Resumen
Resumen de Historia de dos ciudades
Para quién es
For readers who love historical fiction with a strong plot, and anyone drawn to the French Revolution through ordinary lives. Mystery, doubles, rebirth and sacrifice bring private hopes into the path of public violence.
De qué trata este libro
A Tale of Two Cities is a historical novel by Charles Dickens, published in weekly parts in his magazine All the Year Round in 1859. It is set in London and Paris in the years before and during the French Revolution. Dickens wrote it after reading Thomas Carlyle's history of the Revolution, and he wanted to show how great public violence grows out of private cruelty and neglect.
The book follows a small group of people whose lives cross between the two cities. There is a doctor who has spent eighteen years in prison, the daughter who finds him, a French exile living quietly in England, and a brilliant, wasted lawyer who thinks his own life has no worth. Around them a wine shop in a Paris slum becomes the center of a growing storm. The novel is shorter than most of Dickens, and it relies more on plot, mystery and strong images than on comic crowds.
In the next fifteen minutes you will meet the main people, follow the story up to its last great crisis, and see how Dickens builds it. You will also hear what the book is really about, and why its themes of doubles, rebirth and sacrifice matter. We begin on a foggy night in 1775, on the road to Dover, where a message is passed that sounds like a riddle.
En este resumen
- 1A buried man is recalled to lifeFree
- 2A London trial is won by a likeness
- 3Cruelty in France plants the seeds of anger
- 4Love draws three men toward one woman
- 5Echoing footsteps warn of a coming storm
- 6The Bastille falls and vengeance spreads
- 7A letter calls Darnay back to Paris
- 8Doubles, rebirth and the price of love
- 9How Dickens builds the book
Idea clave 1 de 9
A buried man is recalled to life
The story opens in November 1775 on the Dover road. A mail coach labors up a muddy hill, and its passengers are wary of each other and of highwaymen. One of them is Mr Jarvis Lorry, an elderly clerk of Tellson's Bank, a stiff and old-fashioned London firm. A messenger rides up with a note for him, and Lorry answers with three words that puzzle the messenger: Recalled to life. The words set the pattern for the whole book.
Lorry is on his way to France with a delicate task. At Dover he meets Lucie Manette, a young woman of seventeen with golden hair and a calm, sensitive face. She was raised as an orphan in England, and she believed her father had died long ago. Lorry now tells her that he is alive, that the bank has found him, and that he has been held in secret for eighteen years. Lucie is overwhelmed and nearly faints, but she agrees to go and see him.
The two cross to Paris and go to the district of Saint Antoine, a crowded slum where hunger shows on every face. A wine cask has broken in the street, and the poor crowd around it to scoop up the red wine with their hands and even lick it from the stones. One man dips his finger and scrawls a word on a wall in the wine. It is a small scene, but it gives an early picture of a people who are starving and ready to seize anything. Dickens wants the reader to feel the color of blood here before any blood is spilled.
The wine shop belongs to Ernest Defarge, a stout and watchful man, and his wife, Madame Defarge, who sits knitting and says little. Defarge leads Lorry and Lucie up a bare staircase to a garret. There, with his back to the door and his head bent, sits a white-haired man making shoes. He is Doctor Alexandre Manette, who was taken from his life as a physician and held in the Bastille. He knows himself only by the number of his cell, one hundred and five, North Tower.
Lucie kneels before him, and slowly something stirs in his memory when he sees her hair and touches a strand he has kept. The scene is tender and painful, and it is the first of the book's many returns from the dead. Lorry and Lucie take the broken man out of Paris at night and carry him to London, where she will care for him. The question the book leaves open is who put him there, and why.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
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Who’s who
- Sydney Carton
- A gifted but dissipated London lawyer, he resembles Charles Darnay and loves Lucie Manette without hope.
- Charles Darnay
- A French exile living in England, he rejects his aristocratic family's values and becomes close to the Manettes.
- Lucie Manette
- Doctor Manette's loving daughter, she supports her troubled father and draws Darnay and Carton into her circle.
- Doctor Alexandre Manette
- Lucie's father is a physician struggling to recover after eighteen years of imprisonment in the Bastille.
- Madame Defarge
- Ernest Defarge's wife keeps a knitted register of enemies and shares his revolutionary hostility toward the nobility.
- Ernest Defarge
- A Paris wine seller and revolutionary leader, he formerly served Doctor Manette and helps protect his secret.
- Jarvis Lorry
- A loyal clerk at Tellson's Bank, he helps reunite Lucie with her father and befriends their household.
- Miss Pross
- Lucie's outspoken and devoted companion, she fiercely protects the young woman and cares for the Manette household.
About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 138,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 9 h 15 min
- Listening time15 h 25 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 13 other languages
Questions about Historia de dos ciudades
What is A Tale of Two Cities about?
It follows a doctor freed after eighteen years in the Bastille, his daughter Lucie, and the men who love her, as their lives are drawn between London and Paris during the French Revolution.
Is A Tale of Two Cities a true story?
No, the characters are invented, but the setting is real. Dickens wrote it in 1859 and drew on Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution for the events around the storming of the Bastille and the Terror.
Which are the two cities in the title?
The two cities are London and Paris. Dickens moves between them and compares them, showing the injustice and danger in each, and the way events in France reach into the lives of people in England.
Is A Tale of Two Cities hard to read?
The plot is clear and driven by mystery, and many readers find it easier than Dickens's longer novels.
What is the main message of A Tale of Two Cities?
The book argues that cruelty and neglect create violent anger, that revenge only repeats harm, and that love, loyalty and sacrifice can give a life meaning and bring a person back from despair.