A tale of Two Cities

The structure of the course work. In this course paper, I will explain a brief overview about the life and career of Charles Dicken and inform about his works including his poems and novels such as “A Tale of Two Cities”. The paper consists of an introduction, main part with 4 sub branches and conclusion.


CHAPTER I. Charles Dickens and “A Tale of Two Cities”
1.1. Life of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens is one of the most important figures in British literature, especially that of Victorian era. He was best known for his novels The Pickwick Papers (1936), Oliver Twist (1937-39), Nicholas Nickleby (1938-1939), David Copperfield (1850), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1860-1861). The main qualities of his novels were the depth of his characters, his narration of the conditions of the working class, his humour and his critical point of view. He is a writer of London, which always has an important role in most of his novels. “A Tale of Two Cities” is one of his best known works, although it lacks Dickens’ usual houmous. The novel was first published as a serial in 1859 in Dickens’ periodical All the Year Round. Dickens used “The French Revolution: A History” by Thomas Carlyle as his basic source for historical information and created a plot developing with interesting and detailed scenes. Dickens even mentions Carlyle’s book in the preface, along with “The Frozen Deep”, from which he “first conceived the main idea of this story.” The novel has become one of the most important texts about the French Revolution. Literature is a common thing to discuss for us as a student of English Letters, but we do not really know what actually literature is. Some say that literature is a kind of creative work, it can be a fiction or non-fiction and it involves the creator’s mind to create it, but what about a comic such as Superman then. It is a comic, but can it be considered as a literary work? Actually, literature itself has no exact definition about what exactly literature is, because literature is always in the form of written work but in the contrary, all kinds of written work can not be called as literature. According to a book Encyclopedia of General Knowledge by S. Graham literature is the written and printed products of human thought, generally divided into fiction and non-fiction. Then, according to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary literature is writing that are valued as work of art, especially fiction, drama, and poetry. Based on those two definitions of literature, we can draw the conclusion that literature is written or printed work and it has value of art. According to Terry Eagleton in her book Literary Theory an Introduction, literature is not merely a written work that uses ordinary language as we use every day in our daily conversation, but literature uses language in a peculiar way, as stated in the book: Perhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or ‘imaginative’, but because it uses language in peculiar ways. On this theory, literature is a kind of writing which, in the words of the Russian critic Roman Jacobson, represents an ‘organized violence committed on ordinary speech’. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. We can see the peculiar way of literature in using language when we are reading poetry. In poetry, the poets often use the ‘extra ordinary language’ in order to maintain the rhyme and the beauty in writing his or her literary work. They usually use metaphor, personification, violence the structure, rhythm and resonance of words in excess an abstract meaning to make their words more ‘unfamiliar’. It is different when the authors are writing a novel. In writing a novel, the authors sometimes also use this kind of extra ordinary language, but sometimes they do not, because in writing a novel the authors sometimes use ordinary language to convey their idea through their work.¹ In a novel, the authors usually want to reveal his or her own experience to the reader with daily language due to get the reader easier to understand what the whole novel is talking about. Sometimes, authors also add some factual or historical events in their work. This method is used in order to invite the reader to feel or to share the author’s experience or the historical event to the readers. According to some statements above, we know that literary works are nothing without its authors. The author is the more important person of literary work because; the creator of literary works is the author. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren in their book Theory of Literature said that the most obvious of a work of art is its creator, the author so, it is obvious that the author is the main cause of the existence of their works including all the characters inside it. There is also a close relationship between literary works and its authors because as stated before that sometimes in writing their works, the authors include also their experience of life in their work, but the work itself is not a copy of their real life. The statement above occurs because the literary work is their media to release their emotion or just a place to share their experience in the past. They also include their biography into their work and represent it through the character of their work. It is because biography is an ancient literary genre. Biography is a part of historiography and it makes no methodological distinction in status, so everyone may have their own biography no matter they are a statesman, a general, an architect, a lawyer, and a man who plays no public role. For example Charlotte Bronte, the author of Jane Eyre, she reveals her past experience when she was a governess through the character of Jane Eyre. Another author who reveals the past experience is Charles Dickens. This great Victorian era author revealed his past experience when he was a worker through his famous work David Copperfield and The Great Expectation which considered as his semi-autobiographical novels. According to Rohrberger and Woods in their book Reading and Writing about Literature, there are indirect relationship and similarity between the work and the author. An author’s work including the character perhaps is “a kind of mask which is surely based on the author’s experience of 1ife”². It means that the literary work which is based on the biography of the author can be a place to hide their weakness in the past through the character of their work. As stated in the book Theory of Literature The work may be a mask, a dramatized conventionalization, but it is frequently a conventionalization of his own experience, his own life can be about unhappy childhood, about love, or may be about anything else that make a significant event recorded in author’s mind and they are described in their literary work direct or indirectly. From those statements above, now we are paying attention to Charles Dickens ’ work, The Great Expectations. In this novel, Charles Dickens reveals almost all significant event of his life through the character of Phillip Pirrip (Pip) the main character of this novel. Although the character is created as a fiction, Charles Dickens creates it as if he is a real character who resembles to his past experiences.³ He created the character imaginatively but, he used his actual life as the important material to build the plot in this novel, so the story really reflects his own experience. It can lead us to the significant part of the author’s experience of life and share it to the reader about what kind of life which the author had in the past.