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A Tale of Two Cities: Charles Dickens

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Explanation of the key Themes, Motifs, and Symbols including:

Imprisonment
The Broken Wine Cask
Madame Defarge's Knitting
The Marquis
The Possibility of Resurrection
The Necessity of Sacrifice
Doubles
Shadows and Darkness

Detailed Character Analysis of Sydney Carton, Madame Defarge, Doctor Manette, Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette.
Identification and discussion of Important Quotations.

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 10,2002

This edition

Format
96 pages, Paperback
Published
January 10, 2002 by Spark Publishing
ISBN
9781586633523
ASIN
158663352X
Language
English

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About the author

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sparknotes

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Many of the editions by this group of authors are actually guides to books rather than the works.

If the author of the SparkNotes is known, they should be the first author. Please leave these SparkNotes Editors as the second author and the author of the original work as the last author. Do not combine with the original work. Do not put the author of the ORIGINAL work first.

Link to discussion.

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.5 / 5.0, 6 votes)
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3(50%)
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6 reviews All reviews
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Veldenava7
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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I tried to read A Tale of Two Cities. I know it's a classic, but geez! Talk about run on sentences! I had to get the Spark Notes just to know what was going on. However, now I think I can read the novel and actually understand what is going on.
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SumiiiMAL
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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This was so incredibly helpful when reading A Tale of Two Cities, as the context and symbolism were almost totally lost on me. Only slight gripe is how much smoke blowing there was about Dickens’ writing. Changes POV suddenly? BRILLIANT and powerful device to get the reader more engaged! Writes two opposing one-dimensional characters to only service the plot? A STUNNING representation of order vs chaos! Still, if this book didn’t exist I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy AToTC at all!
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makuras
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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war. my book takes place during the french revolution. on the bloodstained streets of Paris, Lucy must make a sacrifice...

Two brothers, fall in love with the same woman. for them, this means war. but not just any war, the french revolutionary war. this book is a fight over the same heart. poor Lucy must make a choice. not only do these kinds of choices happen in a book, but they also happen in our world too.

in our greedy world, the main cause of war is jealousy, weather or not it's about something that another person has or something that neither people have. war is usually about who has what first, why they have it, and why the other person wants it. when two people fall in love with the same person, of course this is gonna bring some tension to the problem. either way, one of the peoples heart will be broken. so will their relationship.

but, sydney( one of the two brothers that falls in love with Lucy ) doesn't realize that if Lucy chooses that she doesn't want to marry neither of the two brothers, it's her choice. of course sydney would be very upset, but it's not really his choice.

but of course it's much more serious than that because both of their family's are so caught up in the french revolutionary war, so this makes it harder for them.

when i think inside and outside the book, i think that love and war are very similar. you can hurt people in love, just like you can hurt people in war.this book taught me about how people make choices for reasons. and most of the reasons are selfish reasons.

to conclude;

love, hate, and war. these are the main problems in this book, and the world, is this the way dickens wanted me( the reader ) to see the world, or is he trying to tell me that this is the world. but now i have to the understanding that love isn't like war, love is war.

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Titaniumpig
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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So I read A Tale of Two Cities earlier this year and I enjoyed it but I couldn’t quite keep up with everything that was happening so now I’m reading this. 4.6 stars
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OurBoySouichi
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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Keep in mind, the 4-star review refers to the helpfulness of the Spark Notes guide. I'd give the actual book 1 star but since I didn't actually read it I can't bring myself to submit a rating. It just feels wrong. Still my review of the book would go something like this:

As far as classics go, this one is pretty terrible. Thank god for Spark Notes or I would have had to slog through this wholly tiresome read all on my own. I did make an attempt but a few chapters in and I gave up. The rest of the time I spent skimming over the work whilst reading the literature guide. Maybe if I'd had more than a week to read it I could have managed but Dickens puts some serious effort into making this book as arduous and unreadable as possible.

My take: A sloppily constructed plot coupled with really fancy prose woven into the events of the French Revolution in order to make it seem significant.

As I'm not really a big fan of historical fiction I guess I was bound to dislike this but I didn't think it'd be THIS bad. I would have much preferred an actual history of the French Revolution to this convoluted nonsense, but that's just me.
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Re1612
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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I never would have finished reading (and understood) A Tale of Two Cities without the aid of this study guide.
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