Essay | Dickens' Life Linked to a Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens once said, "I do not write resentfully or angrily: for I know that all of these things have worked together to make me what I am." (Schlicke 409) Being such an intelligent man, he realized that characters and incidents in his novels could portray the traumatic, troubling times or the soothing, comforting times he personally had experienced throughout his own life. When Dickens was writing A Tale of Two Cities, he called upon a trusted friend to explain how he envisioned the design of this novel to be different from his others by saying, "I set myself the little task of making a picturesque story, rising in every chapter with characters true to nature, but whom the story itself should express...in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written in place of bestiality." (Schlicke 550) Even with scattered years of education, Dickens artistically combined...
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