Charles Dickens Full name Charles John Huffam Dickens. (1812 – 1870) A famous English writer and social critic.
Charles Dickens is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the 20th century critics had recognised him as a literary genius.
A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same period.