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A Tale of Two Cities
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Book II, Chp. 14-18
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Mme Defarge’s knitting of names and calling her work a shroud is unsettling. Did anyone else think there are shades of reference to the The Three Fates of mythology in her description?
Doctor Manette’s psychological regression to his past and the physical manifestions of it seen in his return to his activity of a shoemaker tells us something major has happened to unhinge his mental stability. Lucie believes has heard the footsteps of hundreds of people coming to disrupt her tranquil life in London. Carton has warned her - and the reader - that such sounds cannot be good. Now, we have Doctor Manette again taking up the profession of a shoemaker. Shoes, sounds, a man who appears to have risen from the grave, a crowd that was on the verge of losing control in the streets.
I imagine the original readers of this book were on the edges of their chairs, just as we are.
Tristram wrote: "What do you think of the narrator’s light and comic treatment of domestic violence at the Crunchers’? Did Dickens really play this kind of thing for humour? ..."Yeah, I think he did. This has been fodder for comedy until very recently, though in recent decades they never showed the abuse, they just found it funny to threaten it. Think of Jackie Gleason's, "One of these days, Alice... POW! Right in the kisser!" Or Ricky Ricardo looming menacingly over Lucy, who backs her way behind a chair to put a barrier between them. I listened to a podcast about an old TV show a couple of weeks ago, and the 30 somethings on the show were APPALLED at the sexism. Well, two things - first the whole point of the episode was to shine a light on the sexism and make it less acceptable, so it was actually a good thing. But, second - the show in question was from the early 60s. I don't think younger people have a clue as to how much differently things like this were seen just a very short time ago.
the mender of roadsWhat an odd moniker. I was reminded, just phonetically, of the Colossus of Rhodes, which I really knew nothing about. Having looked it up, I don't really see anything symbolic that would relate to our story. Maybe it's just a coincidence, or is there something in the story of Helios? Sun god, sun king? Something about protecting the city? Am I searching for a connection that isn't there?
This statement (copied above from Tristam) reminds me of Les Miserables and the revolutionary scenes of that novel."Another darkness was closing in as surely, when the church bells, then ringing pleasantly in many an airy steeple over France, should be melted into thundering cannon; when the military drums should be beating to drown a wretched voice, that night all potent as the voice of Power and Plenty, Freedom and Life."
Does Mme DeFarge represent France itself?
Very interesting observations about the glimpses of mob mentality foreshadowing the revolution to come. I hadn't picked up on it, of course, but, as always, appreciate these connections when they're pointed out to me. :-)
Mary Lou wrote: "Tristram wrote: "What do you think of the narrator’s light and comic treatment of domestic violence at the Crunchers’? Did Dickens really play this kind of thing for humour? ..."Yeah, I think he ..."
Yes, I think so too. It's very Punch and Judy. I'm glad that kind of thing doesn't go over as well now as it used to. Banging her head against the back of the bed--I don't think even at the time this could have come off as that funny if it were not so conventional that readers didn't really think about it as a real thing.
Still, I don't think Elizabeth Gaskell would have done this.
Tristram wrote: "We also learn that Mme Defarge’s knitting has a special purpose, namely that she is actually knitting a kind of black book by putting the names of people who are to be punished during the coming revolution – Mme Defarge tells her husband that a revolution will come even if they themselves will not necessarily live to see it –into the fabric, using a secret writing. That’s why, when asked what she is knitting, she meaningfully replies, “Shrouds"."Then again (building on the Cruncher discussion), I guess I have my own angle of maybe-inappropriate humor, because I found this little interchange between "composed" Madame D and a nosy bystander to be hilarious. Don't go small-talking with Madame Defarge, people! She is not a casual kind of person.
“I am highly gratified,” said Mr. Lorry, “....Dear me! This is an occasion that makes a man speculate on all he has lost. Dear, dear, dear! To think that there might have been a Mrs. Lorry, any time these fifty years almost!”“Not at all!” From Miss Pross.
“You think there never might have been a Mrs. Lorry?” asked the gentleman of that name.
“Pooh!” rejoined Miss Pross; “you were a bachelor in your cradle.”
“Well!” observed Mr. Lorry, beamingly adjusting his little wig, “that seems probable, too.”
...
In the hope of his recovery, and of resort to this third course being thereby rendered practicable, Mr. Lorry resolved to watch him attentively, with as little appearance as possible of doing so. He therefore made arrangements to absent himself from Tellson’s for the first time in his life, and took his post by the window in the same room.
Is Mr. Lorry my favorite character in all of Dickens? Possibly.
There may be a lot of sacrifice happening in this book, but is there any more challenging a sacrifice to pull off than Lorry altering his lifelong habits so far as to absent himself from Tellson's on his friend's behalf?
He and Pross make such a great pair, too. I would be rooting for them to get married if they weren't so much more delightful as independent friends.
Thank you for recalling that exchange between Miss Pross and Mr. Lorry, Julie. One of the few light moments in this very heavy story. It would be a stretch to say that Mr. Lorry is one of my favorite characters in all of Dickens, but I do like him. It's definitely a sacrifice for him to give up his life-long routines and responsibilities. I question the wisdom behind his decision to hide Dr. Manette's setback from Lucie, though.
Mary Lou wrote: "I question the wisdom behind his decision to hide Dr. Manette's setback from Lucie, though."But telling her would mean treating Lucie like an adult, and we can't have that now, can we?
Mod
What an odd moniker. I was reminded, just phonetically, of the Colossus of Rhodes, which I really knew nothing about. Having looked it up, I don't really see anything symbolic ..."
In the light of a remark made by Peter in the preceding thread, I now think of the mender of roads as someone who prepares the roads with new flagstones so that the sound of the clogs can be heard. I don't think this was explicitly intended by Dickens because actually the mender of roads seems to play a minor role and he is certainly not a very inveterate revolutionary as yet, seeing how he cheers the King. But still, he seems to be a connection between the town and the countryside and maybe help spread the flame of upheaval to the peasants.
Mod
Yeah, I think he ..."
I think that we have grown way too touchy and sensitive - so much so that I'm glad I am not a comedian because with my sense of humour I'd surely borrow trouble - but on the other hand, I could not find it in me to find the domestic plights of Mrs. Cruncher amusing. I felt similarly about Jeremiah Flintwinch and Affery, by the way.
Mod
"Another darkness was closing in as surely, when the church bells, then ringing ..."
She could at least represent a certain class, namely that of the petite bourgeoisie, the craftsmen, vendors, artisans, shopkeepers etc., who formed the bulk of the sans-culottes, i.e. those that Robespierre would base his power on.
Mod
She certainly wouldn't have done that kind of thing. I cannot think of any other Victorian writer but Dickens who would have done this, but wasn't it typical of some of Dickens's literary models, such as Fielding and Smollett?
Mod
The Spy's Funeral
Book II Chapter 14
Phiz
Text Illustrated:
"Funerals had at all times a remarkable attraction for Mr. Cruncher; he always pricked up his senses, and became excited, when a funeral passed Tellson's. Naturally, therefore, a funeral with this uncommon attendance excited him greatly, and he asked of the first man who ran against him:
"What is it, brother? What's it about?"
"I don't know," said the man. "Spies! Yaha! Tst! Spies!"
He asked another man. "Who is it?"
"I don't know," returned the man, clapping his hands to his mouth nevertheless, and vociferating in a surprising heat and with the greatest ardour, "Spies! Yaha! Tst, tst! Spi—ies!"
At length, a person better informed on the merits of the case, tumbled against him, and from this person he learned that the funeral was the funeral of one Roger Cly.
"Was He a spy?" asked Mr. Cruncher.
"Old Bailey spy," returned his informant. "Yaha! Tst! Yah! Old Bailey Spi—i—ies!"
"Why, to be sure!" exclaimed Jerry, recalling the Trial at which he had assisted. "I've seen him. Dead, is he?"
"Dead as mutton," returned the other, "and can't be too dead. Have 'em out, there! Spies! Pull 'em out, there! Spies!"
The idea was so acceptable in the prevalent absence of any idea, that the crowd caught it up with eagerness, and loudly repeating the suggestion to have 'em out, and to pull 'em out, mobbed the two vehicles so closely that they came to a stop. On the crowd's opening the coach doors, the one mourner scuffled out of himself and was in their hands for a moment; but he was so alert, and made such good use of his time, that in another moment he was scouring away up a bye-street, after shedding his cloak, hat, long hatband, white pocket-handkerchief, and other symbolical tears.
These, the people tore to pieces and scattered far and wide with great enjoyment, while the tradesmen hurriedly shut up their shops; for a crowd in those times stopped at nothing, and was a monster much dreaded. They had already got the length of opening the hearse to take the coffin out, when some brighter genius proposed instead, its being escorted to its destination amidst general rejoicing. Practical suggestions being much needed, this suggestion, too, was received with acclamation, and the coach was immediately filled with eight inside and a dozen out, while as many people got on the roof of the hearse as could by any exercise of ingenuity stick upon it. Among the first of these volunteers was Jerry Cruncher himself, who modestly concealed his spiky head from the observation of Tellson's, in the further corner of the mourning coach.
The officiating undertakers made some protest against these changes in the ceremonies; but, the river being alarmingly near, and several voices remarking on the efficacy of cold immersion in bringing refractory members of the profession to reason, the protest was faint and brief. The remodelled procession started, with a chimney-sweep driving the hearse—advised by the regular driver, who was perched beside him, under close inspection, for the purpose—and with a pieman, also attended by his cabinet minister, driving the mourning coach. A bear-leader, a popular street character of the time, was impressed as an additional ornament, before the cavalcade had gone far down the Strand; and his bear, who was black and very mangy, gave quite an Undertaking air to that part of the procession in which he walked.
Mod
The Wine Shop
Book II Chapter 15
Phiz
Text Illustrated:
"It may have been a signal for loosening the general tongue. It elicited an answering chorus of "Good day!"
"It is bad weather, gentlemen," said Defarge, shaking his head.
Upon which, every man looked at his neighbour, and then all cast down their eyes and sat silent. Except one man, who got up and went out.
"My wife," said Defarge aloud, addressing Madame Defarge: "I have travelled certain leagues with this good mender of roads, called Jacques. I met him—by accident—a day and half's journey out of Paris. He is a good child, this mender of roads, called Jacques. Give him to drink, my wife!"
A second man got up and went out. Madame Defarge set wine before the mender of roads called Jacques, who doffed his blue cap to the company, and drank. In the breast of his blouse he carried some coarse dark bread; he ate of this between whiles, and sat munching and drinking near Madame Defarge's counter. A third man got up and went out.
