A tale of one novel.

                  One of the books that I had the pleasure of reading over the summer was Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. I had been planning to read a Dickens novel for quite some time, mainly because of the breadth of responses of the readers whom I spoke to. Some had nothing but praise for Dickens’s masterful storytelling, some loftily proclaimed it as an “acquired taste,” and some simply hated every single florid word that diverted their attention away from the plot. My journey into the land of Dickens took me to a place that I probably would not have been able to get to one or two years ago. I discovered an incredible author who had an uncanny ability to hook his readers through a sea of poetic prose and wit.

                  Many of Dickens’s strengths stem from his perpetual need to keep the masses interested in his work. However, this is not some sort of excuse for his writing skill; on the contrary, it was the catalyst for it. One of these strengths is his ability to craft a fictional world and imbue it with physical and emotional detail. As the title suggests, A Tale of Two Cities takes place in two capital cities: London and Paris. Dickens fleshes out both of these locales and many others with incredible detail, often devoting entire paragraphs to describe locales and continually inserting descriptions in the narrative text. What makes these descriptions so effective, however, is Dickens’s ability to infuse them with emotion. His world is not lifeless—every nook and cranny is tied to sentiment. In one description of a countryside village, for example, Dickens describes the villagers who “see to the poor live stock, and lead the bony cows out, to such pasture as could be found by the roadside” and the cows themselves who “try for a breakfast among the weeds of their feet” (128). These illustrations make for a world that the reader can easily view from the Dickensian seat of omniscience.

                  Dickens’s other great strength is his ability to establish deep connections between his characters and the events that surround them. In A Tale of Two Cities, one of the ways he does in a connect-the-dots fashion: he introduces the characters relevant to the story and later draws the parallels between them to create a sense of completeness. Many instances of this literary technique occur throughout the book. Dr. Manette is revealed as a prisoner in a French wine shop, but neither the reason for his imprisonment nor his connection to his keepers is revealed until near the end of the book. Another technique he employs is Chekhov’s gun. The most important instance of this technique is Sydney Carton’s physical similarity to Charles Darnay. This does not seem like an important detail when revealed at the beginning of the book, but it later proves to be significant when Carton takes Darnay’s place at the guillotine. The ability to create interesting and interconnected stories was one of Dickens’s greatest assets, and A Tale of Two Cities is no exception.

                  A Tale of Two Cities is not without its blemishes, however. Perhaps the greatest pitfall of Dickens’s writing style is the simplicity of his characters. The book’s plot is intricate, but the characters that drive it are not: many of them exhibit one-dimensional and unrealistic tendencies. Lucie Manette is the most flagrant example—she is modeled as an impossibly delicate, kindhearted, and generally “perfect” woman who displays an absolute loyalty to her husband. This, however, is a small complaint in the scope of the tale as a whole. It is difficult to step into the shoes of the characters, but nonetheless, Dickens does a fine job of allowing us to look at the world from above and presenting a story of love, change, and social justice.