'A CHRISTMAS CAROL' BY CHARLES DICKENS IS PUBLISHED

A Christmas Carol

Yesterday, The Grandma went to the library to read about Steve Biko. Today, she has returned to borrow A Christmas Carol, one of the most popular novels of the universal literature written by Charles Dickens.

A Christmas Carol was first published on a day like today in 1843 and The Grandma has wanted to homage this event reading this wonderful novel again.

Before going to the library, The Grandma has read a new chapter of Michael Dean's A Ghost in Love and Other Plays.

More information: Too Much, Too Many, Enough I & II

A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, commonly known as A Christmas Carol, is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in London by Chapman & Hall in 1843 and illustrated by John Leech.

A Christmas Carol recounts the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser who is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. After their visits, Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man.

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol during a period when the British were exploring and re-evaluating past Christmas traditions, including carols and newer customs such as Christmas trees. He was influenced by the experiences of his own youth and by the Christmas stories of other authors including Washington Irving and Douglas Jerrold.

Dickens had written three Christmas stories prior to the novella, and was inspired following a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several establishments for London's street children. The treatment of the poor and the ability of a selfish man to redeem himself by transforming into a more sympathetic character are the key themes of the story. There is discussion among academics as to whether this was a fully secular story, or if it is a Christian allegory.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Published on 19 December, the first edition sold out by Christmas Eve; by the end of 1844 thirteen editions had been released. Most critics reviewed the novella favourably. The story was illicitly copied in January 1844; Dickens took legal action against the publishers, who went bankrupt, further reducing Dickens's small profits from the publication. He went on to write four other Christmas stories in subsequent years.

In 1849 he began public readings of the story which proved so successful he undertook 127 further performances until 1870, the year of his death. A Christmas Carol has never been out of print and has been translated into several languages; the story has been adapted many times for film, stage, opera and other media.

A Christmas Carol captured the zeitgeist of the mid-Victorian revival of the Christmas holiday. Dickens had acknowledged the influence of the modern Western observance of Christmas and later inspired several aspects of Christmas, including family gatherings, seasonal food and drink, dancing, games and a festive generosity of spirit.

The writer Charles Dickens was born to a middle class family which got into financial difficulties as a result of the spendthrift nature of his father John. In 1824 John was committed to the Marshalsea, a debtors' prison in Southwark, London. Dickens, aged 12, was forced to pawn his collection of books, leave school and work at a dirty and rat-infested shoe-blacking factory. The change in circumstances gave him what his biographer, Michael Slater, describes as a deep personal and social outrage, which heavily influenced his writing and outlook. 

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By the end of 1842 Dickens was a well-established author, having written six major works, as well as several short stories, novellas and other pieces. At the end of December of that year he began publishing his novel Martin Chuzzlewit as a monthly serial; the novel was his favourite work, but sales were disappointing and he faced temporary financial difficulties.

Charles Dickens

Celebrating the Christmas season had been growing in popularity through the Victorian era. The Christmas tree had been introduced in Britain during the 18th century, and its use was popularised by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Their practice was copied in many homes across the country.

In the early 19th century there had been a revival of interest in Christmas carols, following a decline in popularity over the previous hundred years. The publication of Davies Gilbert's 1823 work Some Ancient Christmas Carols, With the Tunes to Which They Were Formerly Sung in the West of England and William Sandys's 1833 collection Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern led to a growth in the form's popularity in Britain.

Dickens had an interest in Christmas, and his first story on the subject was Christmas Festivities, published in Bell's Weekly Messenger in 1835; the story was then published as A Christmas Dinner in Sketches by Boz (1836). The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton, another Christmas story, appeared in the 1836 novel The Pickwick Papers.

