A Tale Of Two Cities

“[A Tale of Two Cities] has the best of Dickens and the worst of Dickens: a dark, driven opening, and a celestial but melodramatic ending; a terrifyingly demonic villainess and (even by Dickens’ standards) an impossibly angelic heroine. Though its version of the French Revolution is brutally simplified, its engagement with the immense moral themes of rebirth and terror, justice, and sacrifice gets right to the heart of the matter … For every reader in the past hundred and forty years and for hundreds to come, it is an unforgettable ride.”—Simon Schama

Charles Dickens (1812-70) experienced hunger, privation, debtors’ prison, and child labor as a child. A legacy allowed him to escape and receive two years of formal schooling. He became a parliamentary reporter before launching his writing career with Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837). As a novelist and magazine editor, he found serialized success through Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). He continued popular dramatic readings until his death, when The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained unfinished.

Frederick Busch was a writer, teacher, and critic, and the author of more than twenty works of fiction, including North, Girls, and The Mutual Friend, a novel about Charles Dickens.

A. N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has held a prominent position in literature and journalism. He is the author of biographies of Sir Walter Scott, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, Hilaire Belloc, and Iris Murdoch, as well as The Victorians and After the Victorians. He is also the author of novels such as My Name Is Legion and The Healing Art.

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