A Tale of Two Cities

Klappentext

A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens's complete 1859 novel in one Standard Large Print hardcover. The selected narrative moves between London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. Its three Books-Recalled to Life, the Golden Thread, and the Track of a Storm-contain all forty-five chapters in source order. The opening contrasts ages of wisdom and foolishness before the plot brings together families, a prisoner, a doctor, and people whose earlier decisions return with force. This edition keeps the complete ending and lets readers follow the novel as a single work.

Dickens began serializing the story in the first issue of All the Year Round on 30 April 1859. The final book-form text appeared later that year. His first-volume dedication to Lord John Russell and author's preface are printed here before the narrative from a separately identified scan of the 1859 edition. In the preface Dickens recalls Wilkie Collins's drama The Frozen Deep and describes how the story's governing idea first came to him. Those historical pages are part of the author's book context, not newly composed explanatory text.

The main novel and sixteen historical plates follow the illustrated Project Gutenberg eBook 98 witness. All sixteen plates are preserved in grayscale production copies for this black-and-white interior; the source originals remain separately identified. The digital wrapper and duplicate electronic navigation are omitted from the printed reading sequence. The source note distinguishes the Gutenberg narrative and images from the separate 1859 dedication and preface, and records the restoration of the first Book heading from the same source HTML.

The printed Contents lists the three Books and their chapters. It gives a useful route back to the Dover road, to the wine shop, to the trial scenes, or to a later return across the Channel without depending on a device or a companion file. Dickens develops private memory alongside public upheaval: an imprisonment reaches into another generation, and characters discover that a name, a promise, or a resemblance can carry a cost. A reader may pause at a chapter boundary and return without losing the larger three-Book arc.

This Standard Large Print Edition is a 7-by-10-inch case-laminate hardcover. The body is set in 18-point Atkinson Hyperlegible Next with 27-point line spacing. Ragged-right setting avoids stretched gaps between words, and the text is not divided at line endings. The margins leave room around the reading area on a bound page. These are concrete choices intended to ease sustained reading; they do not assert fixed-print WCAG conformance. The exterior illustration is identified separately from the historical interior plates.

For libraries and personal collections, this ISBN identifies the complete single-volume Standard hardcover, distinct from separately planned split editions. The novel can support nineteenth-century fiction, Dickens, historical-fiction, classroom, and accessible-format shelves. This record identifies the work, physical edition, source witness, and extra historical paratext so a selector can understand what is actually in this binding. It does not promise an electronic outline or downloadable file to the buyer of the printed book.

Algorithmic Quality Assurance: 139 deterministic and probabilistic checks; semantic reviews and holistic evaluation by frontier models; explanations within. AI as quality enforcer.

An original Lagniappe, At the Start of a Weekly Story, uses the digitized first issue of All the Year Round as a separate reading companion. It places Dickens's famous opening back on a dated weekly page and invites a short reflection on serial pacing. The About This Series page explains why this source-bound complete classic belongs in Classics Picked For You.