A Tail of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities, in his own literary journal called All the Year Round in weekly installments from April to November of 1859. He got the germ of the idea for the novel from a play by Wilkie Collins called The Frozen Deep, in which he played the self-sacrificing hero. Dickens decided to transplant the emotive issue of self-sacrifice onto the time period of the French Revolution, and he modeled Sydney Carton after Collins's hero. To ensure that his novel would be as historically accurate as possible, Dickens pored over his friend Thomas Carlyle's classic history of the French Revolution