A Tale of Two Cities

[singlemalt]

Why did I decide to read this? Fucking a' Chuck. Pick up the pace will ya?

[frollostone]

Two Cities is my least favourite Dickens. In his other books, even the lesser ones like American Notes, the challenge of reading them lies in keeping up with the exuberant rate of his invention, but T.C. is dry and the dryness makes it, as you say, slow. Critics had sniffed at his work and called him nothing more than an entertainer with no important thoughts in his head, and I think this new straight-faced tone was part of his attempt to prove them wrong. (life was also being rather hard on him at this time, if I remember my Dickens biogs correctly) In most of his later, serious, books he manages to maintain a sense of humour but this one, for some reason, lacks it almost entirely. I've heard of some high school children who had it assigned to them in class and I think that's madness. Two Cities is enough to put a person off Dickens for life.


Edit:

Here we go. I looked up my Ackroyd biog of Dickens and in the Tale of Two Cities section it's got this:

"This was the first full year in which he was separated from his wife, and, perhaps just as importantly, the first full year in which he maintained his isolation from such old companions as Mark Lemon [because a lot of those old friends supported his abandoned wife]...Even now he could not shake off the peristant low illness which enervated him ... there was a persistant feeling of dilapidation and weariness about him ... he wrote a letter to Forster which ends with a prospect of death ... how carefully he was now working ... it seems less to require a book than a theatre."

I agree with that last comment. Filmed or staged, Tale can be given the juice that Dickens denied it when he wrote it. The bare skeleton of the story is tighter and more entertaining than, say, Nicholas Nickleby, which wambles about and has one of those improbable Victorian melodrama aha-I-am-really-your-long-lost- brother-now-I-shall-twirl-my-evil-moustache type villains, but N.N. is redeemed by such brilliant moments as Miss Squeers' letter ("My pa requests me to write to you, the doctors considering it doubtful if he will ever recuvver the use of his legs, which prevents his holding a pen," etc) and Tale isn't. It has emotional drama, which is a poor substitute for Fanny Squeers.

[singlemalt]

I find it hard to believe that high school kids are forced to read this. It is maddeningly slow. I said "come on" at least ten times during this book. There are so many other great books that you can "force" on kids that they will like. This just isn't one of them.

Great Expectations was very good, but TOTC just meanders, and is painful. Dickens and I are taking an extended vacation from each other.