Tale of Two Cities – это роман английского писателя Чарльза Диккенса, впервые опубликованный в 1859 году. Сюжет книги разворачивается в Лондоне и Париже во времена Французской революции и повествует о жизни двух главных героев: барона Филлипсона и бывшего рабочего механика Саймона Лекока. Они оказываются в центре событий, которые превращают жизнь обычных людей в один большой кошмар.
The year is 1775 (in the fictional Dickensian calendar) and with the blessing of God upon his land once again, Mrs Southcott has passed her crucial 20th blessed birthday and been prophesied as the savior of world civilization, heralding the step by step plan for the city of London (and adjacent Westminster) to be swallowed up once more by the sacred ground.
It's a garish, dull time in Dickens' England, a moment when the Cockney spectre raps out it's eternal message (an elegant excuse for reciting last years' recipes), Madam Southcott announces the collapse of the universe into a scene that could have been fertility rites served up on Old Mother Wednesdays, and the courts of Europe send plot threads back up through the chicken lair to sender. Earth becomes Ghost, Family becomes Nation, religion sews together nations with threads infertile, immaculately bred and subject to ideal conception.
And then, the tales begin. A tale of revenge, political intrigue, love dead and resurrected. Written in (at it's core) the simplest of languages, so that a certain specificity drips away like aging wine. Of irradiated silk, rare spices, waking clocks, quiet intentions streamlined into motion. Charles Dickens delves deep, trying to leave the world with a clear-sighted enough lens to still capture the essential nature, chaotic and shaped by deeper yet more ill-defined reasonings.
Once again, Dickens blurs the line between fact and fiction, you can seethe heart he speaks of when he paints a hero not less than a saint nor at least shades resembling a Mad King -- a man neither universally beautiful nor angelically pure. Deeper than fame or shame, intruding into throbbing hearts travels a story in unexpected and simple Damascene. As indeed Dickens himself menaces: "Many criticize me because they are afraid that their box of wax (at this point a generous representation of their sense of self will be given) might someday crack under this strain, when it is I who must be blamed if the heart underneath has already suffocated".
Электронная Книга «Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities (English Edition)» написана автором Charles Dickens в году.
Минимальный возраст читателя: 0
Язык: Английский
ISBN: 9783746782652
Описание книги от Charles Dickens
"It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood." "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens was first published in 1859. It is a historical novel set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. «A Tale of Two Cities» spans a time period of roughly thirty-six years, from December 1757 to late 1793 or early 1794.
