Charles Dickens set his historical novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859) in the French Revolution seventy years before, but it was far from the dead past to him.
The opening lines of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities are among his most famous. He creates a sense of breathless and surging emotion; he encourages the reader to think of the past as a living, throbbing present; and he reminds us that the present too may stand on the brink of sudden and violent change. The chapter is quite long, but cleverly written and, especially with a few notes, very enlightening.
John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ opens with Christian wondering how to convince his wife that their town and their family are in immediate danger.
John Bunyan’s groundbreaking allegorical novel ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ (1678) opens with John in Bedford County Gaol, where he was imprisoned for holding unlicensed Christian gatherings. He recalls the time many years earlier when it first came to him, with disconcerting conviction, that there should be more to a believer’s Sunday than playing tip-cat on the village green.
From the very first lines, Jane Austen’s classic novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’ pokes affectionate fun at Georgian England.
The opening lines of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (1813) are arguably the best-loved in all English fiction. In the drawing-room of Longbourn, a gentleman’s residence near the Hertfordshire village of Meryton, pretty but empty-headed Mrs Bennet is all of a flutter because there is a new neighbour in Netherfield Park.
The simple folk of Brittany know what it means when a nobleman calls himself godfather to an unknown infant.
Rafael Sabatini’s ‘Scaramouche’ is the tale of Andre-Louis Moreau, a young lawyer of no great convictions who becomes caught up in the French Revolution of 1789 through loyalty to a friend. The novel opens by placing Moreau against his family background — a difficult matter, though Breton gossip thinks it has got it all worked out.
Mr Easy believes he has missed out on fatherhood, and having nothing else to do, turns to political campaigning.
Mr Nicodemus Easy is a Hampshire gentleman destined to be the father of the hero of Captain Marryat’s novel. As the tale opens, however, Mr Easy has resigned himself to being childless, and has determined to make the best of it.