Defarge refreshed himself with a draught of wine—but, he took less than was given to the stranger, as being himself a man to whom it was no rarity—and stood waiting until the countryman had made his breakfast. He looked at no one present, and no one now looked at him; not even Madame Defarge, who had taken up her knitting, and was at work.
"Have you finished your repast, friend?" he asked, in due season.
"Yes, thank you."
"Come, then! You shall see the apartment that I told you you could occupy. It will suit you to a marvel."
Commentary:
Again, horses, numerous figures (28 in the Paris street, 35 in the English street), and multiple focal points suggest parallel scene construction. Appropriate to the release of animal spirits in "The Spy's Funeral," there is only one woman, as opposed to at least five in "The Stoppage at the Fountain" in the previous month's installment. In contrast to the sounds of the horses, the consternation of the men, and the lachrymose lamentations of the women in "The Stoppage at the Fountain," in the essentially comedic "The Spy's Funeral" we hear sounds of communal festivity: three 'common' musical instruments (proletarian trumpet, drum, and fiddle), and the boisterous play of the leap-frogging street urchins — indeed, as opposed to the marble children of the French fountain, the English scene bubbles over with the youthful vivacity of living children, consistent with Dickens's piling present participles on top of each other to describe the scene: "with beer-drinking, pipe-smoking, song-roaring, and infinite caricaturing of woe, the disorderly procession went its way, recruiting at every step, and all the shops shutting up before it". In the Parisian scene, the fountain, the houses, and in particular the clogs clearly establish the scene's context rather more clearly than the signs (left) and the house-tops (right). In "The Spy's Funeral" adults' shoes contrast the children's bare feet to indicate the social strata represented and the playful nature of this more carefree crowd. Finally, the overall movement, right to left, is unimpeded in both scenes: the direction as suggested by the faces of all present is reinforced by the horses' heads, left of center in each plate.
Structurally as well as thematically, "The Stoppage at the Fountain" (August) and "The Spy's Funeral" (September) are visual complements, for in each case a crowd reacts to a death in a right-to-left movement of a carriage bearing an object of opprobrium — the indignant Marquis and the spy. Within these large group, historical genre pictures is a strong sense of violent, swirling, confusing motion complementing each plate's dominant mood; to convey all this, each crowd scene has several focal points. The English street again involves a communal response, general rejoicing over the death of a spy, whose casket we cannot see, and a shadowy figure just emerging from the doorway, extreme right.
The September pairing depends upon a series of binary oppositions: London/Paris, outdoors/indoors, crowd/limited cast, exuberant emotionalism/dispassionate conversation, kinetic/static. In "The Spy's Funeral," the bear-leader has just been pressed into the service of the rag-tag mob accompanying Barsad's corpse to the cemetery. In contrast, all appears serene in the little St. Antoine wine-shop run by the habitually smoking Defarge and his perpetually knitting wife.
"Mr. Stryver at Tellson's Bank," Book II, Chapter 2 (for August), and "The Wine-Shop," Book II, Chapter 6 (for September), help the reader draw parallels and make differentiations between the two cities and knit up the plot. Both scenes ostensibly concern business — the ledgers in the London counting house (symbolic of British commerce, and, by extension, British society) are paralleled by the bottles of the Defarges' St. Antoine wine-shop. In the background of the Tellson's scene, three men count bags of money, apparently for deposit, the iron grates here (suggestive of the need for security) contrasting the fifteen-paned window of the wine-shop. Outside the Defarges' door, women gossip in the street as a male idler attempts to overhear the conversation between the publicans and the spy. The close-up structure of both scenes does not permit us to see whether there are other patrons, but the rose in Madame Defarge's cap is a detail consistent with the printed text, and we may therefore assume that this signal has momentarily cleared the shop of customers. The precise moment captured seems to be that at which Barsad (seen in the plates for the first time) informs the Defarges that Lucie is to marry Charles Darnay (otherwise, D'Aulnais on his mother's side and St. Evrémonde on his father's), in effect, the present Marquis.
Whereas Browne's Defarge seems unperturbed, Dickens's betrays his emotion at this "intelligence": "Do what he would, behind the little counter, as to striking of a light and the lighting of his pipe, he was troubled, and his hand not trustworthy" (Book II, Chapter 6). although Dickens says that the effect of this news is "palpable," Browne has not chosen to reveal it. Rather, he has chosen to depict a tranquil surface whose undercurrents he signals to us through the male idler just beyond the lintel, for his Jacobin cap is a visual reminder of the revolutionary nature of the establishment roughly equivalent to Barsad's hailing Defarge as "Jacques," the code-name for a member of the clandestine Jacquerie. A clear symbol of the coming social cataclysm, the idler is seen through the doorway in roughly the same position in "The Wine- Shop" as the fashionably-dressed gentleman in the greatcoat and sporting a cane who is apparently depositing three bags of coins, details all suggestive of Britain's mercantile establishment, in "Mr. Stryver at Tellson's Bank."
The common activity (the graphic subtext, if you will) in these scenes is recording, for Madame Defarge's knitting is as much a ledger as the large tome on Mr. Lorry's desk, right of center. The chair and large pot of the wine-shop are paralleled by the stool and waste-basket in Tellson's, occupying a similar position in both plates. Despite the differences in their trade and clients, the St. Antoine wine-shop is the counterpart of the bank hard by Temple Bar, for information as well as coin is exchanged in both establishments, the former run by implacable foes of the aristocracy, the latter superintended by the protector of Lucie Darnay and frequented by French émigrés in search of news of home after the outbreak of the Revolution. The aristocratic and monied clientele of Tellson's are in marked contrast to the scarecrow paupers (covert radicals) who haunt the wine-shop, which becomes a grassroots insurrectionist stronghold after the storming of the Bastille (depicted on the Paris skyline of "The Sea Rises," Browne's plate for October). In addition to being centers of recording, the wine-shop and Tellson's are repositories of records. The weighty volumes on the shelf behind Mr. Lorry bespeak years of financial transactions (deposits and withdrawals), and assure the financial survival of those French aristocrats wise enough to deposit in a Parisian bank with a London house. In Madame Defarge's equally copious coded ledgers are accounts of the aristocracy's heinous domestic crimes and familial lineages. Behind these quiet genre scenes lie the essential differences in the societies of the two cities of the tale; the prosperity of a relatively free trading people implies that they will not experience the mob violence of "The Sea Rises" that proletarian poverty and exploitation across the water have virtually foredoomed, although, as "The Spy's Funeral" suggests, the potential for such violence lies within English society also.
Mod
Headnote Vignette
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapter 14 ("The Honest Tradesman")
Harper's Weekly (July 1859)
Text Illustrated:
"It was now Young Jerry's turn to approach the gate: which he did, holding his breath. Crouching down again in a corner there, and looking in, he made out the three fishermen creeping through some rank grass! and all the gravestones in the churchyard—it was a large churchyard that they were in—looking on like ghosts in white, while the church tower itself looked on like the ghost of a monstrous giant. They did not creep far, before they stopped and stood upright. And then they began to fish.
They fished with a spade, at first. Presently the honoured parent appeared to be adjusting some instrument like a great corkscrew. Whatever tools they worked with, they worked hard, until the awful striking of the church clock so terrified Young Jerry, that he made off, with his hair as stiff as his father's.
But, his long-cherished desire to know more about these matters, not only stopped him in his running away, but lured him back again. They were still fishing perseveringly, when he peeped in at the gate for the second time; but, now they seemed to have got a bite. There was a screwing and complaining sound down below, and their bent figures were strained, as if by a weight. By slow degrees the weight broke away the earth upon it, and came to the surface. Young Jerry very well knew what it would be; but, when he saw it, and saw his honoured parent about to wrench it open, he was so frightened, being new to the sight, that he made off again, and never stopped until he had run a mile or more.
He would not have stopped then, for anything less necessary than breath, it being a spectral sort of race that he ran, and one highly desirable to get to the end of. He had a strong idea that the coffin he had seen was running after him; and, pictured as hopping on behind him, bolt upright, upon its narrow end, always on the point of overtaking him and hopping on at his side—perhaps taking his arm—it was a pursuer to shun. It was an inconsistent and ubiquitous fiend too, for, while it was making the whole night behind him dreadful, he darted out into the roadway to avoid dark alleys, fearful of its coming hopping out of them like a dropsical boy's Kite without tail and wings. It hid in doorways too, rubbing its horrible shoulders against doors, and drawing them up to its ears, as if it were laughing. It got into shadows on the road, and lay cunningly on its back to trip him up. All this time it was incessantly hopping on behind and gaining on him, so that when the boy got to his own door he had reason for being half dead. And even then it would not leave him, but followed him upstairs with a bump on every stair, scrambled into bed with him, and bumped down, dead and heavy, on his breast when he fell asleep."
Mod
Mr. Cruncher's Friends
John McLenan
Book II Chapter 14
Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities
Harper's Weekly July 1859
Text Illustrated:
"Young Jerry, who had only made a feint of undressing when he went to bed, was not long after his father. Under cover of the darkness he followed out of the room, followed down the stairs, followed down the court, followed out into the streets. He was in no uneasiness concerning his getting into the house again, for it was full of lodgers, and the door stood ajar all night.
Impelled by a laudable ambition to study the art and mystery of his father's honest calling, Young Jerry, keeping as close to house fronts, walls, and doorways, as his eyes were close to one another, held his honoured parent in view. The honoured parent steering Northward, had not gone far, when he was joined by another disciple of Izaak Walton, and the two trudged on together.
Within half an hour from the first starting, they were beyond the winking lamps, and the more than winking watchmen, and were out upon a lonely road. Another fisherman was picked up here—and that so silently, that if Young Jerry had been superstitious, he might have supposed the second follower of the gentle craft to have, all of a sudden, split himself into two.
The three went on, and Young Jerry went on, until the three stopped under a bank overhanging the road. Upon the top of the bank was a low brick wall, surmounted by an iron railing. In the shadow of bank and wall the three turned out of the road, and up a blind lane, of which the wall—there, risen to some eight or ten feet high—formed one side. Crouching down in a corner, peeping up the lane, the next object that Young Jerry saw, was the form of his honoured parent, pretty well defined against a watery and clouded moon, nimbly scaling an iron gate. He was soon over, and then the second fisherman got over, and then the third. They all dropped softly on the ground within the gate, and lay there a little—listening perhaps. Then, they moved away on their hands and knees.
