Charles Dickens

Karen Kelly

In Charles DickensÍs classic tale of the French Revolution,æLucie Manette and her family are living quietly in London when the revolution draws them into the center of the dangerous mob in Paris. The fight for her husbandÍs freedom and the sacrifice of Sydney Carton has been adapted for young readers. æFrom the calm of London to the unrest in Paris, love, loyalty, and friendships are tested in the Calico Illustrated Classics adaptation of DickensÍs A Tale of Two Cities. Calico Chapter Books is an imprint of Magic Wagon, a division of ABDO Group. Grades 3-8.

Tale of Two Cities

Josephina Lucke

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. 

Alec Karlen

“…as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by many remembrances that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young mother (and I so old!), and by many associations of the days when what we call the world was not so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed in me.”

Tale of Two Cities quotes

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