus as a reader on Dickens’s use of figurative language, and what it reveals to me about the world of his novels.” From a sample issue of the journal that is available without access restrictions.
Contains: Criticism
Author: Alter, Robert
From: Philosophy and Literature 20.1 (1996) 130-137
Themes in Charles Dickens’s Writings
http://www.victorianweb.org/dickens/themeov.html
This site from Victorian web contains a number of well-written undergraduate student essays under the direction of Professor George Landow.
Contains: Commentary, Criticism
From: Victorian Web
Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, & the Subject of Omniscience
http://www-ucpress.berkeley.edu:3030/dynaweb/public/books/literature/
jaffe
“In traditional narrative theory, the term “omniscience” refers to a narrator’s absolute knowledge and authority. Narrative theory provides no social, historical, or psychological context for omniscience, nor does it attempt to explain the predominance of omniscient narration in nineteenth-century British fiction. Audrey Jaffe uses Dickens’s novels and sketches to redefine narrative omniscience as a problematic that has implications for the construction of Victorian subjectivity, giving us new insights into Dickens and into other fiction as well. Jaffe demonstrates that omniscience is the effect of a series of oppositions—between narrator and character, knowledge and its absence, sympathy and irony, privacy and publicity. Showing how these oppositions participate in and enforce Victorian ideas about family, the subject, and private life, this study illuminates connections between ideology and narrative form.”
Contains: Criticism
Author: Jaffe, Audrey
From: The University of California Press: 1991
Biographical sites about Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens Gad’s Hill Place
http://www.perryweb.com/Dickens/index.html
A well-designed site which presents information on Dickens’ life and works, a searchable quote archive, and links to related sites, including some online texts.
Contains: Webliography, Works List, Works Available, Extensive Bio, Pictures
Author: Marsha Perry
Charles Dickens’s Journalistic Career
http://www.albion.edu/english/Diedrick/DICKENS.HTM
This essay “originally appeared in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 55: Victorian Prose Writers Before 1867 (Detroit: Gale, 1987). Includes links to supplementary graphics and text files.
Author: James Diedrick
From: Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol 55. Detroit: Gale, 1987.
David Perdue’s Charles Dickens Page
http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/
This site contains bibliographies, timelines, some plot summaries and details of Dickens’ London. It also contains information on Dickens’ travels in America and his influence on the celebration of Christmas.
Contains: Timeline, Pictures, Bibliography, Webliography, Works List, Commentary
Author: David Perdue
“Nothing of what is nobly done is ever lost”
http://www.bibliomania.com/Fiction/dickens/DickensIntro.html
This extensive biography tells of Dickens’ life, efforts at social reform, and discusses the social impact and popularity of many of his writings. It contains many quotations from Dickens about his works and life.
Contains: Sketch, Interview, Commentary
Author: Bob Heaman
Terraformers’ Tombtown Presents Charles Dickens
http://www.tombtown.com/bios/dickens.htm
This short biography focuses on Dickens’ adult life and it’s relationship to his writing. In particular, it highlights a few real people who were models for fictional characters.
Contains: Sketch
Author: Tombtown
Keywords: biographical criticism
Other sites about Charles Dickens
The Dickens’ Society
http://lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/CD-Society.html
Includes an index to the print publication, The DIckens Quarterly.
Contains: Bibliography
Author: The Dickens’ Society>
