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Two sides of the same story
The two texts Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens and Villette by Charlotte Brontè are both set in London during the 1850’s. Even though they both write about London the two texts are complete opposites
In text 1, Charles Dickens (Little Dorrit), expresses in many ways how he views London. An example of this is at the start of text 1 when he says «Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, stepped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire despondency». Just from this example we can see how he feels about London. His attitude is very negative, and it seems like he feels once you enter the city of London everything unique and beautiful about the world fades away and everything conforms to some sort of order of sameness. Throughout the text we see him use different metaphors in a way to draw a picture in the readers head.
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Which could be an indicator that he doesn't feel comfortable with the way things are supposed to be. It's not only abstract things like laws and structures he seems to have a problem with. I do believe that the biggest problem he has is how all these factors have an effect on the actual people living in London. He draws a picture of the working class doing the same things every day, and living in a «sweet sameness» from the day they're born to the day they die. He also mentions that people live so unwholesome that they'd corrupt fair water overnight. All of these examples makes it clear that Charles Dickens did not like London at all, neither does it seemed like he liked the way people were living, the way they were being treated and how they were being treated. At least not in Little Dorrit. To conclude, he is very successful at conveying his distaste towards
...he rain’s sharp”. This is related to the night in the factory, which is meant to make the feeling of the events even worse. However, when Davis in the end describes areas out of the factory-driven town, where the richer class live, it is described as happy, beautiful place that is described as a ‘perfect town”. “If one oft’ with dwarfs wud come from t’ lane moors to-night, and gif hur money, to go out, -OUT, I say,-’out, lad, where t’ sun shines, and t’ heath grows, and t’ ladies walk in silken gownds, and God stays all t’ time-where t’man lives that talked to us to-night, Hugh knows,-Hugh could walk there like a king!” This quote shows that, what might seem like every day life to the richer class, is described as close to heaven for the people who live in the factory-driven town. Davis uses visual imagery to illustrate to the show the negativity of industrialism.
A comparative study of Sydney Carton in Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities, and Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet in Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, requires the reader to analyze various aspects that the transforming effect love can have on a personality. As we study each character, it is relatively easy to see that no matter how painful love can be, it is usually to one’s betterment to have experienced it. Love affects each person differently. Some become more introspective, searching to better themselves for the sake of themselves or another. Others do not recognize what they are lacking in their lives until they find love. In either event, it permanently redirects the course of one’s life. Or causes one to end it in some cases. We see that all three characters learn to love themselves better, to love others anew and in the end, make the ultimate sacrifice for their love for another.
In Mary Robinson’s poem, London’s Summer Morning the speaker describes the fast-moving hustle and bustle of a busy London street. The poem serves as a kaleidoscope of the speaker’s surrounding describing not only what she sees, but how all of her senses engage with her environment. There is a clear focus on the surrounding commerce and occupations. The author makes distinct choices in tone, diction, word choice and sensory imagery to convey the utter chaos that she is immersed in. Despite Robinson’s choice to start and end the poem with negative connotations, she displays an argument that explains the beautiful commerce that takes place in the chaotic nature of the mornings in London.
Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities during his time of fascination with the French Revolution. The French Revolution was a time of inequity. There are many occasions in the novel where the problems of the Revolution are displayed. The human race is shown at its worst. Throughout the novel, man’s inhumanity towards fellow man, whether from a different social class or their own neighborhood, is shown through the metaphors of wine symbolizing blood, water symbolizing life, and blue flies symbolizing townspeople buzzing around death.
Power can allow one to make decisions for others than will benefit them, but too much power can cause one to become corrupt. In the novel, A Tale of Two Cities, the author, Charles Dickens, views power as a way in which corruption arises. Throughout the novel, Dickens speaks about three characters who starts to abuse their power as time passes in the novel. Dickens portrays the characters of the Monseigneur, the Marquis of Evermonde, and the revolutionaries as characters who goes through a change as a result of power.
