Why is tale of two cities a classic

Explore Plus. Enter pincode. Usually delivered in 3 days? Charles Dickens. AmazingBuy 4. After serving 18 years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Alexandre Manette is finally released and united with his daughter Lucie in England. As the lives of Alexandre and Lucie intertwine with those around them - most namely Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, two very different men drawn together by their love for Lucie - the rising tensions in France and the violent eruption of the revolution climax in the storming of the Bastille.

But in A Tale of Two Cities I saw himpulling back from concerted action against social injustice, as adopting the British establishment's horror over the French Revolution, focusing on the uprising's excesses. Worse, he used an improbable melodramatic story of individual romance and personal sacrifice to turn readers attention from—and against—the larger issues being played out in England and France in that tumultuous time. However, years later when I picked up the novel again I realized that first reading had been too quick, in my eagerness to catch the admittedly thrilling narrative highlights.

I resolved to re-read it more carefully and slowly, much as in Dickens's lifetime it had been read by an eager public who'd had to wait for weekly instalments. The results were revelatory. Despite A Tale of Two Cities being one of Dickens's most heavily plotted full-length novels, with a basic story-line that is perhaps his best known, much of it is written in a curiously indirect style. Lending itself to another one of those ambivalent parody critiques: "It's Dickens's simplest novel, it's Dickens's most complex novel.

He often eschews in A Tale the long descriptions he's known for and jumps right into plot developments without giving the reader vital information up front, such as who the characters involved are or what they are trying to do, leaving it all to become clear through the chapter's progress—or later in the novel. The whole first "Recalled to Life" section is narrated thus mysteriously: what's the meaning of this enigmatic message received by a coach passenger?

Why does it whip him into action and what's his mission? Who is being revived? The latter question is not completely answered until late in the novel. Even one of the first answers to this question raises another mystery which is oddly avoided by all until its revelation catches them off guard near the end: why was Dr. Manette imprisoned in the Bastille in the first place? Dickens is adept at posing such mysteries and then misdirecting our attention, so that we brush them off until they come back to bite us as sharply as the characters themselves.

For example, Dr. He won't say, so it's probably just part of his obsessive craziness and there's so much else going on that we don't ponder it. Toggle navigation. High 91F. Winds light and variable.. Tonight Clear skies. Low 61F. Winds light and variable. His books are amusing but also rich and thought-provoking. And his outage at societal inequalities is sadly still quite relevant, just as it was in the 19th century. Overall, I really liked this novel. It tells the story of one family that is caught up in the events of the French Revolution, and it asks a lot of questions about justice and guilt.

One man is basically asked to pay for the crimes committed by his cruel, aristocratic family on the Parisian poor. He has rejected his family long ago and deplores their actions, but the revolution is imminent and the oppressed want blood.

How do we make amends, when our ancestors and sometimes even our close relatives, have committed atrocities or acts of oppression? My copy had brilliant black and white illustrations — like this one. Yet Dickens also condemns the violence of the Revolution fairly explicitly. So her behavior is, at least, understandable. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.

No surprise, the characters were super vivid and easy to visualize, down to the smallest player. She has no personality or life outside of her self-sacrificing devotion to her husband and father. Dickens seems to have no interest in either her bodily or intellectual reality — she has a child and it grows to the age of a toddler in the space of about a paragraph or two.

How do these events change her?! Sydney Carton is great and, quite frankly, the whole book is pretty great too. It asks if a man, a family, even a society, can be redeemed.

It would be perfect reading if you enjoy things like Poldark , or other dramas set in this period revolving around one family.