A Tale of Two Cities

by Dickens, Charles; Busch, Frederick

• ISBN13: 9780451526564
• ISBN10: 0451526562
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-08-01
• Publisher: Signet Classics

Summary

Dickens's classic tale of the French Revolution brings to life a time of terror and treason, and chronicles a starving people who rise in frenzy and hate to overthrow a corrupt and decadent regime. This 150th anniversary edition features a new Afterword. Revised reissue.

Author Biography

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, at Landport, near Portsmouth, England. He died at Gads Hill, his home in Kent, on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children in a family often plagued by debt, Dickens at ten saw his father arrested and confined in the Marshalsea, a debtors' prison in London, and although a small boy he was placed in a blacking factory where he worked at labeling bottles, visiting John Dickens on Sundays. Charles returned to school on his father's release, taught himself shorthand, and at sixteen became a parliamentary reporter. At twenty-four his career took off with the publication of Sketches by Boz (1836), which was followed by Pickwick Papers the next year. As a novelist and magazine editor he had a long run of serialized successes through Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). His family life had ended earlier, in 1858, when fame drew him apart from his wife of twenty-three years, Catherine, and (although his readers never knew) into the arms of young Ellen Ternan, an actress. Ill health slowed him down but he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fiction to an adoring public that included Queen Victoria. At his death he left The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished. Frederick Busch is the author of eighteen works of fiction, including Closing Arguments, Girls, and The Mutual Friend, a novel about Charles Dickens. The winner of numerous awards, he is the Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University.

Table of Contents

Recalled to Life
The Period	p. 1
The Mail	p. 3
The Night Shadows	p. 8
The Preparation	p. 11
The Wine-shop	p. 20
The Shoemaker	p. 29
The Golden Thread
Five Years Later	p. 38
A Sight	p. 43
A Disappointment	p. 48
Congratulatory	p. 59
The Jackal	p. 64
Hundreds of People	p. 69
Monseigneur in Town	p. 79
Monseigneur in the Country	p. 86
The Gorgon's Head	p. 90
Two Promises	p. 99
A Companion Picture	p. 105
The Fellow of Delicacy	p. 108
The Fellow of No Delicacy	p. 114
The Honest Tradesman	p. 117
Knitting	p. 126
Still Knitting	p. 135
One Night	p. 143
Nine Days	p. 147
An Opinion	p. 152
A Plea	p. 158
Echoing Footsteps	p. 161
The Sea Still Rises	p. 170
Fire Rises	p. 174
Drawn to the Loadstone Rock	p. 180
The Track of a Storm
In Secret	p. 190
The Grindstone	p. 199
The Shadow	p. 204
Calm in Storm	p. 208
The Wood-sawyer	p. 213
Triumph	p. 217
A Knock at the Door	p. 223
A Hand at Cards	p. 227
The Game Made	p. 237
The Substance of the Shadow	p. 247
Dusk	p. 259
Darkness	p. 262
Fifty-two	p. 269
The Knitting Done	p. 278
The Footsteps Die Out for Ever	p. 288
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