A tale of two cities : Dickens's revolutionary novel /

Students and faculty will find Glancy's introduction to Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities to be informative and useful. Its synthesis of scholarship on this rich novel includes its early context and standard categories of literary discussion: setting, character, plot, theme. The text used is the Oxford University Press "World's Classics" edition of the novel, which provides valuable historical references and two chronologies of the French Revolution and the novel's events. Glancy's study includes a Dickens chronology and a guide to serialization, as well as notes and an annotated bibliography. Especially interesting are the author's discussion of alternate titles Dickens could have used, the novel's imagery, the influence of Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep, and women's roles. Though limited to introducing such issues in a brief format, this study will be interesting to general readers and undergraduate students of the British novel.-S. A. Parker, Hiram College