It was now Young Jerry's turn to approach the gate: which he did, holding his breath. Crouching down again in a corner there, and looking in, he made out the three fishermen creeping through some rank grass! and all the gravestones in the churchyard—it was a large churchyard that they were in—looking on like ghosts in white, while the church tower itself looked on like the ghost of a monstrous giant. They did not creep far, before they stopped and stood upright. And then they began to fish."
Mod
Headnote Vignette
John McLenan
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapter 15 ("Knitting")
Harper's Weekly (August 1859)
Text Illustrated:
"All work is stopped, all assemble there, nobody leads the cows out, the cows are there with the rest. At midday, the roll of drums. Soldiers have marched into the prison in the night, and he is in the midst of many soldiers. He is bound as before, and in his mouth there is a gag — tied so, with a tight string, making him look almost as if he laughed." He suggested it, by creasing his face with his two thumbs, from the corners of his mouth to his ears. "On the top of the gallows is fixed the knife, blade upwards, with its point in the air. He is hanged there forty feet high — and is left hanging, poisoning the water."
They looked at one another, as he used his blue cap to wipe his face, on which the perspiration had started afresh while he recalled the spectacle.
"It is frightful, messieurs. How can the women and the children draw water! Who can gossip of an evening, under that shadow! Under it, have I said? When I left the village, Monday evening as the sun was going to bed, and looked back from the hill, the shadow struck across the church, across the mill, across the prison — seemed to strike across the earth, messieurs, to where the sky rests upon it!"
Mod
"He described it as if he were there —"
John McLenan
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Ch. XV, "Knitting"
Harper's Weekly (August 1859)
Text Illustrated:
"I stand aside, messieurs, by my heap of stones, to see the soldiers and their prisoner pass (for it is a solitary road, that, where any spectacle is well worth looking at), and at first, as they approach, I see no more than that they are six soldiers with a tall man bound, and that they are almost black to my sight — except on the side of the sun going to bed, where they have a red edge, messieurs. Also, I see that their long shadows are on the hollow ridge on the opposite side of the road, and are on the hill above it, and are like the shadows of giants. Also, I see that they are covered with dust, and that the dust moves with them as they come, tramp, tramp! But when they advance quite near to me, I recognise the tall man, and he recognises me. Ah, but he would be well content to precipitate himself over the hill-side once again, as on the evening when he and I first encountered, close to the same spot!"
He described it as if he were there, and it was evident that he saw it vividly; perhaps he had not seen much in his life.
"I do not show the soldiers that I recognise the tall man; he does not show the soldiers that he recognises me; we do it, and we know it, with our eyes. `Come on!' says the chief of that company, pointing to the village, `bring him fast to his tomb!' and they bring him faster. I follow. His arms are swelled because of being bound so tight, his wooden shoes are large and clumsy, and he is lame. Because he is lame, and consequently slow, they drive him with their guns — like this!"
He imitated the action of a man's being impelled forward by the butt-ends of muskets.
"As they descend the hill like madmen running a race, he falls. They laugh and pick him up again. His face is bleeding and covered with dust, but he cannot touch it; thereupon they laugh again. They bring him into the village; all the village runs to look; they take him past the mill, and up to the prison; all the village sees the prison gate open in the darkness of the night, and swallow him — like this!"
He opened his mouth as wide as he could, and shut it with a sounding snap of his teeth. Observant of his unwillingness to mar the effect by opening it again, Defarge said, "Go on, Jacques."
Mod
Headnote Vignette
John McLenan
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapter 16, "Still Knitting"
Harper's Weekly (August 1859)
Text Illustrated:
"Madame Defarge and monsieur her husband returned amicably to the bosom of Saint Antoine, while a speck in a blue cap toiled through the darkness, and through the dust, and down the weary miles of avenue by the wayside, slowly tending towards that point of the compass where the chateau of Monsieur the Marquis, now in his grave, listened to the whispering trees. Such ample leisure had the stone faces, now, for listening to the trees and to the fountain, that the few village scarecrows who, in their quest for herbs to eat and fragments of dead stick to burn, strayed within sight of the great stone courtyard and terrace staircase, had it borne in upon their starved fancy that the expression of the faces was altered. A rumour just lived in the village — had a faint and bare existence there, as its people had — that when the knife struck home, the faces changed, from faces of pride to faces of anger and pain; also, that when that dangling figure was hauled up forty feet above the fountain, they changed again, and bore a cruel look of being avenged, which they would henceforth bear for ever. In the stone face over the great window of the bed-chamber where the murder was done, two fine dints were pointed out in the sculptured nose, which everybody recognised, and which nobody had seen of old; and on the scarce occasions when two or three ragged peasants emerged from the crowd to take a hurried peep at Monsieur the Marquis petrified, a skinny finger would not have pointed to it for a minute, before they all started away among the moss and leaves, like the more fortunate hares who could find a living there.
Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the stone floor, and the pure water in the village well — thousands of acres of land — a whole province of France — all France itself — lay under the night sky, concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line. So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it."
Mod
"And stood with his hand on the back of his wife's chair"
John McLenan
Illustration for Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities,Book II, Chapter 16, "Still Knitting." [The spy, John Barsad, drinks a glass of cognac with Defarges]
Harper's Weekly (August 1859)
Text Illustrated:
"It is all the same," said the spy, airily, but discomfited too: "good day!"
"Good day!" answered Defarge, drily.
"I was saying to madame, with whom I had the pleasure of chatting when you entered, that they tell me there is — and no wonder! — much sympathy and anger in Saint Antoine, touching the unhappy fate of poor Gaspard."
"No one has told me so," said Defarge, shaking his head. "I know nothing of it."
Having said it, he passed behind the little counter, and stood with his hand on the back of his wife's chair, looking over that barrier at the person to whom they were both opposed, and whom either of them would have shot with the greatest satisfaction.
The spy, well used to his business, did not change his unconscious attitude, but drained his little glass of cognac, took a sip of fresh water, and asked for another glass of cognac. Madame Defarge poured it out for him, took to her knitting again, and hummed a little song over it.
"You seem to know this quarter well; that is to say, better than I do?" observed Defarge.
"Not at all, but I hope to know it better. I am so profoundly interested in its miserable inhabitants."
"Hah!" muttered Defarge.
Commentary:
Like Phiz, McLenan in his series for Harper's Weekly focused on the earlier scene in the wine shop, realizing the three figures rather than the shop's interior, in "And stood with his hand on the back of his wife's chair". McLenan's figure of Madame Defarge is far less appealing than either Phiz's or Barnard's, and McLenan's spy is surprisingly well dressed for a man whose profession's cardinal rule is, "Blend in.
Mod
Headnote Vignette,
John McLenan
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Ch. 17, "One Night"
Harper's Weekly (August 1859)
I have no idea how this illustration goes with this chapter.
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"'See!' said the Doctor of Beauvais"
John McLenan
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapter 17, "One Night"
Harper's Weekly (August 1859)
Text Illustrated:
"It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new sensation while his words were in her ears; and she remembered it long afterwards.
"See!" said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards the moon. "I have looked at her from my prison-window, when I could not bear her light. I have looked at her when it has been such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I had lost, that I have beaten my head against my prison-walls. I have looked at her, in a state so dun and lethargic, that I have thought of nothing but the number of horizontal lines I could draw across her at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines with which I could intersect them." He added in his inward and pondering manner, as he looked at the moon, "It was twenty either way, I remember, and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in."
The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that time, deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing to shock her in the manner of his reference. He only seemed to contrast his present cheerfulness and felicity with the dire endurance that was over."
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"It is frightful, messieur..."
Book II Chapter 15
Fred Barnard
The Household Edition
Text Illustrated:
"Workmen dig, workmen hammer, soldiers laugh and sing; in the morning, by the fountain, there is raised a gallows forty feet high, poisoning the water."
The mender of roads looked through rather that at the low ceiling, and pointed as if he saw the gallows somewhere in the sky.
"All work is stopped, all assemble there, nobody leads the cows out, the cows are there with the rest. At mid-day, the roll of drums. Soldiers have marched into the prison in the night, and he is in the midst of many soldiers. He is bound as before, and in his mouth there is a gag — tied so, with a tight string, making him look almost as if he laughed." He suggested it by creasing his face with his two thumbs, from the corners of his mouth to his ears. "on the top of the gallows is fixed the knife, blade upwards, with its point in the air. He is hanged there forty feet high — and is left hanging, poisoning the water."
They looked at one another, as he used his blue cap to wipe his face, on which the perspiration had started afresh while he recalled the spectacle.
"It is frightful, messieurs. How can the women and children draw water? Who can gossip of an evening under that shadow?"
Commentary:
The animated figure of the road-mender from the little village of the Marquis St. Evrémonde, his wooden shoes the signifier of his rural origins, narrates the fate of the murderer of the Marquis, a wretch whose decaying corpse is now polluting the village's fountain and casting a blight on the social life of the little community. His audience in the chamber above the St. Antoine wine shop are Defarge (left) and the three radical revolutionaries, Jacques One, Two, and Three.
Barnard follows the tranquil scene of Carton's protestation of love for Lucie in England with a scene in the French capital that advances the plot surrounding the Defarges' determination to eradicate the race of St. Evrémonde.
Whereas Phiz selected, perhaps at Dickens's instruction, only those scenes with emotional and pictorial appeal, Barnard has attempted to realise key moments in the plot as well as to present studies of some of the key characters. McLenan, in contrast, was interested in objects that hold some special significance in the plot. In this instance, he focused on the village fountain, leaving little to the imagination of the horrified reader in the headnote vignette for "Knitting." He subsequently shows the same scene as Barnard selected from the chapter, but McLenan's figures are far less effectively modelled in "He described it as if he were there —" in the August 6th instalment in Harper's Weekly.
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"Saint Antoine"
Text Illustrated:
"In the evening, at which season of all others Saint Antoine turned himself inside out, and sat on door-steps and window-ledges, and came to the corners of vile streets and courts, for a breath of air, Madame Defarge with her work in her hand was accustomed to pass from place to place and from group to group: a Missionary—there were many like her—such as the world will do well never to breed again. All the women knitted. They knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the jaws and the digestive apparatus: if the bony fingers had been still, the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched.
But, as the fingers went, the eyes went, and the thoughts. And as Madame Defarge moved on from group to group, all three went quicker and fiercer among every little knot of women that she had spoken with, and left behind.
Her husband smoked at his door, looking after her with admiration. "A great woman," said he, "a strong woman, a grand woman, a frightfully grand woman!"
Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church bells and the distant beating of the military drums in the Palace Courtyard, as the women sat knitting, knitting. Darkness encompassed them. Another darkness was closing in as surely, when the church bells, then ringing pleasantly in many an airy steeple over France, should be melted into thundering cannon; when the military drums should be beating to drown a wretched voice, that night all potent as the voice of Power and Plenty, Freedom and Life. So much was closing in about the women who sat knitting, knitting, that they their very selves were closing in around a structure yet unbuilt, where they were to sit knitting, knitting, counting dropping heads."
Commentary:
The economically-depressed center of the imminent political revolution, the urban slum of St. Antoine, is a contrast to areas of eighteenth-century London that are crucial to the action: the Old Bailey, Tellson's Bank near Temple Bar, and Doctor Manette's house in Soho. Although the illustration is situated late in chapter 17, it reflects events in "Still Knitting." Returning home at night, the Defarges learn from their contact within the ranks of the police that another spy has been commissioned for their district, an Englishman named "John Barsad." Presumably Barnard's view of the environs of the Defarges' wine shop is next afternoon, after an inquisitive new-comer matching the very description given them of Barsad enters the shop and orders a cognac.
Barnard is again reluctant to duplicate a scene by his friend and mentor Hablot Knight Browne, so that he only obliquely realizes the scene in which the spy, John Barsad, arrives on the Defarges' doorstep in "The Wine-Shop" in Book 2, Chapter 6 (in the monthly part for September, 1859). In Phiz's illustration, the teaming street life is suggested by the movements of the slum's denizens glimpsed through the open door (left). Whereas Phiz emphasizes the apparent non-chalance of the knitting wife and smoking husband as they confront the government spy, Barnard provides what a cinematographer would term "an establishing shot" of the female-dominated breeding ground of the revolution. The textual moment realized in the sixteenth chapter of the second book, "Still Knitting," occurs after the visit of the spy.
Whereas Phiz elected to show the interior of the wine shop and just three figures, Barnard shows Madame Defarge (center) as a community organizer and social networker. He has identified her for the viewer by repeating her profile, her turban, and her pendulous ear-rings. The extension of the text is the relative solidarity of the women (left) as opposed to the quarrelsome nature of the male-dominated register of the picture, right, in which men in the doorway and street gesticulate and a pair of skeletal cats square off with one another at Madame Defarge's feet.
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The Three Jacques
Book II Chapter 15
Sol Eytinge Jr,.
The Diamond Edition 1867
Commentary:
The 'Jacquerie' was the name given to the peasants' revolt in France in 1358, derived from the name 'Jacques Bonhomme', contemptuously applied to any peasant by the nobility. [Bentley et al., 131]
The group character study involves the revolutionary leader — Ernest Defarge, landlord of Saint Antoine's wine-shop — and his almost indistinguishable followers, the only individual among them being Jacques Three. Ten years later, and probably entirely without Eytinge's illustration for reference (given the effects of nineteenth-century copyright exclusivity for the American and British book markets), Fred Barnard selected almost precisely the same moment for realisation in his sequence of twenty-five illustrations for the Household Edition of the novel. In the garret to which Defarge leads them, he and his comrades receive with burning interest the road-mender's account of the execution of Gaspard:
"The looks of all of them were dark, repressed, and revengeful, as they listened to the countryman's story; the manner of all of them, while it was secret, was authoritative too. They had the air of a rough tribunal; Jacques One and Two sitting on the old pallet-bed, each with his chin resting on his hand, and his eyes intent on the road-mender; Jacques Three, equally intent, on one knee behind them, with his agitated hand always gliding over the network of fine nerves about his mouth and nose; Defarge standing between them and the narrator, whom he had stationed in the light of the window, by turns looking from him to them, and from them to him.
The raised gesture of the narrator, the road-mender, and the rapt attention of the Jacquerie, as well as the characteristic movement of The hand of Jacques Three to his mouth, suggest that the passage realised is likely this:
"Enough!" said Defarge, with grim impatience. "Long live the Devil! Go on."
"Well! Some whisper this, some whisper that; they speak of nothing else; even the fountain appears to fall to that tune. At length, on Sunday night when all the village is asleep, come soldiers, winding down from the prison, and their guns ring on the stones of the little street. Workmen dig, workmen hammer, soldiers laugh and sing; in the morning, by the fountain, there is raised a gallows forty feet high, poisoning the water."
The mender of roads looked through rather than at the low ceiling, and pointed as if he saw the gallows somewhere in the sky.
"All work is stopped, all assemble there, nobody leads the cows out, the cows are there with the rest. At midday, the roll of drums. Soldiers have marched into the prison in the night, and he is in the midst of many soldiers. He is bound as before, and in his mouth there is a gag-tied so, with a tight string, making him look almost as if he laughed." He suggested it, by creasing his face with his two thumbs, from the corners of his mouth to his ears. "On the top of the gallows is fixed the knife, blade upwards, with its point in the air. He is hanged there forty feet high — and is left hanging, poisoning the water."
They looked at one another, as he used his blue cap to wipe his face, on which the perspiration had started afresh while he recalled the spectacle.
"It is frightful, messieurs. How can the women and the children draw water! Who can gossip of an evening, under that shadow! Under it, have I said? When I left the village, Monday evening as the sun was going to bed, and looked back from the hill, the shadow struck across the church, across the mill, across the prison — seemed to strike across the earth, messieurs, to where the sky rests upon it!" [Book 2, Chapter 15, "Knitting"]
Despite the care with which Phiz researched period costumes for his serial illustrations, he chose not to depict the book's clandestine revolutionaries, the Jacquerie, whereas both Eytinge in 1867 and Barnard in 1876 felt that these characters, generalized though they may be in Dickens's novel, were worthy of examination in order to place the redemptive action of the story in the context of the root causes and furtive planning of the revolution which led to the slaughter of thousands during the Reign of Terror. Paul Davis notes that members of the revolutionary brotherhood all adopted the secret name "Jacques," and that "Jacques Four" is the pseudonym which Ernest Defarge adopts in these meetings, which eventually involve the road-mender from the Marquis' village, an excitable peasant whom the brotherhood designate as "Jacques Five." By virtue of his position of narrator in Eytinge's sixth illustration, his gesture, and his cap with which he mops his perspiring brow, one may readily identify the road-mender as the man standing to the right.
However, aside from Defarge, in terms of the narrative the most important member of the Jacquerie assembled in the garret is Jacques Three, upon whom Davis passes no comment but about whom critic Harry Stone has much to say. Eytinge's depiction of the figure, alienated from his fellows at the back left, is consistent with Stone's interpretation in that this third, idiosyncratic "Jacques" is transfixed by the gruesome narrative unfolding. Jacques Three in the text is obsessed with the slaughter of the upper class, and in particular with the notion of large-scale blood-letting. Stone relates Dickens's creation of this character, whom the writer "tags" with a distinctive, repetitive gesture (touching the area immediately around his mouth), with the novelist's boyhood reading of The Terrific Register, a cheap periodical devoted to sensational and horrific disasters on land and sea, especially tales involving dismemberment and cannibalism. Eytinge sets Jacques Three apart from the others in this scene by virtue of his "restless hand and craving air" — realizing him as the "hungry man [who] gnawed one of his fingers as he looked at the other three" (Book Two, Chapter 15, "Knitting"), the other three being Defarge (behind the road-mender in Eytinge's realization) and the two in front of him on what is in fact the old pallet bed of Doctor Manette (as Barnard's illustration makes clear). As the road-mender describes the manner of Gaspard's protracted execution, Jacques Three cannot help but betray his own blood lust as "his finger quivered with the craving that was on him."
Eytinge's handling of the scene is comparatively realistic in manner and faithful to Dickens's text, right down to Jacques Five's cap and Jacque Three's touching his face, but lacks the telling details of the urban petite bourgeois' fashionable waistcoat, breeches, stockings, and buckled shoes — in sharp contrast to the rural road-mender's wooden shoes — and the clearly defined source of light in the upstairs garret that Barnard provides (left). However, as a close-up of the faces of the three Jacques Eytinge's illustration is still an effective complement to Dickens's rendering of the clandestine meeting, which concludes with a sentence of extinction for the entire Evrémonde family.
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Monsieur and Madame Defarge
Book II Chapter 16
Sol Eytinge Jr.
Diamond Edition of Dicken's works 1867
Text Illustrated:
"This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked, martial-looking man of thirty, and he should have been of a hot temperament, for, although it was a bitter day, he wore no coat, but carried one slung over his shoulder. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, too, and his brown arms were bare to the elbows. Neither did he wear anything more on his head than his own crisply-curling short dark hair. He was a dark man altogether, with good eyes and a good bold breadth between them. Good-humoured looking on the whole, but implacable-looking, too; evidently a man of a strong resolution and a set purpose; a man not desirable to be met, rushing down a narrow pass with a gulf on either side, for nothing would turn the man.
Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counter as he came in. Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his own age, with a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of manner. There was a character about Madame Defarge, from which one might have predicated that she did not often make mistakes against herself in any of the reckonings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being sensitive to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright shawl twined about her head, though not to the concealment of her large earrings. Her knitting was before her, but she had laid it down to pick her teeth with a toothpick."
Commentary:
In contrast to the marriage of mismatched opposites Jerry and "Aggerawayter" Cruncher Eytinge presents the leaders of the clandestone revolutionary society, the Jacquerie, in Saint Antoine, the publicans or wine-shop keepers Ernest and Terese Defarge. Dickens introduces the couple early in the action, in "The Wine-shop".
All of these details of portraiture one may discern in this Eytinge illustration, which depicts Madame Defarge as still knitting as the spy, John Barsad, attempts to engage her and her husband in conversation. Eytinge's interpretation of the redoubtable middle-aged couple and of the impact upon them of the circumstances in which they find themselves in "Still Knitting" is more perceptive than Phiz's 1859 steel engraving "The Wine-shop", in which Defarge seems at ease and his demure, beautiful young wife wholly absorbed in her knitting. On the other hand, Eytinge has a couple who are appropriate extensions of Dickens's text, for they are both more mature and less physically attractive, and better individualized, even if the Diamond Edition's illustrator, who realizes little of their place of business, does not include Barsad in the picture, thereby in effect placing the viewer in Barsad's position. Under the penetrating gaze of the royalist regime's latest spy in the neighborhood Defarge fumbles to light his pipe. The spy artfully alludes to the inhumane execution of the Marquis' assassin, Gaspard, but the wily couple refuse to commit themselves to either an opinion on his fate or even to a sympathetic comment about the death of the poor man whose child perished under the wheels of Monseigneur's speeding carriage. Unperturbed, Madame Defarge coolly appraises the interlocutor, even as she checks her coded knitting's entry for John Barsad. Before the couple lies the cognac glass that the spy has just emptied, so that we can assume that Eytinge has illustrated precisely this dialogue:
"I was saying to madame, with whom I had the pleasure of chatting when you entered, that they tell me there is — and no wonder! — much sympathy and anger in Saint Antoine, touching the unhappy fate of poor Gaspard."
