This sentence is the first sentence in the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens.
this is a literary language.
What Dickens wants to say is that in his time, some people lived a paradise, while others lived a hell. It should be understood in connection with the full text of this sentence.
this is the best time, this is the worst time,
this is the age of wisdom, this is the age of stupidity;
This is the period of faith, this is the period of doubt;
This is a bright season, and this is a dark season;
This is the spring of hope and the winter of disappointment;
There are all kinds of things in front of people, and there is nothing in front of people;
people are going straight to heaven; People are going straight to hell.
-in a word, it was very similar to now, and some of the noisiest authorities insisted on using the superlative adjective to describe it. Say it is good, it is the most advanced; Say it's not good, and it's the highest level. Extended information
Dickens was born in the suburb of Portsmouth on February 7, 1812, and was born into a family of small naval staff. As a teenager, he had to go to school intermittently because of his family life. Later, he was forced to work as a child laborer in a factory.
After the age of p>15, I worked as an apprentice, clerk and court recorder in a law firm. At the age of 2, he began to be a newspaper reporter and reported on the House of Commons. In 1837, he finished his first novel, The Biography of Pickwick, which was the first realistic novel creation, and later his writing ability became more and more mature.
Oliver Twist (1838), Old Antique Shop (1841), Dombey and Son (1848), david copperfield (185), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations have been published successively. ?
Dickens paid special attention to describing the life experiences of the "little people" living at the bottom of British society, which profoundly reflected the complicated social reality in Britain at that time and made outstanding contributions to the development of critical realism literature in Britain. His works have a far-reaching influence on the development of English literature.
Baidu encyclopedia _ Dickens