A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  A TALE OF TWO CITIES

  Book the First: Recalled to Life

  CHAPTER 1 - The Period

  CHAPTER 2 - The Mail

  CHAPTER 3 - The Night Shadows

  CHAPTER 4 - The Preparation

  CHAPTER 5 - The Wine-Shop

  CHAPTER 6 - The Shoemaker

  Book the Second: The Golden Thread

  CHAPTER 1 - Five Years Later

  CHAPTER 2 - A Sight

  CHAPTER 3 - A Disappointment

  CHAPTER 4 - Congratulatory

  CHAPTER 5 - The Jackal

  CHAPTER 6 - Hundreds of People

  CHAPTER 7 - Monsieur the Marquis in Town

  CHAPTER 8 - Monsieur the Marquis in the Country

  CHAPTER 9 - The Gorgon’s Head

  CHAPTER 10 - Two Promises

  CHAPTER 11 - A Companion Picture

  CHAPTER 12 - The Fellow of Delicacy

  CHAPTER 13 - The Fellow of No Delicacy

  CHAPTER 14 - The Honest Tradesman

  CHAPTER 15 - Knitting

  CHAPTER 16 - Still Knitting

  CHAPTER 17 - One Night

  CHAPTER 18 - Nine Days

  CHAPTER 19 - An Opinion

  CHAPTER 20 - A Plea

  CHAPTER 21 - Echoing Footsteps

  CHAPTER 22 - The Sea Still Rises

  CHAPTER 23 - Fire Rises

  CHAPTER 24 - Drawn to the Loadstone Rock

  Book the Third: The Track of a Storm

  CHAPTER 1 - In Secret

  CHAPTER 2 - The Grindstone

  CHAPTER 3 - The Shadow

  CHAPTER 4 - Calm in Storm

  CHAPTER 5 - The Wood-Sawyer

  CHAPTER 6 - Triumph

  CHAPTER 7 - A Knock at the Door

  CHAPTER 8 - A Hand at Cards

  CHAPTER 9 - The Game Made

  CHAPTER 10 - The Substance of the Shadow

  CHAPTER 11 - Dusk

  CHAPTER 12 - Darkness

  CHAPTER 13 - Fifty-two

  CHAPTER 14 - The Knitting Done

  CHAPTER 15 - The Footsteps Die Out For Ever

  PENGUIN ENRICHED EBOOK FEATURES

  Early Reception of A Tale of Two Cities

  Psychology in A Tale of Two Cities

  Dickens and Melodrama

  Dickens and Alcohol

  Dickens and Prisons

  Illustrations of Eighteenth-Century Fashion and Culture and Dickens’s Victorian World

  Further Reading

  Filmography for Dickens’s Novels

  GREAT EXPECTATIONS

  VOLUME I

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  VOLUME II

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  VOLUME III

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  Appendix: - The Ending as Originally Conceived

  PENGUIN ENRICHED EBOOK FEATURES

  Early Reception of Great Expectations

  What Is “Dickensian”?

  Gothic Elements in Dickens

  Dickens and Victorian Servants

  Dickens Sites to Visit in England

  Suggested Further Reading: Victorian Fiction

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  A TALE OF TWO CITIES and GREAT EXPECTATIONS

  CHARLES DICKENS was born at Portsmouth on 7 February 1812, the second of eight children. Dickens’s childhood experiences were similar to those depicted in David Copperfield. His father, who was a government clerk, was imprisoned for debt and Dickens was briefly sent to work in a blacking warehouse at the age of twelve. He received little formal education, but taught himself shorthand and became a reporter of parliamentary debates for the Morning Chronicle . He began to publish sketches in various periodicals, which were subsequently republished as Sketches by Boz. The Pickwick Papers was published in 1836-7 and after a slow start became a publishing phenomenon and Dickens’s characters the centre of a popular cult. Part of the secret of his success was the method of cheap serial publication which Dickens used for all his novels. He began Oliver Twist in 1837, followed by Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41). After finishing Barnaby Rudge (1841) Dickens set off for America; he went full of enthusiasm for the young republic but, in spite of a triumphant reception, he returned disillusioned. His experiences are recorded in American Notes (1842). Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) did not repeat its predecessors’ success, but this was quickly redressed by the huge popularity of the Christmas Books, of which the first, A Christmas Carol, appeared in 1843. During 1844-6 Dickens travelled abroad and he began Dombey and Son (1846-8) while in Switzerland. This and David Copperfield (1849-50) were more serious in theme and more carefully planned than his early novels. In later works, such as Bleak House (1852-3) and Little Dorrit (1855-7), Dickens’s social criticism became more radical and his comedy more savage. In 1850 Dickens started the weekly periodical Household Words, succeeded in 1859 by All the Year Round; in these he published Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1860-61). Dickens’s health was failing during the 1860s and the physical strain of the public readings which he began in 1858 hastened his decline, although Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) retained some of his best comedy. His last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was never completed and he died on 9 June 1870. Public grief at his death was considerable and he was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.

  KRISTIE ALLEN holds a PhD from Rutgers University and has taught Romantic and Victorian literature at Rutgers University and Macalester College. In addition to writing on Charles Dickens, she has published articles on George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and on Victorian melodramas.

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  A TALE OF TWO CITIES

  First published in Great Britain by Chapman and Hall 1859

  First published in the United States of America by T. B. Peterson & Brothers 1859

  Originally published in serial form in All the Year Round 1859

  GREAT EXPECTATIONS

  First published in Great Britain by Chapman and Hall 1861

  First published in the United States of America by T. B. Peterson & Brothers 1861

  Originally published in serial form in All the Year Round 1860-1861

  This two-book edition published in Penguin Books 2010

  Penguin Enriched eBook Features copyright © Kristie Allen, 2008, 2010

  All rights reserved

  eISBN : 978-1-101-49951-1

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  Notes on the Texts

  A TALE OF TWO CITIES

  This edition of A Tale of Two Cities uses the text as it appeared in its first serial publication in Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round in 1859. Only a few emendations have been made.

  GREAT EXPECTATIONS

  The present edition has been reprinted from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (Penguin Classics, 2003), with an introduction by David Trotter and edited and with notes by Charlotte Mitchell.

  The appendix prints the ending of the novel as Dickens originally conceived it.

  A TALE OF TWO CITIES

  Book the First

  Recalled to Life

  CHAPTER 1

  The Period

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

  There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

  It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.

  France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But, that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

  In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of ‘the Captain’, gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself by the other four, ‘in consequence of the failure of his ammunition’: after which the mail was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their turn-keys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St Giles’s, to search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the mob; and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence.

  All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures – the creatures of this chronicle among the rest – along the roads that lay before them.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Mail

  It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the first of the persons with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond
the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter’s Hill. He walked up-hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in combination, had read that article of war which forbad a purpose otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to their duty.

  With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles as if they were falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested them and brought them to a stand, with a wary ‘Wo-ho! so-ho then!’ the near leader violently shook his head and everything upon it – like an unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.

  There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all.

  Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheek-bones and over the ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of his two companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter, when every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in ‘the Captain’s’ pay, ranging from the landlord to the lowest stable nondescript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter’s Hill, as he stood on his own particular perch behind the mail, beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before him, where a loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum of cutlass.