All Program Dates
October 12, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
October 26, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
November 9, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
November 23, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
December 7, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
December 21, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
Registration
Tuition for this course is $360. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
This program is for those 18 and older.
To promote access to onsite and virtual Rosenbach experiences, we offer scholarships for each Signature Program. To inquire, email Sunstein Senior Manager of Digital Initiatives Edward G. Pettit at epettit@rosenbach.org.
Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Thursday, August 27, for Rosenbach members on Thursday, September 3, and for the general public on Thursday, September 10.
Description
A Tale of Two Cities is the French Revolution as imagined by Charles Dickens:
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.
In this seminar, we’ll go beyond the best and worst of times and examine the wisdom/foolishness, belief/incredulity, Light/Darkness, hope/despair, etc. in a story that attempts to encapsulate a cataclysmic historical event, told by an author at the top of his abilities who had also just turned his life upside down with a series of personal decisions: abandonment of his wife; a young secret mistress; shuttering of his long-running magazine; start of a new magazine; and his first public reading tour. In effect, Dickens himself was leading a kind of small-r revolution against himself at the time he was writing about Revolution.
We’ll close-read the novel together in a serial format. Dickens released his novel in weekly installments (as well as in a simultaneous monthly format) over 31 weeks in 1859. We’ll compress our reading into six meetings over ten weeks and try to imitate the original serial reading experience (with no spoilers as we discuss), and along the way, I’ll provide context from Dickens’s life and times and details about how he constructed his novel.
Instructor
Edward G. Pettit is the Sunstein Senior Manager of Digital Initiatives at the Rosenbach, overseeing reading courses and presenting the Biblioventures series since its inception, which has covered Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and for twenty months, a serial exploration of Dickens’s first book, The Pickwick Papers. Pettit has also taught many reading courses at the Rosenbach, including Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Dickens’s Christmas Books. He is a member of the Dickens Fellowship, the Philadelphia Pickwick Club, and in 2012, was the Charles Dickens Ambassador for the Free Library of Philadelphia’s year-long bicentenary celebration of Dickens’s birth. When not reading, he can be found working on his TARDIS so he can return to the 19th century.