A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (best young adult book series .TXT) ๐
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A doctor is released from the Bastille after being falsely imprisoned for almost eighteen years. A young woman discovers the father sheโs never known is not dead but alive, if not entirely well. A young man is acquitted of being a traitor, due in part to the efforts of a rather selfish lout who is assisting the young manโs attorney. A man has a wine shop in Paris with a wife who knits at the bar. These disparate elements are tied together as only Dickens can, and in the process he tells the story of the French Revolution.
Charles Dickens was fascinated by Thomas Carlyleโs magnum opus The French Revolution; according to Dickensโ letters, he read it โ500 timesโ and carried it with him everywhere while he was working on this novel. When he wrote to Carlyle asking him for books to read on background, Carlyle sent him two cartloads full. Dickens mimicked Carlyleโs style, his chronology, and his overall characterization of the revolution; although A Tale of Two Cities is fiction, the historical events described are largely accurate, sometimes exactly so. Even so, Dickens made his name and reputation on telling stories full of characters one could be invested in, care about, and despise, and this novel has all of those and more. It also, in its first and last lines, has two of the most famous lines in literature. With the possible exception of A Christmas Carol, it is his most popular novel, and according to many, his best.
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- Author: Charles Dickens
Read book online ยซA Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (best young adult book series .TXT) ๐ยป. Author - Charles Dickens
In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterersโ warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of โthe Captain,โ gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself by the other four, โin consequence of the failure of his ammunition:โ after which the mail was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Gilesโs, to search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; today, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and tomorrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmerโs boy of sixpence.
All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creaturesโ โthe creatures of this chronicle among the restโ โalong the roads that lay before them.
II The MailIt was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the first of the persons with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooterโs Hill. He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to their duty.
With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested them and brought them to a stand, with a wary โWo-ho! soho-then!โ the near leader violently shook his head and everything upon itโ โlike an unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.
There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all.
Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the ears,
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