"No one has told me so," said Defarge, shaking his head. "I know nothing of it."
Having said it, he passed behind the little counter, and stood with his hand on the back of his wife's chair, looking over that barrier at the person to whom they were both opposed, and whom either of them would have shot with the greatest satisfaction."
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The Four Jacques
Felix Octavius Carr Darley
Book II Chapter 15
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Household Edition
Text Illustrated
"The mender of roads looked through rather than at the low ceiling, and pointed as if he saw the gallows somewhere in the sky.
"All work is stopped, all assemble there, nobody leads the cows out, the cows are there with the rest. At midday, the roll of drums. Soldiers have marched into the prison in the night, and he is in the midst of many soldiers. He is bound as before, and in his mouth there is a gag-tied so, with a tight string, making him look almost as if he laughed." He suggested it, by creasing his face with his two thumbs, from the corners of his mouth to his ears. "On the top of the gallows is fixed the knife, blade upwards, with its point in the air. He is hanged there forty feet high — and is left hanging, poisoning the water."
They looked at one another, as he used his blue cap to wipe his face, on which the perspiration had started afresh while he recalled the spectacle.
"It is frightful, messieurs. How can the women and the children draw water! Who can gossip of an evening, under that shadow! Under it, have I said? When I left the village, Monday evening as the sun was going to bed, and looked back from the hill, the shadow struck across the church, across the mill, across the prison — seemed to strike across the earth, messieurs, to where the sky rests upon it!"
The hungry man gnawed one of his fingers as he looked at the other three, and his finger quivered with the craving that was on him."
Commentary:
Since the 1863 American Household Edition volumes neatly divide the novel at the end of Chapter 17 in Book Two, Darley's choice of subjects was likely intended to present the French Revolution in its "before" and "after" stages, with the clandestine plotters of the earlier part of the story becoming a mob bent on the annihilation of all aristocrats in the latter part. Although the nineteenth-century illustrators of the 1859 novel each have at least one scene in the Saint Antoine wine-shop of the Defarges, the original illustrator, Hablot Knight Browne does not depict the malcontents above the shop; rather, he shows the recently-released Bastille prisoner there early in his series, in his second illustration for the first monthly installment, The Shoemaker, and then later in the series depicts the spy, John Barsad, interrogating the Defarges in one of the two September 1859 illustrations, The Wine-shop. Realizing, however, how important the plotters become once the Revolution has broken out, two of the book's 1860s American illustrators, John McLenan and Sol Eytinge, Jr., have included a realizations of this clandestine garret scene in their narrative-pictorial sequences. Whereas the weekly installments in All the Year Round have no illustrations whatsoever, the weekly installments in Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization have at least two illustrations each, usually a regular wood-engraving (which becomes in the T. B. Peterson volume a full-page illustration) and a headnote vignette, a situation which gave McLenan the flexibility to alert the reader to an important event in the week's installment as well as to realize a significant moment in the action.
Thus, for Book Two, Chapter Fifteen (6 August 1859), McLenan actually shows the Marquis' assassin hanging above the fountain in the uncaptioned headnote vignette and then shows the narration of the avenger's fate in the garret above the shop, with Defarge nearest the window, the narrator (the road-mender) center, the look-a-like three Jacques listening intently (left). The inset narrator looks well advanced into middle age in these treatments of the scene, his hard life as a laborer belying his thirty-five years. At the conclusion of his inset narrative, the Jacquerie vote as "doomed to destruction" both the Evrémonde chateau and the entire family line, implying the "Extermination" of Darnay and his children. The scene visually accords well with its textual counterpart in terms of the setting and the juxtaposition of the figures in the dimly lit garret:
Defarge and the three glanced darkly at one another. The looks of all of them were dark, repressed, and revengeful, as they listened to the countryman's story; the manner of all of them, while it was secret, was authoritative too. They had the air of a rough tribunal; Jacques One and Two sitting on the old pallet-bed, each with his chin resting on his hand, and his eyes intent on the road-mender; Jacques Three, equally intent, on one knee behind them, with his agitated hand always gliding over the network of fine nerves about his mouth and nose; Defarge standing between them and the narrator, whom he had stationed in the light of the window, by turns looking from him to them, and from them to him. [Book 2, Chapter 15]
The most emotionally charged version of this critical scene occurs in Fred Barnard's illustrations for the 1874 Household Edition of the novel. Vividly realizing the scene as Dickens describes it, Fred Barnard frames the image of the road-mender's animatedly narrating events which occurred in the countryside with Dickens's own words, so that the reader encounters the image and text simultaneously — a decided advantage of the technology of wood-engraving in the 1870s. As opposed to Barnard's theatrical treatment, Darley's almost photographic treatment (with disposition of figures resembling that in McLenan's illustration) strikes the reader as subdued, but faithful to the text in terms of its detailing, Darley adding such elements as the floorboards, the low ceiling, and the crack in the wall, above center. Each of the three Jacques, sitting on the palette where Dr. Manette, recovering his wits after two decades of imprisonment, had slept, responds in a slightly different way to the narrative, consuming the story as thoughtfully as readers of the 1859 novel have done ever since its simultaneously serial publication on either side of the Atlantic. Darley distinguishes the thoughtful and observant publican, Defarge, from the others by his waistcoat and shirt, while the other Jacques and their guest have peasants' wooden shoes and caps. At the time, the reader casually notes such details, of course, encountering the small-scale photogravure plate proleptically, and then re-evaluating it with greater scrutiny when the narrative moment towards the end of volume one arrives. Only then will the reader appreciate the contrast between the bourgeois wine-shop proprietor (Jacques Four) to the rear of the listeners and the ragged trousers and smock frock of the bearded, uncouth peasant ("Jacques Five") who holds center-stage, as, blue cap in hand, he holds his listeners spellbound. Symbolically, having "the air of a rough tribunal", the group represents a fusion of radical interests, a disaffected urban proletariat, a restive peasantry, and a middle class bent on asserting its rights over the interests of an inept court and corrupt aristocracy.
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Madame DeFarge knitted steadily
Book II Chapter 16
A. A. Dixon
Collins Edition 1905
Text Illustrated:
"Very interesting remembrances!" said the spy. "I have known Doctor Manette and his daughter, in England."
"Yes?" said Defarge.
"You don't hear much about them now?" said the spy.
"No," said Defarge.
"In effect," madame struck in, looking up from her work and her little song, "we never hear about them. We received the news of their safe arrival, and perhaps another letter, or perhaps two; but, since then, they have gradually taken their road in life—we, ours—and we have held no correspondence."
"Perfectly so, madame," replied the spy. "She is going to be married."
"Going?" echoed madame. "She was pretty enough to have been married long ago. You English are cold, it seems to me."
"Oh! You know I am English."
"I perceive your tongue is," returned madame; "and what the tongue is, I suppose the man is."
He did not take the identification as a compliment; but he made the best of it, and turned it off with a laugh. After sipping his cognac to the end, he added:
"Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married. But not to an Englishman; to one who, like herself, is French by birth. And speaking of Gaspard (ah, poor Gaspard! It was cruel, cruel!), it is a curious thing that she is going to marry the nephew of Monsieur the Marquis, for whom Gaspard was exalted to that height of so many feet; in other words, the present Marquis. But he lives unknown in England, he is no Marquis there; he is Mr. Charles Darnay. D'Aulnais is the name of his mother's family."
Madame Defarge knitted steadily, but the intelligence had a palpable effect upon her husband. Do what he would, behind the little counter, as to the striking of a light and the lighting of his pipe, he was troubled, and his hand was not trustworthy. The spy would have been no spy if he had failed to see it, or to record it in his mind."
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"The Spy's Funeral"
Book II Chapter 14
Harry Furniss
Charles Dickens Library Edition 1910
Text Illustrated:
"These [conventional signs of mourning, including the handkerchief and hatband], the people tore to pieces and scattered far and wide with great enjoyment, while the tradesmen hurriedly shut up their shops; for a crowd in those times stopped at nothing, and was a monster much dreaded. They had already got the length of opening the hearse to take the coffin out, when some brighter genius proposed instead, its being escorted to its destination amidst general rejoicing. Practical suggestions being much needed, this suggestion, too, was received with acclamation, and the coach was immediately filled with eight inside and a dozen out, while as many people got on the roof of the hearse as could by any exercise of ingenuity stick upon it. Among the first of these volunteers was Jerry Cruncher himself, who modestly concealed his spiky head from the observation of Tellson's, in the further corner of the mourning coach.
The officiating undertakers made some protest against these changes in the ceremonies; but, the river being alarmingly near, and several voices remarking on the efficacy of cold immersion in bringing refractory members of the profession to reason, the protest was faint and brief. The remodelled procession started, with a chimney-sweep driving the hearse — advised by the regular driver, who was perched beside him, under close inspection, for the purpose — and with a pieman, also attended by his cabinet minister, driving the mourning coach. A bear-leader, a popular street character of the time, was impressed as an additional ornament, before the cavalcade had gone far down the Strand; and his bear, who was black and very mangy, gave quite an Undertaking air to that part of the procession in which he walked."
Commentary:
Barnard, McLenan, Eytinge, and Dixon, Furniss's predecessors, offer him little of a model for his depiction of violence erupting in an indeterminate urban setting. Whereas the novel's first American illustrator, John McLenan, adopted a whimsical and surrealistic approach to Jerry Cruncher's "trade" by showing young Jerry imagining himself pursued by a coffin through a cemetery, Phiz in one of his two monthly illustrations for September 1859 focuses on the bear and his trainer in the ramshackle bacchanal that has boisterously supervened after the sombre start of the police spy Roger Cly's funeral. At this point, according to Dickens, the procession has just reached Temple Bar, and is therefore passing Tellson's Bank on Fleet Street, in front of which establishment which are stationed the previously-introduced bank messenger and "odd-job man," Jerry Cruncher, and his son (the pair being the focus of the Fred Barnard Household Edition illustration for Chapter One, Five Years Later," in Book Two). The basis for Furniss's illustration of assault by raggamuffin street boys on the informer's funeral is Phiz's, so that studying how the later artist has sharpened and refined the earlier artist's work is informative.
