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Tale of Two Cities - A Review by Naval Langa

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Review of The Novel TALE OF TWO CITIES written by Charles Dickens. The writer of the review is Mr Naval Langa, an author from India. He writes short stories and articles about the art of painting.

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Tale of Two Cities - A Review by Naval Langa

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Naval Langa
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Review of The Novel TALE OF TWO CITIES written by Charles Dickens. The writer of the review is Mr Naval Langa, an author from India. He writes short stories and articles about the art of painting.

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Review of The Novel TALE OF TWO CITIES written by Charles Dickens. The writer of the review is Mr Naval Langa, an author from India. He writes short stories and articles about the art of painting.

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27 views4 pages

Tale of Two Cities - A Review by Naval Langa

Uploaded by

Naval Langa
Review of The Novel TALE OF TWO CITIES written by Charles Dickens. The writer of the review is Mr Naval Langa, an author from India. He writes short stories and articles about the art of painting.

Copyright:

© All Rights Reserved
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Review of The Novel TALE OF TWO CITIES written by Charles

Dickens. The writer of the review is Mr. Naval Langa, an author from
India. He writes short stories.

It is quite difficult to write about the novels written by Charles Dickens, as


you have to be one among the thousands of people who have done the
job earlier. 

It is quite surprising that the master writer like Charles Dickens who
wrote novels like 'Hard Times' and 'Great Expectations' turned on the
historic lane and configured a love story that is passing through the
confusing streets of two great cities: London and Paris. 

These were the most turbulent cities of the eighteenth century. He had
woven his novel 'A Tale of Two Cities' narrating these cities.

The Plot: A Story of Turmoil

The love relationship of two unusual characters, Lucy Manette and


Charles Darney passed through the time narrated by Dickens as 'It was
the best of the times; it was the worst of the times'. 

The couple made their way through strange circumstances. They were
caught in a storm of the revolutionary atmosphere of late eighteenth-
century France. And they would have hardly passed through it without
offering abnormal responses to the situation they were forced to face.

The story is painted on a torn canvas of turbulent London where


mockery of the law had replaced justice, the guns were necessary
articles for travellers, and the fresh graves were excavated for selling the
parts of recently buried dead bodies. The warehouse of France in
general and the theatre of Paris, in particular, were worse than London.

The last phase of feudalism and the haunted the conscience of French
peasants had outrun all the notions of civility and human behaviour. 

The movement of peasants for ousting the tyrant rulers partially ended
on the fall of the prison of Bastille. All the prisoners were freed from the
Bastille jail-Dr. Manette, the father of Lucy Manette, one of the prime
characters of the novel being one of them.

Lucy helped her father to come out of the obsession of his jail term. She
took charge of the boat and sailed through the demanding process of
curing his father and developing her relationship with Charles. 
A migrant from France and language teacher in London school, Charles
Darney had an aristocratic lineage that he kept undisclosed until the day
of his marriage with Lucy. But his aristocratic virtue of protecting one of
his former loyalists drove him into the storm of France. He was caught;
he was convicted for merely having the aristocratic lineage, and he was
to be executed.

But he was freed through unexpected assistance from a former lover of


Lucy, Sydney Carton. His face was just like the face of Charles. Sydney
Carton replaced himself in Charles' place in the jail, sacrificing his life for
saving the life of the husband of the woman whom he loved. Other
characters, Jarvis Lorry, Defarge couple, Mrs Pross, and others walked
with the story, making its flow lucid and the contents rich.

How to Create Believable Characters - Learning From Charles


Dickens

If we want to know how the characters in novels are created and how
they are made looking lively, the reading of the novel A Tale of Two
Cities written by Charles Dickens would be a good guide.

Dickens’ characterization of men and women in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ is


near to realistic. Some of them act a little bit dramatic, as and when the
plot of the novel demands so. Jarvis Lorry, a simple-minded banker and
Madame Defarge, a diehard revolutionary, never depart from the strict
necessities attached with their professions. 

