"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Perhaps one of the most famous classic literature quotes, many people in western civilization today are bound to recognize these words even if they have not read Charles Dickens' a Tale of Two Cities. My goal in reading A Tale of Two Cities was to read beyond these well known words and try to understand what these oxymoronic words, in Charles Dickens' own mind, really mean.
A Tale of Two Cities is the first Dickens book that I have read. If I really wanted to learn the meaning behind just the opening words to A Tale of Two Cities I know that I could always look them up on sparknotes or google. However, such an unsubstantial understanding of them would be shallow. Instead, I decided to read this book in order gain the entire concept of the writing, and in order to get a taste for the famous "Dickens" writing.
Before I started the fictional book A Tale of Two Cities, I knew that Dickens was well known for his descriptive writing. However, it wasn't until I finished the end of the 6th chapter that I truly understood just HOW intensely descriptive his writing is. Though some, including famous writers Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, consider Dickens' style "loose writing", I find it charming and feel that it pulls me into the story firsthand. Similarly, other authors have criticized that Dickens' writing has a lack of psychological depth. I disagree with that assessment. Even in the first 40 pages of his 400 page book, Dickens has set up an interesting plot surrounding a banker called Mr. Lorry who sets out to introduce a young lady named Manette her long lost father. The gloomy setting of the story (1775 in a squalid description of Paris) seems to be both a social commentary on Dickens' own times (the details of which I have not yet determined) and seems to embody the zeitgeist of that era as well.
As I continue to read A Tale of Two Cities, I am looking forward to seeing how Dickens develops his characters and plot and to see if I can make any correlation between the story and Dickens' own life.
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