A Tale of Two Cities (Everyman's Library)

Presented here in a beautiful hardcover edition, A Tale of Two Cities is a classic and powerful study of crowd psychology and the dark emotions aroused by the French Revolution, illuminated by Charles Dickens’s lively comedy.

Lucie Manette had been separated from her father for eighteen years while he languished in Paris’s most feared prison, the Bastille. Finally reunited, the fortunes of the Manette family becomes inextricably intertwined with those of two men, the heroic aristocrat Darnay, and the dissolute lawyer, Carton. Their story, which encompasses violence, revenge, love and redemption, is grippingly played out against the backdrop of the terrifying brutality of the French Revolution.
A Tale of Two Cities begins on a muddy English road in an atmosphere charged with mystery and drama, and it ends in the Paris of the French Revolution with one of the most famous acts of self-sacrifice in literature. In between lies one of Charles Dickens’s most exciting books—a historical novel that, generation after generation, has given readers access to the profound human dramas that lie behind cataclysmic social and political events.

This edition includes an introduction by Simon Schama in addition to sixteen Phiz illustrations.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Everyman’s Library Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

CHARLES DICKENS was born in a little house in Landport, Portsea, England, on February 7, 1812. The second of eight children, he grew up in a family frequently beset by financial insecurity. At age eleven, Dickens was taken out of school and sent to work in London backing warehouse, where his job was to paste labels on bottles for six shillings a week. His father John Dickens, was a warmhearted but improvident man. When he was condemned the Marshela Prison for unpaid debts, he unwisely agreed that Charles should stay in lodgings and continue working while the rest of the family joined him in jail. This three-month separation caused Charles much pain; his experiences as a child alone in a huge city–cold, isolated with barely enough to eat–haunted him for the rest of his life.

When the family fortunes improved, Charles went back to school, after which he became an office boy, a freelance reporter and finally an author. With Pickwick Papers (1836–7) he achieved immediate fame; in a few years he was easily the post popular and respected writer of his time. It has been estimated that one out of every ten persons in Victorian England was a Dickens reader. Oliver Twist (1837), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) were huge successes. Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4) was less so, but Dickens followed it with his unforgettable, A Christmas Carol (1843), Bleak House (1852–3), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1855–7) reveal his deepening concern for the injustices of British Society. A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860–1) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–5) complete his major works.

Dickens's marriage to Catherine Hoggarth produced ten children but ended in separation in 1858. In that year he began a series of exhausting public readings; his health gradually declined. After putting in a full day's work at his home at Gads Hill, Kent on June 8, 1870, Dickens suffered a stroke, and he died the following day.