"Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickens Charles)

balance opposing pairs, to make contrasts and comparisons. Look
closely for dual themes and characters, even (in Book the Second) for
dual chapter titles. Most elements in the story have, if not an
equal, at least an opposing element.

With a description of a brutal punishment carried out on a French
boy, Dickens leads in to two major themes: Fate and Death. Each is
personified--given human identity--a trick of style Dickens will be
using again and again. The "certain moveable framework" for which
trees have already sprung up is the guillotine; at the moment, the
sinister-sounding "tumbrils of the Revolution" are merely farm carts.
The basis for their future employment, carrying the doomed through
the streets of Paris, has already been laid by an unjust and ignorant
society.

Dickens' tone for describing abuses is ironic, but indignant, too.
Clearly, he doesn't believe that a murdering highwayman shoots
"gallantly," but he does view the hangman as "ever worse than
useless." Few of Dickens' contemporaries despised capital punishment
as much as he did; fewer describe it so vividly. What's your
reaction to the executions detailed here? Dickens himself was both
fascinated and repelled by death, and generations of readers have
found his attitude catching.

NOTE: TOPICAL/HISTORICAL REFERENCES The two kings with "large jaws"
and their queens, one fair, one plain, are the monarchs of England
and France: George III and Charlotte Sophia; Louis XVI and Marie
Antoinette, respectively.

The references to visions, spirits, and spectres mark the beginning
of a deliberate pattern. Mrs. Southcott was a religious visionary;
the "Cock-lane ghost" was an 18th-century poltergeist. Moving ahead
to his own time, Dickens invokes the "spirits of this very year last
past," meaning those spirits raised by D. D. Home, a popular
Victorian medium.

These historic ghosts will give way to fictional ones. As you read,
look for the mist likened to "an evil spirit" (Book I, Chapter 2),
and for the "spectre" of Jarvis Lorry's nightmare (I, 3)--the image
is of Dr. Manette, raised from the "death" of solitary imprisonment.
References to the spirit world span the entire novel. The ghosts are
here for a reason.

If you've heard many ghost stories you know that they create a weird,
unreal atmosphere--exactly the effect Dickens was aiming for in A
Tale. His spirits and spectres hint at the possibility of another
world, of life beyond death. They're images that support two of the
novel's themes: unreality versus reality, and--more
important--resurrection.