In the episode, a Mr Wardle relates the tale of Gabriel Grub, a lonely and mean-spirited sexton, who undergoes a Christmas conversion after being visited by goblins who show him the past and future. Slater considers that the main elements of the Carol are present in the story, but not yet in a firm form. The story is followed by a passage about Christmas in Dickens's editorial Master Humphrey's Clock. The professor of English literature Paul Davis writes that although the Goblins story appears to be a prototype of A Christmas Carol, all Dickens's earlier writings about Christmas influenced the story.

More information: BBC

The phrase Merry Christmas had been around for many years -the earliest known written use was in a letter in 1534- but Dickens's use of the phrase in A Christmas Carol popularised it among the Victorian public. The exclamation Bah! Humbug! entered popular use in the English language as a retort to anything sentimental or overly festive;  the name Scrooge became used as a designation for a miser, and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as such in 1982.

In the early 19th century the celebration of Christmas was associated in Britain with the countryside and peasant revels, disconnected to the increasing urbanisation and industrialisation taking place.

In A Christmas Carol, Dickens showed that Christmas could be celebrated in towns and cities, despite increasing modernisation. The modern observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday. The Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 1840s had produced a resurgence of the traditional rituals and religious observances associated with Christmastide and, with A Christmas Carol, Dickens captured the zeitgeist while he reflected and reinforced his vision of Christmas.

More information: The Guardian

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions

of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth,

and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

Charles Dickens

CHARLES DICKENS' GREAT EXPECTATIONS: ENDLESS HOPE

Great Expectations, a weekly serial

The Grandma has started to read a new Charles Dickens' novel, Great Expectations. She has also continued with her English grammar manual Intermediate Language Practice. Today, she has revised Chapter 18.

More information: Modals I, II, III & IV

Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel: a bildungsroman that depicts the personal growth and personal development of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person.

The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes. The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most memorable scenes, including the opening in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict, Abel Magwitch.

More information: BBC

Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery, poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death, and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. 

Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations, which is popular both with readers and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media.

Joe and Pip in Great Expectations

As Dickens began writing Great Expectations, he undertook a series of hugely popular and remunerative reading tours. 

His domestic life had, however, disintegrated in the late 1850s and he had separated from his wife, Catherine Dickens, and was having a secret affair with the much younger Ellen Ternan. 

The introduction of the 1984 Penguin English Library edition suggests that the reluctance with which Ellen Ternan became his mistress is reflected in the icy teasing of Estella in Great Expectations.

Dickens and Wills co-owned All the Year Round, one 75%, the other 25%. Since Dickens was his own publisher, he did not require a contract for his own works. Although intended for weekly publication, Great Expectations was divided into nine monthly sections, with new pagination for each.  

Harper's Weekly published the novel from 24 November 1860 to 5 August 1861 in the US and All the Year Round published it from 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861 in the UK. Harper's paid £1,000 for publication rights. Dickens welcomed a contract with Tauchnitz 4 January 1861 for publication in English for the European continent.

Pip & Biddy and Orlick in Great Expectations

Publications in Harper's Weekly were accompanied by forty illustrations by John McLenan; however, this is the only Dickens work published in All the Year Round without illustrations.

Great Expectations's single most obvious literary predecessor is Dickens's earlier first-person narrator protagonist David Copperfield. 

The two novels trace the psychological and moral development of a young boy to maturity, his transition from a rural environment to the London metropolis, the vicissitudes of his emotional development, and the exhibition of his hopes and youthful dreams and their metamorphosis, through a rich and complex first person narrative. Dickens was conscious of this similarity and, before undertaking his new manuscript, reread David Copperfield to avoid repetition.

More information: The Guardian

The narrative structure of Great Expectations is influenced by the fact that it was first published as weekly episodes in a periodical. This required short chapters, centred on a single subject, and an almost mathematical structure.

Although the novel is written in first person, the reader knows, as an essential prerequisite, that Great Expectations is not an autobiography but a novel, a work of fiction with plot and characters, featuring a narrator-protagonist. 

