Tale of Two Cities

Instructions: Answer the following questions regarding your reading. Be as brief as possible but as detailed as needed to show me your understanding of the book and the question. Type your answers below each question and leave with me after final exam. Late submissions will be penalized 25% per day.

In the beginning of the novel the audience sees him as a man who left prison a couple days ago, and has been traumatized by living in his symbolic grave for eighteen years. The first description of him that the audience reads is Dickens describing him having a “faint voice that was pitiable and dreadful” (Dickens 29). Although as the novel progresses the doctor transforms away from this part of himself, and becomes a well-respected doctor again. After being let out of prison his daughter Lucie comes to bring him home, and this represents the first time he is recalled to life. Later in the novel Doctor Manette is recalled to life again in Book III when he has to testify for his son in law, Charles Darnay, in Paris. Doctor Manette’s testimony for Darnay resurrects his position of respect in Paris as the "Bastille survivor" instead of a prominent physician. This alteration is indicated when Dickens declaims, “His streaming white hair, his remarkable face, and the impetuous confidence of his manner, as he put the weapons aside like water” (Dickens 203). In this scene Doctor Manette enters the revolutionary obsessed France as a hero to all their soldiers, which makes them put down their weapons because they are in awe of him. He comes to them as a friend because he saved one of their own before, and they reward

In many novels, the society created by the author is surrounded by wealth and corruption. Numerous amount of times these settings are produced based on the life in which the author lives. Charles Dickens is no different. In the midst of most of his novels, Dickens exposes the deception of Victorian England and the strict society that holds everything together. In Dickens' novel Our Mutual Friend, a satire is created where the basis of the novel is the mockery against money and morals. Throughout this novel, multiple symbols and depictions of the characters display the corruption of the mind that surrounds social classes in Victorian England.

Dickens uses the needs and wants for people to get an image in their head about what life was really like before the French revolution. "Cold, dirt,

Juxtaposition is also used to further stress the socioeconomic disparities during the French Revolution by comparing the anguish of peasants and the excessiveness of the aristocrats in an even more extreme light. In Book the First, chapter five, Dickens writes, “All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine…Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths” (27). This description of the broken wine cask in front of the wine shop is meant to illustrate the true hunger and squalid living conditions of the peasants, who are so desperate for nourishment that they will feed their babies vile wine through dirty rags. This scene was juxtaposed with a description from Book the Second, chapter seven. In this chapter, the hot chocolate drinking process of a noble is described and “It took four men, all four a-blaze with gorgeous decoration, and the chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur’s lips” (109). This over

Dickens had several real life experiences of poverty and abandonment in his life that influenced his work,

In the book, Dickens portrays the people as having the hatred necessary for mob violence. Immediately, the book shows us an example how such hatred was created. When a youth’s hands were chopped off, “tongue torn out with pincers” and “his body burned alive” it shows the violence and torture that led to the French revolution. The youth represents the weak in French society

Dickens argues that a person should be defined by their own self, character, personality, actions, and other traits which are specifically not their clothing, which is their wealth, which is their social class. He includes several descriptions of the higher social classes, both as opposites to and comparisons with the dress of the poor, but also as examples of how such arbitrary, socially constructed class can hurt even the wealthy – that this is a universal issue that must be resolved, not just a ‘poor person’ problem.

Saint Antoine calls on it’s revolutionaries and in swift action they sweep the Bastille within the week. Dickens personifies Saint Antoine and makes the neighborhood bordering the Bastille the main antagonist inciting revolution. In fact, Madam Defarge doesn’t fight for vengeance, but for Saint Antoine. Expression materializing appearance of weakness exude from this passage. Haggard, starved, distress, miserable, squalid, and a score more assist in defining the state, “the great brotherhood of Spies had become”, and what their death march beats the drum to. People reside in the village of despair, and have become merely puppets of its liberation from societal pariah. Characters swiftly swept into undercurrents of preeminent plot.

1.Write down a passage that appeals to you and describe why? Does it make more of an impact on your understanding of the book or does it make more of a personal impact? What significance does the passage have in the book?

First off, I have decided to approach this critique with less of a rant about my misunderstanding of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. My past critics have dragged on with complaints, though, I tried much harder in attempting to understand and analyze Book One Chapter XI-XIII as to be able to write a more analytical, rather than full-of-complaints, response.

Dickens described the aristocracy was being unfair to the people and treat them in uncharitable ways. Dickens’ wrote about a aristocracy killed a man’s child and hanged the child high above to prove the symbol of the aristocracy. The aristocracy gave a gold coin to the man as the compensation after he killed the man’s child. Dickens disliked the way that the aristocracy used, but he also disliked the way revolutionaries used. From Dickens’ view, there was no real revolution because the revolutionaries were fighting in a barbaric way and only violence, but the Revolution had to be carried out. "I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge… It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."(page 2932-293)In the last few paragraph, Dickens wrote down the importance of the French Revolution and the result that brought to the people.

Charles Dickens believed it was up to him to inform the people of Britain of the social problems occurring around Britain. While Dickens was a young man, he suffered from poverty along with his mother and father. His father was imprisoned for dept and Charles wanted to become a social reformer. Dickens used these problems as themes for his book ‘A Christmas Carol'. These themes involve poverty, pollution and a changing of ways. Dickens used Scrooge, the main character in the book at first to show how current society was at the time and then at the end, after the visits from the three ghosts, how the society could be. At the start of the book Scrooge is anti-social, greedy and extremely selfish. I believe this is how Britain was at the

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” (5).Not only was France not adequately safe, but England was also depicted with having other serious problems as well.These important details help to show the gloomy tone of the setting the story takes place in. By providing these details, the audience can view the amount of treachery that occurred in this time period and can relate to the social distress in Dickens’s

What you need to know from the text is covered in these questions. For all these chapters,