After the lachrymose events in markedly urban Saint Antoine in Phiz's July illustration The Stoppage at the Fountain, this emotionally charged mixed scene of animals and people gathered in an urban setting comes as something of a comic relief, for here (in contrast to the tragic Paris scene) nobody is upset or injured, and in fact nobody has died! The comic figures of the bear and his "leader" (still a common enough sight in the London of the 1850s, but long since passed into history by the time of Furniss's composing his illustration) have replaced the suffering Gaspard and his comforter, the bear-like Ernest Degarge (right of center), and a pair of calm steeds in full funeral gear have replaced the rearing stallions of the July illustration — and a mob at play, dominated by children, has replaced the genuine mourners of St. Antoine.
In his version, Furniss has moved the bear and his leader to the left and away from their central position, and has shifted the horses pulling the hearse to right of center, heading in the opposite direction to those in Phiz's engraving — and Furniss has moved the hitching post (no longer a vehicle for leapfrog) from the right to the left. Although the drummer, up center, is still prominent, Furniss draws the eye well forward to the adult who seems to be urging the ragged street boys to violence as he informs them of the vocation of the dead man. The boys appear to be arming themselves, not merely joining the parade as in Phiz's plate, and several respectable bystanders (left) are clearly terrified by their encounter with the bear and the mob following him. Furniss does not emphasize the urban setting; there are no roof-tops, no sharply delineated shop signs (what is probably such a sign Furniss has barely sketched in, upper left), and no doorways, all contextual elements in Phiz's illustration. The overall effect, then, is somewhat different in that Furniss's mob is not merely playful but potentially destructive, and street youth do not act out of a spirit of fun but are exhorted to violence by rowdy adults, the figure in the foreground likely being Jerry Cruncher himself (his son behind him, to the immediate left), recognizable by his spiky hair. Thus, Furniss connects the scene immediately to the plot of the novel, as Jerry, always on the lookout for a corpse in good physical condition, is about to discover that no body is in the coffin. Significantly, in order to place Jerry in a prominent position, Furniss has been willing to contradict the text, for Jerry should already be hiding in the carriage and on his way to the site of the internment, the churchyard of St. Pancras-in-the-Fields.
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Still Knitting
Book II Chapter 15
Harry Furniss
Charles Dickens Library Edition 1910
Text Illustrated:
"Worse quarters than Defarge's wine-shop, could easily have been found in Paris for a provincial slave of that degree. Saving for a mysterious dread of madame by which he was constantly haunted, his life was very new and agreeable. But, madame sat all day at her counter, so expressly unconscious of him, and so particularly determined not to perceive that his being there had any connection with anything below the surface, that he shook in his wooden shoes whenever his eye lighted on her. For, he contended with himself that it was impossible to foresee what that lady might pretend next; and he felt assured that if she should take it into her brightly ornamented head to pretend that she had seen him do a murder and afterwards flay the victim, she would infallibly go through with it until the play was played out.
Therefore, when Sunday came, the mender of roads was not enchanted (though he said he was) to find that madame was to accompany monsieur and himself to Versailles. It was additionally disconcerting to have madame knitting all the way there, in a public conveyance; it was additionally disconcerting yet, to have madame in the crowd in the afternoon, still with her knitting in her hands as the crowd waited to see the carriage of the King and Queen.
"You work hard, madame," said a man near her.
"Yes," answered Madame Defarge; "I have a good deal to do."
"What do you make, madame?"
"Many things."
"For instance —"
"For instance," returned Madame Defarge, composedly, "shrouds."
Commentary:
The illustration reiterates the inscrutable Moira figure of Madame Defarge, calculating and implacable as she minutely records the transgressions of the upper class. Fifty pages earlier, she appears, recalling her textual appearance in Book Two, Chapter Seven, among the women at the base of the fountain in Saint Antoine. Here, she sits in a chair, presumably behind the counter of the wine-shop, looking squarely at the reader, as confidently and penetratingly as she examines the spy, John Barsad.
Although the previous illustrators have all given prominence to the figure of Madame Therèse Defarge as the patient spider, laying her web methodically against the day when she will ensnare and annihilate her enemies, Furniss's point of departure is clearly the inscrutable knitter in Phiz's The Wine-shop, in which the Defarges without apparent anxiety entertain the royalist spy, John Barsad, unperturbed (at least outwardly) by the questions of an agent who could arbitrarily consign them to a political prison. But whereas Phiz's publican does not pause to look up from her needle-work for even an instant (despite the fact that she is checking her prior recording of the spy's appearance), in Furniss's she visually examines the reader.
The fifteenth weekly installment in Harper's, issued on the 13th of August 1859, features John McLenan's less animated and detailed realization of the scene in the wine-shop, And stood with his hand on the back of his wife's chair for Book Two, Chapter Sixteen, "Still Knitting". Proleptically, in fact, Furniss's illustration, although situated in Chapter Fifteen ("Knitting"), alludes through its caption to a later scene which anticipates the arrival of the spy. Readers of the serial published in the All the Year Round weekly numbers had no such visual reinforcement of these themes; only the purchasers of the monthly parts had the benefit of the Phiz steel-engraving The Wine-shop (Part Four, September 1859), in which the emphasis is clearly on the knitting madam, whereas McLenan's scene has a divided focus since the caption points to Defarge as The principal figure whereas the illustration itself places Madame Defarge at its center. Fred Barnard, on the other hand, in his version of The Wine-shop seems far more interested in the three "Jacques" opposite the placid proprietress, who has laid her knitting aside to pick her teeth — and to drink in all that her customers have to say, while (suspicious of a pair of unfamiliar customers who have just entered) she commits herself to no words whatsoever in Book One, Chapter Five, "The Wine-shop". Dickens develops the character whom he introduced in the opening book as "stout" and "watchful" — Furniss, like Phiz, communicates the watchfulness, but opts for a more petite and feminine figure than Dickens suggests in the following passage, which seems to be the basis of Fred Barnard's description of her.
Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counter as he came in. Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his own age, with a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of manner. There was a character about Madame Defarge, from which one might have predicated that she did not often make mistakes against herself in any of the reckonings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being sensitive to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright shawl twined about her head, though not to the concealment of her large earrings. [Book One, "Recalled to Life," Chapter Five, "The Wine-shop," ]
Furniss's Therèse Defarge, like Phiz's, is neither crone nor Weird Sister, but a demurely clad bourgeois minding her shop and engaged in a particularly feminine pursuit — knitting. However, as the dialogue reveals, her object is not to manufacture baby-clothes, but shrouds for the corpses of the enemies of the people. Furniss and his editor, J. A. Hammerton, however, have juxtaposed the picture of the respectable, middle-class matron with the passage in which the road-mender describes the execution of the patriot, who has executed Nemesis on the brutal Marquis. At the bottom of the facing page, the entire line of the Evrémondes is "registered, as doomed to destruction", so that the illustration does triple duty, alluding to Madame Defarge's earlier appearances, preparing us for her interview with the spy in Chapter Sixteen, and underscoring her importance as the record-keeper of the Jacquerie and the avenging spirit of the people, and of her family.
Presumably what she is "recording" in this illustration, named for the succeeding chapter, is not the annihilation of the aristocratic line that includes Charles Darnay, but the description of the latest police spy, just conveyed to her by the Jacquerie's mole at police headquarters:
"Say then, my friend; what did Jacques of the police tell thee?"
"Very little to-night, but all he knows. There is another spy commissioned for our quarter. There may be many more, for all that he can say, but he knows of one."
"Eh well!" said Madame Defarge, raising her eyebrows with a cool business air. "It is necessary to register him. How do they call that man?"
"He is English."
"So much the better. His name?"
"Barsad," said Defarge, making it French by pronunciation. But, he had been so careful to get it accurately, that he then spelt it with perfect correctness.
"Barsad," repeated madame. "Good. Christian name?"
"John."
"John Barsad," repeated madame, after murmuring it once to herself. "Good. His appearance; is it known?"
"Age, about forty years; height, about five feet nine; black hair; complexion dark; generally, rather handsome visage; eyes dark, face thin, long, and sallow; nose aquiline, but not straight, having a peculiar inclination towards the left cheek; expression, therefore, sinister."
"Eh my faith. It is a portrait!" said madame, laughing. "He shall be registered to-morrow." [Book Two, "The Golden Thread," Chapter Sixteen, "Still Knitting," ]
Shortly in Furniss's sequence we shall meet the man thus delineated, although Furniss will not present him in the context of the wine-shop, and indeed his is one of the few Furniss images not accompanied by any sort of explanatory quotation, other than that the artist and editor suggest that his name, appearing in quotation marks, is an alias.
Mod
"John Barsad," the Spy
Book II Chapter 16
Harry Furniss
Charles Dickens Library Edition 1910
Text Illustrated:
"Say then, my friend; what did Jacques of the police tell thee?"
"Very little to-night, but all he knows. There is another spy commissioned for our quarter. There may be many more, for all that he can say, but he knows of one."
"Eh well!" said Madame Defarge, raising her eyebrows with a cool business air. "It is necessary to register him. How do they call that man?"
"He is English."
"So much the better. His name?"
"Barsad," said Defarge, making it French by pronunciation. But, he had been so careful to get it accurately, that he then spelt it with perfect correctness.
"Barsad," repeated madame. "Good. Christian name?"
"John."
"John Barsad," repeated madame, after murmuring it once to herself. "Good. His appearance; is it known?"
"Age, about forty years; height, about five feet nine; black hair; complexion dark; generally, rather handsome visage; eyes dark, face thin, long, and sallow; nose aquiline, but not straight, having a peculiar inclination towards the left cheek; expression, therefore, sinister."
"Eh my faith. It is a portrait!" said madame, laughing. "He shall be registered to-morrow." [Book Two, "The Golden Thread," Chapter Sixteen, "Still Knitting," p. 166]
A figure entering at the door threw a shadow on Madame Defarge which she felt to be a new one. She laid down her knitting, and began to pin her rose in her head-dress, before she looked at the figure.
It was curious. The moment Madame Defarge took up the rose, the customers ceased talking, and began gradually to drop out of the wine-shop.
"Good day, madame," said the new-comer.
"Good day, monsieur."
She said it aloud, but added to herself, as she resumed her knitting: "Hah! Good day, age about forty, height about five feet nine, black hair, generally rather handsome visage, complexion dark, eyes dark, thin, long and sallow face, aquiline nose but not straight, having a peculiar inclination towards the left cheek which imparts a sinister expression! Good day, one and all!"