Joe learning to read in Great Expectations

In addition, Sylvère Monod notes that the treatment of the autobiography differs from David Copperfield, as Great Expectations does not draw from events in Dickens's life; at most some traces of a broad psychological and moral introspection can be found.

Amongst the narrative devices that Dickens uses, are caricature, comic speech mannerisms, intrigue, Gothic atmosphere, and a central character who gradually changes. 

It's important the close network of the structure and balance of contrasts, and praises the first-person narration for providing a simplicity that is appropriate for the story while avoiding melodrama. There is the symbolism attached to great expectations as reinforcing the novel's impact.

Great Expectations contains the elements of a variety of different literary genres, including the bildungsroman, gothic novel, crime novel, as well as comedy, melodrama and satire; and it belongs, like Wuthering Heights and the novels of Walter Scott, to the romance rather than realist tradition of the novel.

More information: The Telegraph

The title's Expectations refers to a legacy to come, and thus immediately announces that money, or more specifically wealth plays an important part in the novel. Some other major themes are crime, social class, including both gentility, and social alienation, imperialism and ambition. 

The novel is also concerned with questions relating to conscience and moral regeneration, as well as redemption through love. 

Download Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

There are dark shadows on the earth, 

but its lights are stronger in the contrast. 

Charles Dickens

LONDON, 18TH CENTURY: PROGRESS & NEW CHANCES

London Bridge, in the 1700's

Charles Dickens' A tale of two cities has two main localizations. The first of them is Paris, the capital of France and the second one is London, the capital of England. 

The story happens in 1775 when the English city is at the beginning of the the Industrial Revolution, a fact that will change the city and its inhabitants forever and will led the world in advances that enabled mass production. If in 1715 London was composed of a series of contiguous communities spread along the Thames, each of which was within easy reach of open fields, by the 1760s London had begun to escape the magnetic attraction of the river and to make ever-deeper inroads into rural Middlesex and Surrey.

London in 1715 was at one and the same time Britain’s largest manufacturing centre, its largest port, and the centre of governance, the professions, trade, and finance. Perhaps a third of the population was directly involved in manufacturing, and the capital formed the centre of many trades. The numbers of medical and legal professionals, in particular, grew strongly from the last quarter of the seventeenth century through the 1740s when the number of professionals began to level off. 

John Rocque's Map of London, 1746

Employed in an ever growing number of hospitals and institutions, in the plethora of courts, both civil and criminal, and in the army and navy, by around 1730 there were perhaps 15,000 men employed in the law, medicine, the church and the military; while during the same period around one in nine Londoners kept a shop; and a further ten percent worked in the transport sector. From perhaps 750,000 souls in 1760, London grew decade by decade to reach 1.4 million individuals by 1815. Built by hand, a city still dependent on night-soil men and hand pumped water; London developed a complex organisation in these decades to feed and water, clean and care for an unprecedented number of people.

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It was in these decades that London’s pattern of inexorable growth became more firmly established. And this growth was largely the result of migration. High mortality rates and unhealthy living conditions continued to suppress the fertility and life expectancy of native Londoners, ensuring that the capacious shoes of the dead always needed filling with new feet. At the same time, with the introduction of innoculation against smallpox and a decline in infant mortality London's population started to become sufficiently healthy to reproduce itself.

King William street, London

What was most distinctive about this period, however, was the pattern of migration. People from Europe and the British Isles now rubbed shoulders with Black Africans and Caribbeans; with Lascars from India and returned colonists from America and later Australia. 

Thrown onto London's shores by the storms of war and revolution, of the Seven Years' War, the American War, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars; these new, war-weary migrants created a population for late eighteenth-century London that was more varied than had existed in any European city since the Roman Empire.

