Sylvia, the Russian Shrink
A Tale of Two Cities
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Most adults in the English and non English-speaking world can claim to have read or studied at least one of Charles Dickens's works. High school and college teachers in the United States and other nations still regularly make room in the syllabus for his novels and short stories. Many rationales are behind this continuing academic interest that can be gathered into two basic categories or lines of reasoning - the first historical, and the second artistic. From the historical viewpoint, students should study Dickens because of his important position in the development of English literature. He was the first great writer to struggle with and protest loudly against the growing problems of urban civilization, including debilitating slum life, child labor, imprisonment for debt, and unsafe factory conditions. In that aspect Dickens was a publishing phenomenon in his own nineteenth-century Victorian England. Dickens was with out doubts a best-seller of his time. The particular literary qualities that helped make Dickens the quintessential and most popular writer of his age fuel the artistic rationale for studying his works today, for these qualities can be as attractive, absorbing, and entertaining to the modern reader as they were to the readers of Dickens's own time. He is a master of characterization with a transcendent facility to conjure up visual images of living, breathing persons and an incomparable command of realistic dialogue. In the book A Tale of Two Cities all the characters are essential to their function, none introduced merely for fun or in sheer creative passion. The book concentrates upon the blood-bathed violence of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Two revolutions, one of the generation and the other political, determine the structure of A Tale of Two Cities. A combination of critical methods - literary, psychoanalytic, and historical - are required to illuminate the novel's complex structure and its impact on different readers. The novel demonstrates the correlation between family and nation, and it uses the language of psychological conflict and psychological identification to portray social upheaval and the restoration of social order. In his version of the French Revolution, Dickens portrayed not only a nation suddenly in conflict with its own past traditions, but also generations of individual families within that nation struggling to cope with and ultimately to break away from the actions of those who preceded them. Dickens begins A Tale of Two Cities with the brilliant rhetorical flourish of the opening paragraph:
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was season of Darkness, it was the spirit of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short. the period was so far like the present period. . . " |