A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens's twelfth novel, was published serially in weekly installments in Dickens's own literary journal, All the Year Round, beginning in April of 1859. As Dickens mentions in the Preface of the novel, he came up with the basic concept while playing a self-sacrificing, heroic protagonist in a production of Wilkie Collins's play The Frozen Deep, which he put on with his family and friends. Expanding the concept of noble self-sacrifice to a broader narrative context, Dickens modeled Sydney Carton after Collins's protagonist and placed his story in the time period just around the French Revolution. Wanting to ensure historical accuracy, Dickens relied heavily...
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