If by 1760 the character of London's growth was set, with its aristocratic western squares and poorer East End communities, the later decades of the century both reinforced and added at least one new aspect to the pattern. By 1760 London had largely escaped the magnetic pull of the Thames and its meandering east-west course, and the city had begun to expand dramatically both north and south. In part a response to new bridges and roads, to the evolution of a new transport infrastructure, the once open fields between the old City and Islington to the north were gradually filled with new housing; and Southwark evolved from a simple waterside settlement to a more substantial, and in parts much wealthier, suburb. 

More information: BBC

Snaking out along Borough High Road, the Great North Road and Whitechapel, new ribbons of development ate ever further into the surrounding countryside. It was in the decades at the end of the eighteenth century that the first London commuters can be found, sometimes taking advantage of the regularity and cheapness of the new Royal Mail coaches. 

London, 1750

The nature of the built environment that filled these once rural fields was both squalid and grandiose. 

Up until at least the passage of the London Building Act of 1774, and in many instances afterwards, many suburban developments were haphazard and of poor quality, the work of speculators, poor carpenters and bricklayers, using even poorer materials. During periodic depressions in the building industry houses put up in hope of attracting middling sort and rich occupants were let out room by room to the very poor. 

House collapses were common, with whole families occasionally crushed in their beds. To the East and North of the City, the huddled suburban communities of London suffered poor housing and poor infrastructure, made tolerable only by the almost unbounded demand for casual labour on the quays and wharves and in the service industries of the city.

More information: The Social Historian

In contrast, the West End was built to a higher standard. The new shops of the early eighteenth century were made ever more grand, frequently taking the form of purpose built palaces of consumption that pre-figured later nineteenth-century department stores. New squares and commercial developments attempted to emulate the early success of St James’s and Hanover Squares. The urban palaces of the aristocracy stood shoulder to shoulder around these formal squares, with chains, iron railings and padlocks increasingly serving to segregate the rich from their neighbours. At the same time the back streets and mews that filled the areas between the squares retained a diverse community of artisans, service workers and paupers.

A drawing of The Royal Mail, A Tale of Two Cities

New types of street lighting, paving and water supply grew in the same pattern, with remarkably high standards to be found in the West End and in those parts of the City rebuilt after the Great Fire, and equally remarkably low standards in many other areas. While numbered houses, served by fresh running water, framing beautifully paved roads could be found in many areas, in others ground water from public wells was still the only source, and mud still filled the unimproved roads for much of the year. At the turn of the century, the building of the huge, enclosed docks east of the Tower only served to emphasise the relative squalor of the surrounding communities.

The East End became the home of manufacturing, of brewing and distilling, sugar processing and textiles. In combination with the ever-hungry maw of the port, its industries consumed the lives of generations of workers. Besmirched by the smuts and odours sent skyward from the warm coal-fired hearths of the West End, East Enders struggled in poor conditions, at difficult jobs, in a poor environment. Periodic attempts to defend their jobs in the face of threats posed by labour-saving devices led to occasional violent protests, such as the attacks by the cutters on master silk-weavers' engine looms in 1769.

More information: Historic UK

In the ring of suburban parishes along the City's northern and western borders other groups of the poor similarly eked out a hard working life. In St Giles in the Fields and Farringdon Without, large families rented small rooms in badly built tenements, and made a living in the precarious service industries of the capital, as porters and needle women, chairmen and street hawkers.

Victorian illustration about London poverty

In the City itself the financial services of insurance and merchant banking along with warehousing and trading came to form the basis of huge fortunes and middling sort aspirations.  

City merchants increasingly moved out to more salubrious spots beyond the ring of slums gradually encircling the metropolis, commuting back daily to Cheapside and the Royal Exchange. Witness to the greatest change, the West End evolved in response to the growing importance of the London Season, and its increasing role in the lives of Britain's elite. Here the palaces of the aristocracy were served by well-appointed shops and skilled craftsmen. Communities of service workers, coach makers, and dancing masters filled the interstices between the parks and squares, town houses and royal residences, servicing perhaps the wealthiest single community in Europe. 

