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INTRODUCTION
Although the setting of A Tale of Two Cities is different from Dickens' more familiar canvas of Victorian England, the novel contains all his classic themes of himian suffering, poverty, sacrifice and nobleness of spirit. The two cities are London and Paris at the time of the great social and historical upheaval of the French Revolution. The author omits historical names and places, but the narrative is closely based on Carlyle's The French Revolution (a 'wonderful book' as he calls it in his Preface), other contemporary historical sources and his own investigations of the surviving historical sights of the Revolution during his repeated visits to Paris in the 1840s and 1850s. The life of ordinary struggling people in Hoimdsditch, the Old Bailey, St Antoine and Versailles during the 'terrible time' of the early 1790s is depicted by Dickens in a way no other novelist has succeeded in matching.
A Tale of Two Cities, as Dickens intended, provides an insight into the causes, the day-to-day reality and the consequences of the French Revolution and the Terror. Dr Manette, a French phj'sician, attends a poor family and becomes aware that his patients are the victims of maltreatment and mortal wounding by the Marquis de St Evremonde and his brother. The doctor is imprisoned, to secure his silence, in the notorious Bastille prison for eighteen years. He emerges demented and is brought to England where his sanity gradually returns. Charles Damay, a nephew of the Marquis who has renounced his heritage due to the cruelties of the French ruling aristocracy and come to live in England, falls in love vrith and marries Dr Manette's daughter, Lucie. During the Terror, Damay travels to Paris in an attempt to rescue a servant accused of serving the emigrant nobility, but is himself arrested, imprisoned and sentenced to death. At the last moment Damay is smuggled out of prison by Sydney Carton, a dissolute English barrister whom he closely resembles, and who is devoted to Lucie. Carton then takes Damay's place on the scaffold, adding redemption through self-sacrifice to this poignant tale of suffering.
A Tale of Two Cities was originally serialized in All the Year Round between 30 April and 26 November 1859, and was first published in book form in the same year.