Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution

2009 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
The French Revolution

scholarly journals Understanding Violence in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-48
Author(s):  
Mohammed Rasul Murad Akoi
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Psychological Approach ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Inherent Part ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This paper, Understanding Violence in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, deals with violence in its various forms in Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities. The novel recounts the French Revolution of 1789. In the novel, Dickens portrays a terrifying scene of blood and brutality. Violence appears in different forms. Critics have paid attention to Charles Dickens’ own fear of a similar revolution in England. The paper attempts to find the substance of that fear. The paper will discuss the three forms of violence in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities; namely, violence as an inherent part of the French Revolution; violence committed by the crowds or mobs, and the evil that rises and grows as the Revolution continues. It will be argued that Dickens’ depiction of the crowd and mob behavior in A Tale of Two Cities captures the potential which is in the mentality of any crowd to grow violent. That is, a seemingly innocent start could lead to evil. A socio-psychological approach will also be consulted to analyze violence in the novel; violence as part of the revolution; violence committed by the mobs, and finally how the revolutionary masses turn evil.

scholarly journals Mutiny Echoes: India, Britons, and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities

2007 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
PRITI JOSHI
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
National Identity ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Indian Mutiny ◽  
British Culture ◽  
The French Revolution

This essay asks what, if any, import the Indian ““Mutiny”” of 1857 had on A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens�s fictionalized account of the French Revolution. Begun shortly after the Indian uprising started, Dickens�s historical novel appears studiously to avoid any mention of events on the Indian subcontinent, even though these events preoccupied and enraged the author. Few scholars have attended to the question of A Tale of Two Cities and the ““Mutiny,”” but when they have, scholars have looked for analogies between India and Dickens�s account of the French Revolution. In this essay, by contrast, I examine A Tale of Two Cities in a larger context——of Britons' response to the Uprising, of Dickens's short stories and essays in Household Words in the years before the ““Mutiny”” and immediately after, of Dickens's disenchantment with aspects of British culture, and of his need to articulate a national identity grounded in action. I argue that the events in India were the match that ignited Dickens's already established midcentury interests in national identity, nobility, and masculine heroism. I do not wish to suggest that A Tale of Two Cities is an Indian ““Mutiny”” novel, but rather that it is a novel about the ““Making of Britons,”” an important endeavor for an author who was intensely dissatisfied with the Britain that he saw around him.

Revolution, Rigor, and Rigor Mortis

1967 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-108
Author(s):  
Stephen S. Willoughby
Keyword(s):  
Mathematics Education ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Rigor Mortis ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
The One ◽  
The French Revolution

When I first heard the recent changes in mathematics education described as a Revolution, my feeling was that the word was too harsh and implied too much violence I preferred to omit the “R.” Perhaps this is because the word “Revolution” always brings to mind the French Revolution and Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities in which, for some reason, I always identified myself with Sidney Carton (the one who lost his head over a girl).

Feeling Like It Wasn't

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-103
Author(s):  
Rae Greiner
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Or History ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

In “Is There a Problem with Historical Fiction (or with Scott's Redgauntlet)?”—an essay, as it happens, on Sir Walter Scott's great counterfactual novel—Harry E. Shaw calls on literary critics more fully to register “the remarkable variety of things history can do in novels, by short-circuiting the assumption that the representation of history in fiction is really always doing the same sort of work, or should be.” History might be a source of imaginative energy, a sort of launching pad for a book about timeless truths, as in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (“ultimately about individual sacrifice and transcendence, not about the French Revolution in the way in which Scott's Waverley is about the Forty-Five”); or the past might function as “a pastoral,” which is to say, as a field onto which authors project the concerns of their own times, as in Romola (depicting problems “in definitively Victorian terms and then project[ing them] back on to Renaissance Italy,” where they would have been understood quite differently [176–77]). Or history, what Shaw calls “objective history,” might be a work's actual subject (180). An historical novel of this last sort tells it like it was, or tries to. But even that novel is only doing so much, only making a use of history. Georg Lukács is therefore wrong in thinking that “a sufficiently dialectical mode of representation could capture everything” (Shaw 175). No one mode can capture all of even a highly delimited history at once.

Nothing Personal

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Stout
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Logical Consequence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The People ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
The Right ◽  
The French Revolution

Chapter four looks at Charles Dickens’s 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. By examining parallels between the novel and Robespierre’s political philosophy, this chapter argues that Dickens’s novel understands the French Revolution not as an event that gave individuals the right of self-governance but as the event that formalized a conception of citizenship in which individual persons stand as avatars for the national will. The Revolutionary Terror and the guillotine are thus seen as the logical consequence of a theory of the nation that prioritized the People over individual persons.

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Critical Methods ◽  
The French Revolution

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

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