Tale of Two Cities (Version 5)
Chapter 1 of 45 The Period
- Running time
- 15 h 28 min
- Language
- English
- Read by
- Richard Reiman
Chapters
About this recording
Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities is a novel that views the eighteenth century French Revolution through the lens of nineteenth century Victorian Romanticism. Dickens tells the story of a wide range of characters in London and Paris whose lives intersect in the turbulence of the revolution. Unusual among his novels, A Tale of Two Cities relies heavily on plot rather than characterization. The moralism so typical of Dickens is much in evidence, however, as the author stages his story in the most violent period of the revolution, the Reign of Terror (1792-1794). It is very much a tale of good versus evil, with Dickens essentially realizing in fiction the historian Thomas Carlyle’s now-discredited interpretation of the French Revolution as a struggle between oppressed poor and monstrous aristocrats. (The French Middle-Class, which began and ended the Revolution in reality, are nowhere to be found in the novel) Dickens situates the tensions of the period in the characters of the story: Charles Darnay, scion of the aristocracy but determined to atone for his family’s sins; Sydney Carton, a dissolute English barrister drawn to a plan of redemptive self-sacrifice to give his life to…