Late eighteenth-century London dominated the culture of the English-speaking Atlantic, and increasingly the Pacific and Indian oceans as well. The vast majority of Britain's printing presses and newspapers were sited here. The city was possessed of a huge number of coffeehouses and theatres and was home to Britain's greatest authors and scientists, doctors and thinkers. Lectures, exhibitions and debates could be found on almost any day of the week. In intellectual terms it far outpaced the near moribund Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, while the existence of the Royal Society, the great hospitals, and a wealthy and leisured class ensured a vibrant and diverse world of ideas. 

More information: Royal Society

The workings of this world were embedded in a complex set of institutions. Although the royal court played a decreasing role in patronising the arts, a popular audience for theatre and printed works grew up in the West End, centred on Covent Garden, and supplied with an ever changing diet of new events and publications by people such as Samuel Johnson and David Garrick.

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The great associational charities of the age, most of which had been founded around mid-century, such as the Foundling Hospital, the Magdalen, and the Marine Society, went on to form the locus for a shared, elite culture. And if England can be said to have had an Enlightenment it was to be found somewhere between Grub Street, White's coffeehouse, the Royal Academy and that quintessential eighteenth-century London institution, the British Museum, founded in 1753.

But, if in these decades London went from strength to strength, dominating both Britain and its overseas empire, the politics of the capital became ever more parochial. The old City, which housed an ever dwindling proportion of London's population, was run by a still powerful, but increasingly isolated Common Council, Aldermen and Lord Mayor. It continued to act as an effective pressure group on national politics, but ceased to be able to reflect the political demands of the capital as a whole. 

The location of Parliament, mired as it was in the urban sprawl, ensured that national governments would be sensitive to the demands of London. But the growth of the metropolis meant that it could not speak with a single voice. Instead, the City, the Middlesex Bench and the over weaning parishes of Westminster each contributed their own tune to the cacophony of voices seeking to make London heard. The resulting rough music allowed fertile innovation, but it failed to curb the city's myriad social problems.

More information: The Telegraph

On the street, in the alehouses and the low coffeehouses, politics took a different form. Against a backdrop of first the American and then the French Revolution, a new kind of popular politics grew to maturity. 

From the agitation associate with John Wilkes in the 1760s and 70s; in the Gordon Riots of June 1780, and both the Revolutionary and counter-Revolutionary politics of the 1790s and 1810s, Londoners found a new political voice. Radical Westminster with its uniquely open franchise provided one outlet for the political frustrations of Londoners, but the city’s century old traditions of riot and newer organisations such as the London Corresponding Society and its many successors provided others. 

More information: History Discussion

In the industrial revolution Britain led the world in advances that enabled mass production: trade exchanges, transportation, factory technology and new skills needed for the new industrialised world. 

Lucy Powell

PARIS, 18TH CENTURY: REVOLUTION & SOCIAL CHANGES

A drawing of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities

When you start to read a book, the first important thing is to know something about the author. Once you have enough information about him, it's important to situate the book in time and space.

Charles Dickens' A tale of two cities has two main localizations. The first of them is Paris, the capital of France. The story happens in 1775 when the French city is near to live a great social revolution that will change not only France but the world history.

Paris in the 18th century was the second-largest city in Europe, after London, with a population of about 600,000 persons. The century saw the construction of Place Vendôme, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Élysées, the church of Les Invalides, and the Panthéon, and the founding of the Louvre Museum. Paris witnessed the end of the reign of Louis XIV, was the center stage of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, saw the first manned flight, and was the birthplace of high fashion and the modern restaurant.

Louis XIV distrusted the Parisians; when he was young he had been forced to flee the city twice, and he did not forget it. He moved his residence from the Tuileries Palace to the Palace of Versailles in 1671, and moved his entire court to Versailles in 1682. But while he disliked the Parisians, he wanted Paris to be a monument to his glory; he declared in 1666 that he wished to do for Paris what Augustus had done for Rome.

