Hello and welcome to this episode of Chronicles, where this time we're going to be talking all about a tale of two cities

by Charles Dickens. I figured it would be good to get in early with some Dickens appreciation.

So, Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812 in Portsmouth, and from the low fortune of his early life, with his father being sent to a

debtor's prison when Dickens was only a small child, to the renown and wealth that he received

in his own time, Dickens experienced both the impoverished lows and the celebrity status high

society of the Victorian era. And in experiencing both the best and worst of life's offerings,

he became a man who just understood people from all walks of life. He understood their hopes, their dreams and their

plights. And his characters were so well realised from the most misfortunate paupers, such as Oliver

Twist, to the aristocratic exiles like Charles Darnie, who will be talking about more from this current novel.

And of course, his descriptions of London are so vivid. You can almost feel yourself walking the

streets through his pages. And in doing this, his works came to define the Victorian era itself with the adjective of Dickensian.

I had a quote that I just wanted to start off with about Dickens himself, and it's from

G.K. Chesterton, very, very famous, writer, philosopher and critic. And he said, whatever the word great means,

Dickens was what it means. Even the fastidious and unhappy, who cannot read his books without a

continuous critical exasperation, would use the word of him without stopping to think. They feel that Dickens is a great writer,

even if he is not a good writer. He is treated as a classic, that is, as a king who may now be

deserted, but who cannot now be dethroned. Amongst his many famous works, such as Great Expectations and of course a Christmas

Carol, it is a Tale of Two Cities, which was published back in 1859, that went on to become

one of his best-selling works, and it's sold at present over 200 million copies.

And what's interesting is that of Dickens 15 novels, only two of them are historical fiction,

and this happens to be one of them. And so in a tale of two cities, Charles Dickens

weaves these threads of fate and love and redemption through the intertwined lives of these

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