Tale Of Two Cities Rhetorical Analysis

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens is a historical fiction novel that has received a number of critiques that associate Dickens’s tone to criticize the societies of France and England during the Victorian era. Tone allows a writer to influence a reader's perspective on a particular circumstance by using specific words in their writing to portray a specific opinion. Charles Dickens, a social commentator, utilizes this method to show his readers social disparity throughout his novels. Charles Dickens was primarily critical of the aristocrats due to his experience in his adolescence; his father was imprisoned for debt, which allowed Charles to see the ills of Victorian society at an early age. Dickens shows this in his writing as he tends to sympathize with the poor and criticize the aristocracy that played a role in jailing his father and left him in the lower class. A Tale of Two Cities is a social commentary that is overly critical of the aristocrats shown through Dickens tone throughout …show more content…
For example, at the beginning of the book, Dickens personifies France and describes her as follows: “Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. (A Tale of Two Cities, ) ” This passage conveys the use of tone through words such as “humane” and “entertain” which show the satire that is characteristic of Dickens's writing. This quote shows how critical Dickens was of the French aristocrats- he conveys their punishments in a manner that ‘pokes fun’ at the aristocracy and criticizes their rule in