A typical day in 18th century in Paris

Immediately following the death of Louis XIV, his nephew, Philippe d’Orléans, manoeuvered the Parlement into breaking the King's will and naming him the Regent for the five-year-old king Louis XV. On 12 September, the Regent had the child King brought to the Palais de Justice to ratify his Regency, and then to the Château de Vincennes. On 30 December, the young King was installed in the Tuileries Palace, while the Regent took up residence in his family's palace, the Palais Royal, the former Palais-Cardinal of Cardinal Richelieu.

Until the 1789 Revolution, Paris had a strict social hierarchy, whose customs and rules were established by long tradition. It was described by Louis-Sébastien Mercier in the Le Tableau de Paris, written in 1783: There are in Paris eight distinct classes; the princes and great nobles, these are the least numerous; the Nobles of the Robe; the financiers; the traders and merchants; the artists; the craftsmen; the manual workers; the servants; and the bas peuple, the lower class.

More information: BBC

The bourgeois, or members of the middle class of Paris, financiers, merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and those in the liberal professions like doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers or government officials were a growing social class. They were specifically defined by law as persons who had lived in the city at least a year in their own residence, and earned enough money to pay taxes.

A drawing of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities

Most Parisians belonged to the working class or the poor. There were some forty thousand domestic servants, mostly working for middle-class families. Most came from the provinces; only five percent were born in Paris. 

They lived with the families they served, and their living and working conditions depended entirely on character of their employers. They received very low wages, worked long hours, and if they lost their job, or if a woman became pregnant, they had little hope of getting another position.

In the domain of finance and banking, Paris was far behind other European capitals, and even other French cities. The first venture of Paris into modern finance was launched by the Scottish economist John Law, who, encouraged by the Regent, in 1716 started a private bank and issued paper money. Law invested heavily in the Mississippi Company, causing wild speculation, with shares rising to sixty times their original value. The bubble burst in 1720, and Law closed the bank and fled the country, ruining many Parisian investors.

More information: History Lists

Parisians were suspicious of banks and bankers. The Bourse, or Paris stock market, didn't open until 24 September 1724 on rue Vivienne, in the former hôtel de Nevers, after stock markets had existed in Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulouse and other cities. The Banque de France wasn't founded until 1800, after the Bank of Amsterdam (1609), and the Bank of England (1694).

Notre Dame de Paris in the 18th century

During most of the 18th century, the Parisian economy was based on thousands of small workshops, where skilled artisans produced products. 

The workshops were clustered in particular neighborhoods; furniture makers in the faubourg Saint-Antoine; cutlery and small metal-work in neighborhood called the Quinze Vingts near the Bastille. At the beginning of the 18th century, security was provided by two different corps of police; the Garde de Paris and the Guet Royal, or royal watchmen. Both organizations were under the command of the Lieutenant General of Police. The Parisians considered the police both corrupt and inefficient, and relations between the people and the police were increasingly strained.

For most of the 18th century, the hospitals were religious institutions, run by the church, which provided more spiritual than actual medical care. The largest and oldest was the Hôtel-Dieu, located on the parvis of Notre-Dame Cathedral on the opposite side of the square from its present location. It was founded in 651 by Saint Landry of Paris.

More information: Eye Witness to History

Paris possessed an extraordinary number and variety of prisons, used for different classes of persons and types of crimes.

The guillotine during the French Revolution

In October 1789 Doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, in the interest of finding a more humane method, successfully had the means of execution changed to decapitation by a machine he perfected, the guillotine, built with the help of a Paris manufacturer of pianos and harps named Tobias Schmidt and the surgeon Antoine Louis.

The University of Paris had fallen gradually in quality and influence since the 17th century. It was primarily a school of theology, not well adapted to the modern world, and played no important role in the scientific revolution or the Enlightenment.

