After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England.
Charles Dickens (1812-70) was a political reporter and journalist
whose popularity was established by the phenomenally successful
Pickwick Papers (1836-7). His novels captured and held the public
imagination over a period of more than thirty years.
Richard Maxwell teaches in the Comparative Literature & English
departments at Yale.
“[A Tale of Two Cities] has the best of Dickens and the worst of Dickens: a dark, driven opening, and a celestial but melodramatic ending; a terrifyingly demonic villainess and (even by Dickens’ standards) an impossibly angelic heroine. Though its version of the French Revolution is brutally simplified, its engagement with the immense moral themes of rebirth and terror, justice, and sacrifice gets right to the heart of the matter . . . For every reader in the past hundred and forty years and for hundreds to come, it is an unforgettable ride.”–from the Introduction by Simon Schama
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