"Have the goodness to give me a little glass of old cognac, and a mouthful of cool fresh water, madame."
Madame complied with a polite air.
"Marvellous cognac this, madame!"
It was the first time it had ever been so complemented, and Madame Defarge knew enough of its antecedents to know better. She said, however, that the cognac was flattered, and took up her knitting. The visitor watched her fingers for a few moments, and took the opportunity of observing the place in general.
"You knit with great skill, madame."
"I am accustomed to it."
"A pretty pattern too!" "You think so?" said madame, looking at him with a smile.
"Decidedly. May one ask what it is for?"
"Pastime," said madame, still looking at him with a smile while her fingers moved nimbly.
"Not for use?"
"That depends. I may find a use for it one day. If I do — Well," said madame, drawing a breath and nodding her head with a stem kind of coquetry, "I'll use it!"
It was remarkable; but, the taste of Saint Antoine seemed to be decidedly opposed to a rose on the head-dress of Madame Defarge. Two men had entered separately, and had been about to order drink, when, catching sight of that novelty, they faltered, made a pretence of looking about as if for some friend who was not there, and went away. Nor, of those who had been there when this visitor entered, was there one left. They had all dropped off. The spy had kept his eyes open, but had been able to detect no sign. They had lounged away in a poverty-stricken, purposeless, accidental manner, quite natural and unimpeachable.
"JOHN," thought madame, checking off her work as her fingers knitted, and her eyes looked at the stranger. "Stay long enough, and I shall knit 'BARSAD' before you go."
"You have a husband, madame?"
"I have."
"Children?"
"No children."
"Business seems bad?"
"Business is very bad; the people are so poor."
"Ah, the unfortunate,"
Commentary:
The illustration corresponds to two distinct passages: in the first, Madame Defarge records the description of the spy assigned to Saint Antoine to flush out members of the Jacquerie; in the second, the spy enters the Defarges' wine-shop — in their curious customer Madame Defarge recognizes Barsad from the description leaked to her by the secret society's mole at police headquarters. Previously, in the crowded Old Bailey courtroom scene captured by Hablot Knight Browne in The Likeness, the government witnesses Roger Cly and John Barsad must be present (as is Jerry Cruncher, immediately behind Sydney Carton, center), but Phiz has certainly not made his presence obvious. Consequently, in the original monthly sequence of illustrations, the reader had to wait until the September issue to see in The Wine-shop a realization of this slippery, long-faced but otherwise undistinguished figure who sells his investigative talents to the government of the day. When we meet him again in the original narrative-pictorial sequence, in The Double Recognition, his clothing is unchanged, despite the fact that he is now "The Sheep of the Prisons" (a specialist in gleaning information from prison-house conversations) for the Revolutionary regime. Furthermore, Phiz does not reveal his face, leaving him an shadowy figure whom Dickens uses to facilitate the escape of Charles Darnay from La Force.
The fifteenth weekly installment in Harper's, issued on the 13th of August 1859, features John McLenan's less animated and detailed realization of the scene in the wine-shop, And stood with his hand on the back of his wife's chair for Book Two, Chapter Sixteen, "Still Knitting". Again, the illustrator does not particularize the spy, who great talent is to blend in rather than stand out. Although McLenan probably had no recourse to Phiz's monthly illustrations, he has imagined the spy in much the same garb, although his stockings are dark rather than light, as in Phiz's illustration. McLenan, however, throws his figure into the shade, as if deliberately obscuring his facial features. The American serial artist throws the light available (presumably from the open door) upon the faces of the Defarges, and renders the spy's figure somewhat smaller in perspective.
In the September illustration by Phiz, The Wine-shop, the illustrator has also placed the emphasis on the knitting Madame Defarge, whereas McLenan's scene has a divided focus since the caption points to Defarge as the principal figure whereas the wood-engraving, dropped into the text, itself places Madame Defarge at its center. Fred Barnard, on the other hand, in his version of The Wine-shop seems far more interested in the three "Jacques" opposite the placid proprietress, who has laid her knitting aside to pick her teeth. Fred Barnard does depict Madame Defarge on a number of occasions, but his parallel wood-engraving, Saint Antoine, does not depict Madame Defarge in the context of her business, and in fact does not reveal the figure of John Barsad, bearded and in a greatcoat of the latest style, until very late in his sequence, Here Mr. Lorry became aware, from where he sat, of a most remarkable goblin shadow on the wall, illustration for Book Three, Chapter 8 — the twentieth large-scale wood-engraving in his sequence of twenty-five. Again, Barnard has chosen to place the spy in the shadow, but has naturalized him, making him a plausible presence: here is the man who knows how the system operates, Barnard implies.
Furniss's John Barsad, like Phiz's, is dressed as a solid bourgeois of the period, in respectable black and unremarkable clothing. But whereas Phiz's figure is undistinguished, except, perhaps, for a rather long nose and nutcracker physiognomy, Furniss's much more realistic study conveys something of the subject's personality and attitude. Here is a confident observer of the human play who is somewhat cynical about his values and allegiances. Although Furniss does not present the spy in the context of the wine-shop, he particularizes the chameleon-like agent of whatever political faction is in power. His Barsad has a knowing, almost supercilious look, as if he is taking the reader-viewer into his confidence. This is one of the few Furniss images in volume 13 not accompanied by any sort of explanatory quotation, other than that the artist and editor suggest that his name, appearing in quotation marks, is an assumed rather than a birth-name, and therefore an appellation not to be given much credence. Only much later, of course, will his sister reveal John Barsad's real identity, but Furniss has opted not to copy Phiz's The Double Recognition. This is, in fact, the spy's only appearance in Furniss's illustrations, but his regarding the viewer with such scrutiny and attitude renders that one appearance memorable, a figure no longer in the shadows, but scrutinized in all his particulars, including the "sinister expression" that Dickens mentions and a certain swagger implied by the placement of his hands. As in his second appearance in Phiz's original illustrations, we do not see "straight on," but from the back.
Mod
"Lucie and her Father under the Plane-tree"
Book II Chapter 17
Harry Furniss
Charles Dickens Library Edition 1910
Text Illustrated:
"If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been quite happy with you."
He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would have been unhappy without Charles, having seen him; and replied:
"My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had not been Charles, it would have been another. Or, if it had been no other, I should have been the cause, and then the dark part of my life would have cast its shadow beyond myself, and would have fallen on you."
It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new sensation while his words were in her ears; and she remembered it long afterwards.
"See!" said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards the moon. "I have looked at her from my prison-window, when I could not bear her fight. I have looked at her when it has been such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I had lost, that I have beaten my head against my prison-walls. I have looked at her, in a state so dull and lethargic, that I have thought of nothing but the number of horizontal lines I could draw across her at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines with which I could intersect them." He added in his inward and pondering manner, as he looked at the moon, "It was twenty either way, I remember, and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in."
The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that time, deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing to shock her in the manner of his reference. He only seemed to contrast his present cheerfulness and felicity with the dire endurance that was over.
"I have looked at her, speculating thousands of times upon the unborn child from whom I had been rent. Whether it was alive. Whether it had been born alive, or the poor mother's shock had killed it. Whether it was a son who would some day avenge his father. (There was a time in my imprisonment, when my desire for vengeance was unbearable.) Whether it was a son who would never know his father's story; who might even live to weigh the possibility of his father's having disappeared of his own will and act. Whether it was a daughter who would grow to be a woman."
She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his hand."
Commentary:
The illustration corresponds to Phiz's original conception of the idyllic scene only insofar as it features Doctor Manette and his daughter prior to her marriage to Charles Darnay. The moment as Furniss conceives of it is far more intimate because he has deliberately eliminated the other figures present in the December 1859 illustration Under the Plane Tree and moved father and daughter into an embrace as the father points dramatically upward to the moon.
In the original monthly sequence of illustrations, readers did not see a illustration of the memorable scene in the garden when it occurred in the text for October; rather, readers had to wait until the "wind-up," December issue to see in Under the Plane Tree, an analeptic realization of this idyllic moment which serves to underscore the depth of Sydney Carton's feelings for Lucie. In the fourth and final illustration for seventh monthly part Phiz has once again placed Carton on the periphery (rear center) while Doctor Manette chats confidentially with his contemporary, Jarvis Lorry (left), and Lucie and Charles (right) are blissfully unaware of the presence of the others. Carton is once again, as in the July 1859 engraving Congratulations, outside the charmed circle, a social isolate who looks knowingly at the viewer.
The sixteenth weekly installment in Harper's, issued on the 20th of August 1859, features John McLenan's somewhat stilted characterization of Lucie and her father answering the door in the headnote vignette Chapter XVII. One Night. for Book Two, Chapter Seventeen. However, he more than makes up for this weakly executed contextualizing scene by the scene of Lucie and her father alone on the garden bench later that evening, "See!" said the Doctor of Beauvais. in the same installment. It is this treatment rather than Phiz's that offers a pointed contrast for Furniss's far more emotionally satisfying realization. Whereas MacLenan conceives of Doctor Manette as a natural philosopher, pedantically showing his daughter (her face obscured by his left arm) the night sky, the American illustrator admirably conveys Lucie's love for her long-lost parent as she leans in and holds his right hand. In contrast to Doctor Manette's sober business suit in the small-scale MacLenan wood-engraving, Furniss's Doctor Manette wears a lighter jacket and (as befits his age) a skull-cap; furthermore, although he points upward emphatically, he looks into Lucie's adoring face, as the leaves of the plane tree engulf the upper half of the illustration, underscoring the Edenic quality of the moment. This natural quality (evoked by the profuse leaves of the tree that are echoed in the profusion of blonde hair on Doctor Manette's shoulder) has unfortunately escaped the American illustrator, whose generalized night-time backdrop smacks more of the early nineteenth-century theatre (with a glaring spotlight on the Doctor and the tree-trunk behind him) than of Northrup Frye's "Green World," the restorative, alternative environment to the civilized legal and structured social environment of the city in Shakespeare's plays, a concept which the Canadian critic articulated in 1957 in The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton; Princeton University Press).
In Harry Furniss's highly impressionist and sensuous rendering of the scene, the twentieth-century reader must have felt him- or herself almost a voyeur in being privileged to witness and overhear this highly confessional moment, for this is the first time that the father has reflected upon his imprisonment in his daughter's hearing. Although the MacLenan illustration captures something of Doctor Manette's moonlit reverie — which, as Andrew Sanders notes, echoes the philosophical note of Charles Lamb's "Dream Children" in Essays of Elia (1823) — the passionate embrace of the daughter in Furniss's engraving speaks volumes about Lucie's mixed feelings on the eve of her marriage. It is no mere accident of composition that Furniss has made Lucie — beautiful, adoring, and somewhat vulnerable — the physical and emotional center of the picture, whereas previous illustrators have emphasized the centrality of her father. Both are moved by powerful and conflicting emotions, but Furniss has determined that the reader should appreciate Lucie's dilemma.
