A Tale of Two Cities.

DICKENS, Charles.

Item Number: 3829

London: Chapman and Hall, 1859.

First edition, first issue. Octavo, original red cloth. In near fine condition with light wear. First issue, with page 213 misnumbered as 113, the signature mark “b” on the List of Plates, and other first-issue points as called for. Illustrated by H.K. Browne, with 16 engraved plates by him. Housed in a custom morocco clamshell box.

The most famous and possibly the most popular of Dickens's novels, A Tale of Two Cities shows a master of dramatic narrative extracting gold from the ore of history. If the bloody tableau of the French Revolution were not in itself sufficient for a dozen novels, Dickens added to it a professional resurrectionist, an authentic ogress, and an antihero as convincingly flawed as any in modern literature. Here, too, are all of Dickens's recurring themes -- imprisonment, injustice, and cataclysmic violence, resurrection and the renunciation that makes renewal possible.