A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

. .

Résumé :
Sidney Carton is almost the only case in which Dickens has drawn a hero on the true heroic scale, and his famous act of self-sacrifice is unmatched in fiction. The book must be ranked very high among the great tragedies in literature.

Biographie:
Charles Dickens (1812-70) was an English writer, generally considered to be the greatest novelist of the Victorian period and responsible for some of English literature's most iconic novels and characters. He continues to be one of the best-known and most read of English authors, with multiple adaptations of his work frequently being produced....

Sommaire:
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsea, England. His parents were middle-class and suffered financially. When Dickens was twelve years old, his family faced financial crisis, which forced him to quit school and work in a shoe polish manufacturing factory. Dickens's mother and siblings eventually joined him. Dickens continued to work at the factory for several months. In the factory the horrific conditions haunted him throughout his life. Dickens never forgot the day when a senior boy in the warehouse took it upon himself to instruct Dickens how to do his work more efficiently. As a young adult, Dickens worked as a law clerk and later as a journalist. He perceived the darker social conditions of the Industrial Revolution. A collection of semi-fictional sketches entitled Sketches by Boz earned him recognition as a writer. Dickens began to make money from his writing when he published his first novel, The Pickwick Papers in 1836. The Pickwick Papers was hugely popular and Dickens became a literary celebrity at the age of twenty-five. Dickens's themes included wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. In 1836, Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, but after twenty years of marriage and their ten children, he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, an actress many years his junior. Soon after, Dickens and his wife separated. Dickens remained a prolific writer to the end of his life, and his novels - Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, and Bleak House - continued to earn critical and popular acclaim. He died of a stroke in 1870, at the age of 58....