A Tale Of Two Cities (Illustrated And Annotated Edition)

This is the illustrated and annotated edition including an extensive biographical essay about the author and his life as well as a wealth of original illustrations. You will also find a detailed introduction (which is not included in other editions) regarding the history of the title and many insights. A Tale of Two Cities differs essentially from all of Dickens' other novels in style and manner of treatment. Forster, in his 'Life of Dickens,' writes that "there is no instance in his novels excepting this, of a deliberate and planned departure from the method of treatment which had been pre-eminently the source of his popularity as a novelist." To rely less upon character than upon incident, and to resolve that his actors should be expressed by the story more than they should express themselves by dialogue, was for him a hazardous, and can hardly be called an entirely successful, experiment. With singular dramatic vivacity, much constructive art, and with descriptive passages of a high order everywhere, there was probably never a book by a great humorist, and an artist so prolific in conception, with so little humor and so few remarkable figures. Its merit lies elsewhere. The two cities are London and Paris. The time is just before and during the French Revolution. A peculiar chain of events knits and interweaves the lives of a "few simple, private people" with the outbreak of a terrible public event. Dr. Manette has been a prisoner in the Bastille for eighteen years, languishing there, as did so many others, on some vague unfounded charge. His release when the story opens, his restoration to his daughter Lucie, the trial and acquittal of one Charles Darnay, nephew of a French marquis, on a charge of treason, the marriage of Lucie Manette to Darnay,— these incidents form the introduction to the drama of blood which is to follow. Two friends of the Manette family complete the circle of important characters: Mr. Lorry, a solicitor of a very ancient London firm, and Sydney Carton, the most complete gentleman to be found in Dickens. Carton has wasted his talents, leading a wild, bohemian existence in London. The one garden spot in his life is his love for Lucie Manette. To this love he clings as a drowning man to a spar. For this love he lays down his life. At the breaking out of the French Revolution, Darnay hastens to Paris to aid an old family servant who is in danger of losing his life. His wife and his father-in-law follow him. Gradually the entire circle of friends, including Mr. Lorry and Sidney Carton, find themselves in the horrible environment of the Paris of the Terror. Darnay himself is imprisoned and condemned to death, by the agency of a wine-seller, Defarge, and his wife, a female impersonation of blood and war. To save the husband of the woman he loves, Carton by strategy takes his place in prison. The novel closes with the magnificent scene where Carton goes to his death on the scaffold, redeeming a worthless life by one supreme act of devotion. Only the little sewing-girl in the death-cart with him knows his secret. As he mounts the guillotine there rises before him the vision of a redeemed and renewed Paris, of a great and glorious nation. There rise before him many memories and many dead hopes of his own past life, but in his heart there is the serenity of triumph: — "It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."