But Dr Manette turns himself into an advocate and takes the tools of a
saviour in his hands for saving his son-in-law from a certain death
penalty.

Charles Dickens was the technician who used symbols as effective


implements for helping the larger picture of his novel to be understood
deeply. Unlike a well-sculptured use of powerful symbols in his other
novels, in ‘A Tale Of Two Cities’ he depended upon the sharp adjectives
and salient humour. While caricaturing the host of characters, he
displayed his masterly art of telling about the aspects of contemporary
society. 

In the same manner, he narrated the pros and cones of the ongoing
revolution in France. The vivid description of all the characters is such
that if by chance any one of them passes by us, we would immediately
tell that ‘this is Jerry Cruncher (from his unique style of walking) or this is
Lucy (by seeing her serene beauty), or this is Madame Defarge (from the
frozen lava of her anger)’.
The dialogues go with the characters. Mr Lorry and Dr Manette are
professionals. They depict the cultured face of the time. Madame
Defarge is the firebrand lady representing the wrath of the
revolutionaries of contemporary France. 

As the novel was to be published as serial in a newspaper, the beginning


and the end of each chapter tend to be loaded with gunshot sentences.
And when a writer like Dickens fires a shot, it is heard up to far pavilions.
He did not give us characters; he gave us the types of people. 

In real life, you would find a replica of every man and woman Dickens
depicted in his novels. Becoming the mother of children having
convincing looks, Dickens had animated a crowd of characters. They are
proud; they are feeble. They are generous; they are greedy. 

They are coward; they are bold. Dickens read the life before his eyes
and used it for his creations, hoping that the readers would love them
and honour the same.

How to Write Humorously - Learning From Charles Dickens

In A Tale Of Two Cities, Dickens had distributed the humour among


various pockets: the way he described the characters, the manners that
the lords of the land followed in France, and the narrative technique in
which he had no competitor. 

While describing the human tragedies and follies of common men, he


had endeavoured to infuse funniness through the comedy of manners.
But he had not tried to soften the bitterness of truth that the ongoing
revolution was supposed to hold.

Charles Dickens had the courage to be an innovator. Standing against


all the contemporary writers, he had chosen the subject like poverty in
"Oliver Twist". He obeyed his inner voice—his sincere service to the
world in which he lived. Again, even if being the writer of neat fiction, he
chose history as background for his novel "A Tale of Two Cities". 

The writer of ‘Domby and Sons’ and ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’ preferred to


narrate the rigid truth of the history without reservations, without making
compromises. And the result is before our eyes.

He chose the theme of history because it contained the hardest


challenges the people had faced; he chose it because the larger portion
of the people had at last responded to the wildest behaviour shown to
them throughout the years. 
Every drop of blood spilt on the street of Paris, every drop of the sweat
fallen on the farms of feudal France, melted into each other and became
the blade of the Guillotine. And then everything flew from the power of
that Guillotine. Dickens picked up that theme; honoured it in its right
perspective; and dealt with it with his masterly skill.

While reading Dickens, humour would not fail in helping our strains to
disappear. It would make our mind lighter. Had Dickens not been a writer
and the humorist as he was, he would have become a social activist.
Such were the subjects he chose for his writings. 

‘A Tale of Two Cities’, a novel that runs overloaded with the hard facts of
an ongoing revolution, it contains the salient stock of wits and irony.
Though the thematic compulsions restrained Dickens to become outright
humorist; he fully counterbalanced it while caricaturing some of the
characters.

If we look at the novel from a different angle, then war or a revolution is


the greatest satire itself. Mankind has never learnt a lesson from the
past. We go on slaughtering each other without realising the futility of our
actions. Perhaps that was the biggest message this novel should have
delivered. 

‘A Tale of Two Cities’ is a masterpiece novel. It would shine like a gem


on a bookshelf. 

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