"Cliff Notes - Tale of Two Cities, A" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

"I never shall forget, I never can forget that my mother was warm for
my being sent back."

Dickens also never forgot any of his early troubles with women. As a
rising young reporter in London he fell passionately in love with
Maria Beadnell, a girl from a prosperous, middle-class background.
Influenced by her parents, Maria rejected him. Dickens was
devastated, and his enduring but limited conception of the ideal
woman began to take form. In A Tale's Lucie Manette you'll meet the
typical Dickens heroine: young, beautiful, submissive.

A self-taught shorthand reporter, Dickens worked his way into writing
for newspapers, and in the early 1830s began publishing fictional
sketches about London life. In 1836 with the phenomenal success of
his second book, The Pickwick Papers, he was free to write full time.
A man of amazing energy, Dickens produced frequent novels and short
stories, edited the papers in which these appeared, and commented on
and dabbled in politics. In the flush of Pickwick's success he
married, and soon had to cope with the demands of an ever-increasing
family. By the mid-1850s Dickens' wife Catherine had given him ten
children--and Dickens was questioning his life's scheme.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,..." The famous
opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities describes the year 1775, but
Dickens might well have been characterizing his own era. Victorian
England (1837-1901, the span of Queen Victoria's reign) was a society
of rapid change. Dickens himself saw the coach system give way to a
railroad network, and England shift from a predominantly rural to an
urban, industrial society. It was the best of times for aristocrats
and wealthy industrialists; it was surely the worst of times for the
urban poor, slum-dwellers who labored from childhood in sooty
factories. These years also saw the rise of Victorian morality, with
its ideals of family life and puritan habits, even as prostitution
flourished and drunkenness grew to a national epidemic.

A self-made man acutely aware of his near working-class origins,
Dickens both battled prevailing trends and followed them. He was
sensitive to the needs of the poor, yet delighted when he could
finally afford a country house and live like an upper-middle-class
gentleman. Such works as Hard Times, David Copperfield, and Oliver
Twist had satirized or railed at contemporary social abuses, making
Dickens' popular reputation as a great reformer.

Yet a depression had settled on him. He was feeling more and more
unsuited to Catherine. The atmosphere darkens in the novels of the
1850s: Bleak House, Hard Times, and Little Dorrit. Readers during
these years missed the simpler pleasures and humor of The Pickwick
Papers.

A Tale of Two Cities ran between April and November 1859 in weekly