TALE OF TWO CITIES LECTURE NOTES

• "Public performance should not be done by friends and family but the professionals players should be engaged."
• Ellen played a minor part: Lucy's character.
• Lucie - sum of Ellen's appearance and the final 'e.'
• "I must say I like my cult."
• Young Dickens saw many unsettling, many disturbing sites: a place of wretchedness or darkness but also a place of great fascination.
• Wrote about London like a special correspondent of posterity,
• London is like a newspaper: everything is there and everything is disconnected.
• His visits resulted in political change.
• Paris was a vibrant, modernizing city - during Dickens' time.
• "Sets us back in time and at the same time brings us sharply back to the present day."
• Revolution was possible by the lower class population.
• The novel was a warning by Dickens - contrasting between pre and post revolutionary England.
• In correspondence with Carlisle, it made Dickens compress his material and restrict his focus - the monthly serial parts.
• Dickens distributed his materials based on demand of monthly serial parts.
• He wrote as he went along.
• He was pleased with the novel.
• The French dramatization never happened.
• There were adaptations of "Tale of Two Cities," the most famous one being "The Only Way."
• We travel along roads, we hear footsteps, we hear echos - as the past suddenly returns to haunt us.
• "Echo in footsteps": Dickens can build up the inevitability and the momentum as he forces the movement of the plot forward.
• "Show me the North Tower."
• "The sea of dark and threatening water..."
• "Every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and a mystery to other"; every room, every heart, every mind is a mystery to the world.