The great majority of Parisians were at least nominally Roman Catholic, and the church played an enormous role in the life of the city; though its influence declined toward the end of the century, partly because of the Enlightenment, and partly from conflicts within the church establishment. The church, along with the nobility, suffered more than any other institutions from the French Revolution.

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The Protestant Church had been strictly controlled and limited by the royal government for most of the 18th century. 

A drawing of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities

The Jewish community in Paris was also very small; an estimated five hundred persons in 1789. About fifty were Sephardic Jews who had originally come from Spain and Portugal, then lived in Bayonne before coming to Paris. They lived mostly in the neighborhood of Saint-German-des-Prés, and worked largely in the silk and chocolate-making businesses. There was another Sephardic community of about one hundred persons in the same neighborhood, who were originally from Avignon, from the oldest Jewish community in France, which had lived protected in the Papal state. They mostly worked in commerce. The third and largest community, about three hundred fifty persons, were Ashkenaze Jews from Alsace, Lorraine, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland. They spoke Yiddish, and lived largely in the neighborhood of the Church of Saint-Merri.

The Freemasons were not a religious community, but functioned like one and had a powerful impact on events in Paris in the 18th century. The first lodge in France, the Grand Loge de France, was founded on 24 June 1738 on the rue des Boucheries, and was led by the Duke of Antin. By 1743 there were sixteen lodges in Paris, and their grand master was the Count of Clermont, close to the royal family. The lodges contained aristocrats, the wealthy, church leaders and scientists. Their doctrines promoted liberty and tolerance, and they were strong supporters of the Enlightenment. 

More information: Students for Liberty

 Democracy must be built through open societies that share information. When there is information, there is enlightenment. 

When there is debate, there are solutions. When there is no sharing of power, no rule of law, no accountability, there is abuse, corruption, subjugation and indignation. 

Atifete Jahjaga

DICKENSIAN, EXCELLENT CHARACTERS & NEW WORDS

Charles John Huffam Dickens

The Grandma has started to read Charles Dickens’ A tale of two cities. One of the most fascinating things in Dickens novels is to analyze the characters because they change during the story -psychological novel- and they try to redempt themselves in the way they can.

In nearly all novels by Charles Dickens, characters take the main the stage and generally are just as important as the plot becuase of their complexity. 

Charles Dickens' novel, A Tale of Two Cities, offers far more to the reader than the title suggests, particularly because of the enormous complexity of the characters, both central and peripheral. A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens is also a series of tales about dual identities and the ways in which one character serves as a foil to another. In Books I and II of Tale of Two Cities, Dickens establishes the setting and the dynamic relationships among the characters, all of whom are struggling, to greater and lesser degrees, with their positions regarding the Revolution and as a result, this creates a struggle with their identities.

While some characters in the Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities, especially Darnay, clearly have more acute conflicts to resolve and far more to lose than the seemingly minor characters, it is by examining the marginal characters that the reader can understand the dynamic conflicts of the period more fully. Two of the novel’s marginal characters, John Barsad, the duplicitous spy in A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, and Gaspard, the quiet but determined peasant who takes justice into his own hands, represent two faces of the Revolution, and help to emphasize the conflicts and conditions of the major characters.

When John Barsad is introduced in the novel A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, it is immediately clear that he is not only self-serving and hypocritical, he is a man who is not to be trusted. While he is not a popular character, he is, nonetheless an excellent candidate for a character analysis as Barsad is complex and multilayered.

Aside from the case of A Tale of Two Cities the literary canon is full of examples of seemingly minor men and women who become heroes and highly worthy of character analysis, hardly-noticed characters who turn into villains, and people of no reputation who shape the entire course of a novel’s events. This is part of what makes the story Dickens is telling so interesting, even though the events themselves are worthy of note, the characters who are the subjects of great interest and character analysis and their level of complexity make A Tale of Two Cities what it is. 

More information: BBC

Beyond offering the reader a mere narration of the events leading up to the Revolution, Dickens creates suspense, tension, and the opportunity for opinions and actions to be transformed by elevating the influence of characters worthy of intense character analysis in A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens who would otherwise be marginal to the plot. 

