A Tale of Two Cities moves between London and Paris through the French Revolution, entwining Lucie Manette, Charles Darnay, and the dissipated yet redeemable Sydney Carton. Dickens fuses melodrama with the measured architecture of the historical novel, developing motifs of doubling, resurrection, and inexorable "footsteps." This unabridged edition restores Phiz's original plates, whose chiaroscuro and crowd scenes intensify the book's antitheses-justice and vengeance, private sentiment and public tumult-within the 1859 culture of serial print. Composed as Dickens launched All the Year Round, the novel bears the tensile pacing of weekly serials and his exacting editorial control. Long preoccupied with reform and urban spectacle, and steeped in Carlyle's French Revolution, he also drew on the stage pathos of his recent play The Frozen Deep; Carton's self-abnegation retains that theatrical psychology. Scholars and general readers alike will value this edition's ethical clarity and narrative drive. It rewards courses and book clubs for its symmetries, rhetorical music, and political ambivalence, while Phiz's images supply contemporaneous visual cues. A humane, urgent classic, newly vivid in text and image.
Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable-distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.
