Read the following passage and write an analytical essay in about 250 words.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
(1) These famous lines, which open A Tale of Two Cities, hint at the novel’s central tension between love and family, on the one hand, and oppression and hatred, on the other. It established the era in which the novel takes place, England and France in 1775. The age is marked by competing and contradictory attitudes. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. The passage makes marked use of anaphora, the repetition of a phrase at the beginning of consecutive clauses—for example, “it was the age...it was the age” and “it was the epoch...it was the epoch...” This technique, along with the passage’s steady rhythm, suggests that good and evil, wisdom and folly, and light and darkness stand equally matched in their struggle. The opposing pairs in this passage also initiate one of the novel’s most prominent motifs and structural figures—that of doubles, including London and Paris, Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay, Miss Pross and Madame Defarge, and Lucie and Madame Defarge.
(2) This comparison of dichotomous characters, however, severs the educational purpose and reformation intention as Dickens and his contemporaries are aware of. At the time when A Tale of Two Cities had been published, Charles Dickens had in the golden years of his career. His enthusiasm in social reforming through his novels, speeches and writings in journals, a contemporary non-conformist preacher thus suggested “There have been at work among us three great social agencies: the London City Mission; the novels of Mr. Dickens; the cholera.” A Tale of Two Cities, under the setting of French Revolution, not only told a story at then, also shadowed England and French in Dickens’ time.