A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!' ( A Tale of Two Cities, 1859, p. ' A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. Oprah chooses Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations Your browser does not support JavaScript! Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment' ( A Tale of Two Cities, p. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. ' Cramped in all kinds of dun cupboards and hutches at Tellson's, the oldest of men carried on the business gravely. A monument with a dragon atop marks the spot where Temple Bar stood in Dickens' time. It was brought back to the City of London in 2003 and installed in St. By 1878 Temple Bar had become a impediment to the increasing traffic in the area and was removed to a private residence. Temple Bar, an archway designed by Christopher Wren, was erected on the spot in 1672, replacing a wooden archway damaged in the great fire of 1666.

Child & Co bank has operated from this site since the 1660s and Dickens used the bank as a model for Tellson's. Tellson's Bank, in A Tale of Two Cities, is situated at Temple Bar where the City of London meets the City of Westminster and Fleet Street becomes the Strand. He used it as his main historical reference in writing A Tale of Two Cities, a book which Carlyle called ' wonderful' athough complaining that he had to read it by ' teaspoonfuls' ( Johnson, 1952, p.

316).ĭickens jokingly claimed to have read Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837) 500 times. Although the crusty Carlyle at times dismissed Dickens as merely an entertainer, he truly loved the exuberant, full-of-life writer ( Johnson, 1952, p.

Dickens actively sought Carlyle's approval and the influence of Carlyle on Dickens' later work is unmistakable. An essayist, satirist, and historian, Carlyle was a tremendous influence on the younger Dickens. Dickens met Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle in 1840 and the two became fast friends.

Dickens a tale of two cities