Mod
The Wine Shop
Book II Chapter 15
Phiz
Text Illustrated:
"It may have been a signal for loosening the general tongue. It elicited an answering chorus of "Good day!"
"It is bad weather, gentl..."
Kim
Thank you for including this commentary/analysis. It provides us with a world of information and insight. The contrast between the economic world of the English and the poverty and deprivation of the French opens up both our eyes to the contrasting illustrations but also gives us a fresh way to consider and analyze the letterpress.
Ah, Hablot Browne, you will be missed.
Mod
Headnote Vignette
John McLenan
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapter 15 ("Knitting")
Harper's Weekly (August 1859)
Text Illustrated:
"All work is stopped, all assemble there, no..."
Message 21 is a stark and dark image that speaks of death. It is impossible not to see the gallows. It looms over the image. To its left we see the fountain. Its waters flow just as the red wine flowed through the streets of St Antoine. The fountain also reminds us of the death of the child crushed under the wheels of the Marquis’s coach.
What I find most chilling are the bollards that surround the fountain. These bollards, misaligned and leaning, remind one of headstones in an old graveyard. The hangman’s noose, the fountain that gives both the water of life and marks the place of death are part of a much larger landscape of tombstones.
An eerie illustration.
Mod
Thanks as always Kim.
Kim wrote: "The Wine Shop
Book II Chapter 15
Phiz
Text Illustrated:
"It may have been a signal for loosening the general tongue. It elicited an answering chorus of "Good day!"
"It is bad weather, gentl..."
I find it interesting that some of the artists do Madame D as Dickens-heroine slim and doe-eyed, and others as Dickens-working-class stout and multi-chinned. Do we ever really get much description of her, other than that she is pitiless and knitting?
Peter wrote: "What I enjoyed most in the illustrations this week were the detailed commentaries, especially those that offered insightful comparisons and contrasts with other illustrations by the artists.Thank..."
I agree, Peter. I liked this comparison:
Madame Defarge's knitting is as much a ledger as the large tome on Mr. Lorry's desk...(etc.),
and the commentary and Julie both point out what also struck me, namely that Phiz and Furniss both make Madam Defarge look more like Dolly Varden than someone we might think of as a bloodthirsty anarchist. That's our presumption, though, isn't it? Good = attractive, bad = ugly. I kind of like the unexpected challenge to those presumptions. Too bad Lucie isn't portrayed with a big nose and pockmarks. Plain girls can have hearts of gold, too. :-)
Mod
Thank..."
Same here!!!
Mod
I must confess that sometimes for me, characters in books get a life and an outward appearance of their own - quite irrespective of how the narrator describes them. As to Madame Defarges, I certainly picture her as a beautiful woman, not exactly doe-eyed and Dollyish, but rather more of a cold and awe-inspiring beauty such as Edith Dombey. My reason for thinking along these lines is that with her knitting and her habit of sitting still, apparently oblivious of her surroundings but taking in everything, Mme Defarge reminds me of the Fates or, as we Germans say, Nornen, and these I imagine as of timeless beauty.
On a more realistic level, though, Mme Defarge, as a member of the petty bourgeoisie, those people who had to eke out their living under unpromising circumstances, she would probably be rather meagre and have grown old before her time.
Oops, maybe this is from a picture somewhere or my imagination but I do not think of Madame Defarges as beautiful. I think she is an old hag, keeping watch, supporting her husband and willing to do whatever or support her husband's efforts (even murder) to bring down those evil ones in power. She is plump, always to busy to bother with anyone except those she chooses to favor. She a gossip. Evil. I do not want her for my neighbor. peace, janz
I mostly see her as old before her time, but in a 'she must have been beautiful once, and under different circumstances' way. Usually you can see certain features, even if someone does not look good due to life happening
Mod
Mod
Admittedly, I had quite some problems reading the chapters for this week but they cannot be laid down at Dickens’s door. Instead, my eye-doctor is to blame because she prescribed me some multi-focal glasses, and they are just rotten, giving me headaches and wanting me to hurt people (eye-doctors, that is). Luckily, I still have got a normal pair of glasses, which I eventually resorted to, and will see the doctor in the course of the following week to make her rescind her stupid prescription and get me some real old-style glasses. In ten years or so, I can still go over to bi-focal glasses.
Be that as it may, let’s move on to the writer who never fails me, unlike a certain eye-doctor:
This week’s reading portion started with a Chapter called “The Honest Tradesman”, and it is with little surprise that I noticed it was about our friend Jerry Cruncher, who, when sitting with his son on his stool in front of Tellson’s one day, witnesses a funeral pageant. To his amazement, however, the pageant is accompanied by a shouting and railing crowd, which is growing more numerous by the minute. Mr. Cruncher gathers from what these people are shouting that the hearse is carrying the corpse of Roger Cly, and that this Cly was an Old Bailey spy. When Cruncher asks several of the men shouting at the tops of their lungs why they think they are shouting “Spies”, they don’t really know, but they shout anyway, and I think that this is a kind of foreshadowing of the blind fury of a mob, whose members often don’t really know why they have joined it in the first place. The narrator also tells us how the mob takes over the coach, threatening the coachman, and how, after they have thrown the coffin into the grave the infuriated mob indulges in random violence and looting – according to whatever ideas are suggested to them by one or two of its members. It is only the rumour that the town guards are on their way that will help disperse the crowd. We can probably see this as a small foretaste of what is still going to happen in the other of the two cities, and it also reminded me of the London Riot chapters in Barnaby Rudge.
Mr. Cruncher, who remembers Cly from Darnay’s trial as a rather young and healthy-looking man, decides to follow his honest trade – he is that of a “resurrection man”, another instance of bringing the dead, if not back to life, at least back to light and into the hands of medical men – and together with two accomplices (and followed by his son, who wants to find out what his father is doing), he goes to the cemetery at night and digs out the freshly-interred coffin. To his dismay, though, he has to find out that the coffin is empty – a professional disappointment that he immediately puts down to his wife’s free-range praying. At least, his son later tells him that he, too, wants to be a resurrection man one day.
What do you think of the narrator’s light and comic treatment of domestic violence at the Crunchers’? Did Dickens really play this kind of thing for humour?
Chapters 15 and 16 carry us back to France, and they are called “Knitting” and “Still Knitting”. Monsieur Defarge brings the mender of roads to his wineshop in Saint Antoine because this man, who has now apparently enlisted with the Jacqueses, has some tidings about the fate of the Marquis’s murderer for them. It was none other but the desperate father of the child that was run over by the nobleman’s coach, which surprised me because I had assumed that Defarge himself might have committed this act of vengeance or of environment-improvement (because the world was definitely better off without the Marquis). My reason for thinking so was that Defarge was missing from the crowd when the Marquis took a look around to see who had dared throw back the coin at him. – The mender of roads tells Defarge and his comrades how the murderer was hunted down and eventually hung for his crime by the fountain in the little village, where his corpse is still hanging now, poisoning the water – i.e. scaring people away from that formerly central place of gossip. On hearing this news, Defarge and his friends decide that all the members of the Marquis’s family are going to be blacklisted for death and destruction, when the time has come. This forebodes ill for our hero, Charles Darnay.
We also learn that Mme Defarge’s knitting has a special purpose, namely that she is actually knitting a kind of black book by putting the names of people who are to be punished during the coming revolution – Mme Defarge tells her husband that a revolution will come even if they themselves will not necessarily live to see it –into the fabric, using a secret writing. That’s why, when asked what she is knitting, she meaningfully replies, “Shrouds”.
The Defarges take the mender of roads to see a public appearance of the King and Queen as long as he is in Paris, and here it becomes obvious that although he suffers unbearably from the social order of the Ancien regime, yet he is not above cheering the royal couple. Once again, Dickens shows his psychological insight into people’s mindset and into how easy it is to influence them. The Defarges, however, are undaunted at what they might easily have taken as a bad sign with regard to this Jacques’s reliability.
And Mme Defarge brings the mender of roads into line in the following way:
One day, after the mender of roads has returned to his place in the countryside, the Defarges get a warning that a new government spy is on the prowl, a fellow from England, and it does not take long until this very man shows up in the wineshop. Mme Defarge has added a rose to her headgear, which serves as a shibboleth, telling everyone who is in the know that they are not among themselves, and so while the spy is in the shop, all the other customers leave. The spy is none other than Mr. John Barsad, the very man who acted as an informer against Charles Darnay, and he has a very hard time trying to get at any valuable information from the Defarges and to make them compromise themselves while he is in the shop, drinking his cognac. Ironically, while she is talking to her unwelcome customer, Mme Defarge is knitting the man’s name into her blacklist. The couple learns something from Barsad, however, namely that Lucie Manette is going to get married to Charles Darnay, whom Barsad identifies as the nephew of the murdered Marquis. When the spy has gone, M. Defarge voices his hopes that young Darnay will keep out of France when the day has come, but his wife indifferently says that if he happens to come to France just then, he must have been predestined to be in France and his destiny will fulfil itself. Am I wrong in assuming that M. Defarge is not quite as fanatic as his wife?
Later in the day, Mme Defarge goes outside, where all the women are knitting, and the chapter ends with these portentous words:
What do you think of the Defarges and their relationship? Why might M. Defarge call his wife a grand woman?
The last two chapters are set in England and can be summarized in few words: Shortly before the marriage, which is going to take place within a very small circle – the bride, the bridegroom, Dr. Manette, Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross –, Lucie and her father have a confidential talk together, in which the daughter, who has a bad conscience about marrying and leaving her father’s household, is reassured by the old man.
On the day of the wedding, the doctor and Charles have a private conversation, and the doctor comes back with “an intent look, deepening into a frown of dislike and distrust, not even unmixed with fear”. When the young couple have left for their honeymoon, Mr. Lorry deems it necessary to go to Tellson’s and see to his business and when he comes back later in the day, Miss Pross tells him that her master seems to have undergone a mental shock because he has returned to the so long unused tools of the shoemaker, and he apparently thinks that he is back in his prison cell. Neither Miss Pross nor Mr. Lorry succeed in dispelling this bleak illusion but they decide not to communicate this new state of affairs to the honeymooners.
What do you think was the cause of the doctor’s mental shock and relapse?