My Favourite Books

Number 4 - A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

In the early part of 1972 I was 17 years old, at boarding school, and bored waiting for my school career to end and my apres school life to begin. I was in the school library one afternoon, carving my initials into the mahogany table, when, for reasons which I can't now recollect, I decided to venture to parts undiscovered - ie the top shelves where resided leather bound tomes gifted to the school by benefactors hundreds, nay thousands, of years earlier, and completely undisturbed since. I needed a ladder to get there - I needed an oxygen mask when I arrived - the layer of dust was several inches thick. I discovered that there were complete sets of the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Thackeray, Austen and Dickens etc. At that time I was fairly convinced that Dickens wrote in Chaucerian middle-English style ("Whanne that April with his shoures sote, The droughte of March hath perced to the rote".) Having been utterly bamboozled by the Canterbury Tales, and being of the view that most of Shakespeare may as well have been written in Mandarin for all the sense it made to me, I was not hopeful for any of this stuff. But I blew the dust off one tome at random - a life-changing moment - and took it down to the table. It was 'A Tale of Two Cities'. I opened the book expecting Chaucerian gobbledegook. In AD 2006 I can still almost recite the first paragraph by heart- "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.......... etc etc"

Hmmm, I thought, I can nearly understand this - the next couple of paragraphs fixed the time and place of the book as England and France 1775 (Revolution Time!!).

Then, on page 3 we see the Dover Mail coach being pursued by a mysterious rider - here, this is quite interesting, exciting even - AND written in English.

The rider catches up with the coach and gives a message to one of the coach passengers - "RECALLED TO LIFE".

This is intriguing - read on.

Read on and be plunged into the Paris reign of terror - the guillotine shaving heads while les tricoteuses cackle.

Read on and be entranced by Dickens for the first time.

Read on to "It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done........."

Read on and continue reading through Bleak House, the Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, Little Dorrit, etc etc etc.

Read on and never stop.

Read on and develop a lifetime addiction to Dickens.

Read on and discover the other great 19th century writers.

Read on and be grateful that the book you picked at random that day was the right one.