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