ABSTRACT
Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities1 offers students a vivid perspective on the French Revolution and an engaging foray into character study. It has been said that Dickens stared long and hard into the mirror, making faces that he thought might best illustrate one of the fictional lives born of his imagination. He is also known to have spent long nights musing about the creation of new characters and to have wept at the untimely death of others. While many of Dickens’ characters are amusingly stock, others are complex and warrant careful consideration. Besides introducing readers to a memorable cast of characters, A Tale of Two Cities is alive with haunting motifs that give relief to the various themes at work in the novel.
