• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

A Tale of Two Cities

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-138-6

ISBN-10: 1-59308-138-3

eISBN : 978-1-411-43323-6

LC Control Number 2004100831

Produced and published in conjunction with:

Fine Creative Media, Inc.

322 Eighth Avenue

New York, NY 10001

Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

Printed in the United States of America

QM

9 11 13 15 17 19 20 18 16 14 12 10

CHARLES DICKENS

Born on February 7, 1812, Charles Dickens was the second of eight children in a family burdened with financial troubles. Despite difficult early years, he became the best-selling writer of his time.

In 1824, young Charles was withdrawn from school and forced to work at a boot-blacking factory when his improvident father—in fact, his entire family, except for him—was sent to debtor’s prison, where they remained for three months. Once they were released, Charles attended a private school for three years. The young man then became a solicitor’s clerk, mastered shorthand, and before long was employed as a Parliamentary reporter. When he was in his early twenties, Dickens began to publish stories and sketches of London life in a variety of periodicals.

It was the publication of The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837) that catapulted the twenty-five-year-old author to national renown. Dickens wrote with unequaled speed and often worked on several novels at a time, publishing them first in monthly installments and then as books. His early novels Oliver Twist (1837-1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841), and A Christmas Carol (1843) solidified his enormous, ongoing popularity. When Dickens was in his late thirties, his social criticism became biting, his humor dark, and his view of poverty darker still. David Copperfield (1849-1850), Bleak House (1852-1853), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) are the great works of his masterful and prolific later period.

In 1858 Dickens’s twenty-three-year marriage to Catherine Hogarth dissolved when he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, a young actress. The last years of his life were filled with intense activity: writing, managing amateur theatricals, and undertaking several reading tours that reinforced the public’s favorable view of his work but took an enormous toll on his health. Working feverishly to the last, Dickens collapsed and died on June 9, 1870, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood uncompleted.

THE WORLD OF CHARLES DICKENS ANDA TALE OF TWO CITIES

1811 Jane Austen publishes Sense and Sensibility , arguably the first modern English novel.

1812 Charles John Huffam Dickens is born at Portsmouth to John and Elizabeth (née Barrow) Dickens. The government orders a group of Luddites, an organized band of laborers opposed to the industrialized machinery that threatens to replace them, to be shot down.

1817 The Dickens family moves to Chatham, in Kent. Charles be gins reading the books in his father’s library; his favorites in clude the works of Miguel de Cervantes, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett.

1822 The Dickens family moves again, this time to Camden, in North London. Charles quickly and fastidiously learns the landscape of London, an invaluable resource for his later writing.

1824 Charles is sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory, a manu facturer of boot-blacking. His father is arrested for debt and imprisoned for three months, and while the rest of the fam ily stays with John Dickens in prison, Charles lodges else where and continues pasting labels onto bottles of blacking at Warren’s.

1825 John Dickens retires on a naval pension, and Charles attends Wellington House Academy, a private school where he wins a prize in Latin.

1827 He becomes a clerk in a solicitor’s office.

1829 After learning shorthand, he establishes himself as a reporter for the law courts, Parliament, and various London news papers. He meets Maria Beadnell and falls in love with her.

1831 Dickens joins the journalistic staff of the Mirror of Parliament ; he transcribes speeches by the