BBC One's Dickensian

John Barsad and Gaspard are two men who are quite different from one another, and who also differ in their motives and means of expressing their power and influence. 

Nonetheless, in several relatively brief scenes, both men shape the outcome of the novel by acting upon their beliefs and passions decisively and without apology. As a result, the lives of the major characters in A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens and the decisions that they are able and which they choose to make are transformed.

More information: How Stuff Works

Dickensian is a British drama television series that premiered on BBC One from 26 December 2015 to 21 February 2016. The 20-part series, created and co-written by Tony Jordan, brings characters from many Charles Dickens novels together in one Victorian London neighbourhood, as Inspector Bucket investigates the murder of Ebenezer Scrooge's partner Jacob Marley.

Red Planet Pictures's Alex Jones vowed to lobby HM Revenue and Customs and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to relax the tax-relief rules for Dickensian; tax relief is only given for dramas longer than 30 minutes and each episode of Dickensian lasts 30 minutes.

More information: BBC

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. 

I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, 

 should have known perfect bliss. 

Charles Dickens

IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES, IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

Charles Dickens writes in the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities as he paints a picture of life in England and France. The year is late 1775, and Jarvis Lorry travels from London to Paris on a secret mission for his employer, Tellson's Bank. Joining him on his journey is Lucie Manette, a 17-year-old woman who is stunned to learn that her father, Doctor Alexandre Manette, is alive and has recently been released after having been secretly imprisoned in Paris for 18 years...

The Grandma at Malta International Airport

The Grandma and her friends are returning to their homes. Joseph de Ca'th Lon is flying to Lon; Tina Picotes to Monte Carlo; Claire Fontaine to Québec and The Grandma to Barcelona. 

During the flight from Valletta to Barcelona, The Grandma has started to read Charles Dickens' A tale of two cities, a new book that she's going to share with her families. Before reading a book, you must know the author and his/her life. Every author puts a little of himself/herself in his/her books. Charles Dickens is one of the best writers of the history and all his works are considered masterpieces.

This new book talks about London and Paris during the French Revolution. Enjoy it with The Grandma, who is going to post one new chapter, in audio version, every day.

Download A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens (February 1812-9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the 20th century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are still widely read today.

Charles John Huffam Dickens

Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. 

Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms. Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers. Within a few years he had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire, and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication. 

More information: Biography

Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense. The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback. For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features. 

His plots were carefully constructed, and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives. Masses of the illiterate poor chipped in ha'pennies to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.

A tale of to cities published on Harper's Weekly

Dickens was regarded as the literary colossus of his age. His 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, remains popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre.  

Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted, and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities, set in London and Paris, is his best-known work of historical fiction. Dickens has been praised by fellow writers, from Leo Tolstoy to George Orwell, G. K. Chesterton and Tom Wolfe, for his realism, comedy, prose style, unique characterisations, and social criticism. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf complained of a lack of psychological depth, loose writing, and a vein of saccharine sentimentalism. The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social conditions or comically repulsive characters.

Authors frequently draw their portraits of characters from people they have known in real life. David Copperfield is regarded by many as a veiled autobiography of Dickens. 

The scenes of interminable court cases and legal arguments in Bleak House reflect Dickens's experiences as a law clerk and court reporter, and in particular his direct experience of the law's procedural delay during 1844 when he sued publishers in Chancery for breach of copyright. Dickens's father was sent to prison for debt, and this became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit resulting from Dickens's own experiences of the institution.  

Lucy Stroughill, a childhood sweetheart, may have affected several of Dickens's portraits of girls such as Little Em'ly in David Copperfield and Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death, when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. 

More information: The Atlantic

Have a heart that never hardens, 

and a temper that never tires, 

and a touch that never hurts. 

Charles Dickens