Just look at the quote I gave you earlier: “Brooklyn, New York, as the undefined, hard-to–remember the shape of a stain.” He sees it as nothing but a stain on the map. He goes on to talk about “…the sludge at the bottom of the canal causes it to bubble.” Giving us something we can see, something we can hear because you can just imagine being near the canal and hearing the sludge bubble make their popping noises as the gas is released. He “The train sounds different – lighter, quieter—in the open air,” when it comes from underground and the sight he sees on the rooftops. Although some are negative, such as the sagging of roofs and graffiti, his tone towards the moment seems to be admiration. In the second section, he talks about the smells of Brooklyn and the taste of food. He’d talk about how his daughter compares the tastes of pizzas with her “…stern judgments of pizza. Low end… New Hampshire pizza. … In the middle… zoo pizza. …very top… two blocks from our house,” and different it was where he’d grown up. He talks about the immense amount of “smells in Brooklyn: Coffee, fingernail polish, eucalyptus…” and how other might hate it, but he enjoys it. In the same section, he describes how he enjoys the Brooklyn accent and the noise and smells that other people make on the streets and at the park across from his house. “Charcoal smoke drifts into the
Charles Dickens is well known for the interesting, colorful, and cartoonish characters he likes to use in most of his stories. These characters are often more like caricatures, which makes reading about them funny and interesting. However, this is not the case with A Tale of Two Cities. In this novel, Dickens is less concerned with individual characters and more concerned with the plot as a whole. While the characters aren’t particularly stressed as a very important element of the story, they still maintain a quality of roundness and complexity. Dr. Manette is just one example of a character displaying these traits.
In society today, all people determine their lifestyle, personality and overall character by both positive and negative traits that they hold. Sydney Carton in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities was a drunken lawyer who had an extremely low self-esteem. He possessed many negative characteristics which he used in a positive way. Carton drastically changed his life and became a new man. Sydney is not the man he first appeared to be.
How can someone be “recalled to life”? It is a blazing strange statement. In Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities, there are many people who are or help someone else to be recalled to life. In particular, there are three main characters that experience this. Dr. Manette, Charles Darnay, and Sydney Carton are all resurrected, as implied by the statement “recalled to life”.
He brings us up to speed of the last hundreds of years of modernization in the first few chapters illustrating in detail the advancements people have made. The first picture of the “Brave New World” is the “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre”, where we later find from all life is derived and grown. Already we can observe that one of the most sacred things about being a human, the way in which we enter the world has been reduced to an assembly line of bottles with embryos and test tubes. He describes the workers who grow these humans to look as dead corpses from their dress to further drive home the idea that the culture has lost its sense of life. Describing a place of life alside the imagery of death raises some red flags of a disordered society.
Perhaps the clearest illustration of Dickens’s neutrality is located in the very first sentence of the novel. He shows his neutrality through the description “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .(7).” This unusually comparative sentence single-handedly starts the book with a feeling of un-bias. In the final chapter of the book, six carriages carry “the days wine” (people) to La Guillotine to be be-headed (374). In this passage, Dickens shows his remorse for what is done. He gives hint that the common-folk were once a good people who are perverted by the aristocracy, and given the same conditions will be perverted again.
that it shows his view of the mistreatments and evils of the Victorian Era, along with his effort to
History has not only been important in our lives today, but it has also impacted the classic literature that we read. Charles Dickens has used history as an element of success in many of his works. This has been one of the keys to achievement in his career. Even though it may seem like it, Phillip Allingham lets us know that A Tale of Two Cities is not a history of the French Revolution. This is because no actual people from the time appear in the book (Allingham). Dickens has many different reasons for using the component of history in his novel. John Forster, a historian, tells us that one of these reasons is to advance the plot and to strengthen our understanding of the novel (27). Charles Dickens understood these strategies and could use them to his advantage.
Charles Dickens is a talented author who wrote many notable novels, including A Tale of Two Cities. Barbara Hardy notes that at a young age Dickens’ father was imprisoned for debt, leaving young Charles to support himself and his family alone (47). Dickens strongly disliked prisons, which shows as a motif in A Tale of Two Cities. Many of his interests contributed to the formulation of the novel. In the essay “Introduction” from the book, Charles Dickens, Harold Bloom claims Dickens hoped “to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding [the] terrible time” of the Revolution (20). Dickens’ reading and “extraordinary reliance upon Carlyle’s bizarre but effective French Revolution” may have motivated him to write the novel (Bloom 21). Sir James Fitzjames Stephen believed that Dickens was “on the look-out for a subject, determined off-hand to write a novel about [French Revolution]” (Bloom 20). In Brown’s book Dickens in his Time, Dickens guided the writing of the play Frozen Deep where two rivals share the same love, and one ultimately sacrifices himself for...
This paper is to explain the use of irony of a phrase from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. The story is set during the time of the French Revolution and the phrase was the slogan of the revolutionaries: “The Republic One and the Indivisible of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death.” Each term of this phrase will be defined and once defined one will be able to see the extreme irony of it.