Registration has concluded. A Newberry Library Adult Education Class. Five sessions (via Zoom), Thursdays, 2:00-4:00pm (CDT), July 18 to August 15, 2024. Register here.

Love and loss, triumph and tragedy, knitting and mud—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Join us as we read and discuss Charles Dickens’s most experimental serial in consecutive spoiler-free sessions. This class invites participants to fully explore not only why A Tale of Two Cities has been called “a distinctively Victorian fantasia of the French Revolution,” but learn about its reception, critical interpretations, narrative styles, social criticism, and psychological insights. Our sessions will feature close reading, historical and biographical references, relevant art works, scenes from film adaptations, and lively discussion.

Materials List

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. Penguin Classics Edition. ISBN: 978-0141439600.
Other materials will be made available online and brought to the class sessions.
For the first session, please read only chapters 1-3. Please do not read the book’s introduction or preface.

Class Description
Dickens’s twelfth novel, what his friend and biographer called a literary “experiment,” teems with tension, violence, intrigue, and hidden connections. As its title suggests, A Tale of Two Cities addresses doubles, doubling, paradoxes, and contradictions. A study in contrasts that focuses on the two cities of London and Paris, the novel’s story of personal lives caught up in the political upheaval and the violence of the guillotine also explores two eras, two states of mind, and the struggle to communicate across a seemingly unbridgeable divide–a struggle shared by characters, the narrator, the reader, and Dickens himself.

Like Dickens’s later masterpiece, Great Expectations (1860-61), A Tale of Two Cities was originally published in weekly installments as part of the magazine All the Year Round (from April to November of 1859). These “teaspoon” installments, as Dickens’s contemporary Thomas Carlyle called them, are comprised of short, intense chapters with remarkably varying styles. This class begins with a very short reading assignment—the chapters comprising only the first of the original installments—followed by sessions that focus on four to six installments, averaging 90 pages each.

The purpose of this schedule is not to have participants recreate a specifically “Victorian reader” experience (although that issue does come up in discussions), but to help participants focus on the details of the narrative from the very beginning of their experience with the novel. Each class session features discussion of the thematic and formal dimensions of the installment at hand. I have always found that, compared to traditional book discussions, serial reading prompts a deeper and increasingly evolving commentary on specific issues, as well as a heightened sense of recurring images, a reader’s own opinions, and even a reader’s favorite lines.

All good novels actually teach readers how to read them, and serial assignments allow readers to progressively benefit from the novel’s own lessons early, identifying aspects of technique and form that significantly contribute to a full experience of the rest of the novel. And while readers rarely find alternatives to the traditional method of reading a novel once and retroactively discussing “what it’s all about,” the Newberry Adult Education format gives readers the chance to understand what it means to really experience a novel, and to discuss that experience while reading.

Sessions will also include short scenes from film adaptations of A Tale of Two Cities, as well as spoiler-free excerpts from critical materials and tips on what to look for in subsequent installments. These tips include suggestions for noting particular plot points, character changes, and specific “must-read” sections, among other hints for active reading. PowerPoint slides will serve to highlight some of the historical, artistic, and literary references in the novel, offering a kind of annotated intertextual experience prompted by the text of the novel itself.

Slides will also highlight Newberry Library materials relevant to the novel, including images from the original chapters in All the Year Round as well as two early bound editions held in the Special Collections.

Schedule
To be read ahead of time: Only chapters 1-3. Please do not read the introduction or the preface.

Session 1 (7/18/24) : Chapters 1.1-1.3

Session 2 (7/25/24): Chapters 1.4-2.6

Session 3 (8/1/24): Chapters 2.7-2.18

Session 4 (8/8/24): Chapters 2.19-3.7

Session 5 (8/15/24): Chapters 3.8-3.15 (end)

Image: Fred Bernard, “The Lion and the Jackal” (detail). Illustration for the Household Edition of A Tale of Two Cities (1894), by Fred Barnard. Scanned image by Philip V. Allingham, Victorian Web.