The Old Curiosity Club discussion
A Tale of Two Cities
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Book Two Chp 19-24
Mod
A Plea
“Mr Darnay,” said Carton, “I wish we might be friends.”
When Lucie and Charles return from their honeymoon the first person to appear and offer congratulations is Sydney Carton. Dickens describes Sydney as having “a certain air of fidelity.” I find this an interesting description. Generally, Sydney has been presented as being sloppy, slovenly, dishevelled, and seemingly always at least a bit drunk. The choice of the word “fidelity” is intriguing. I think Dickens used it with great precision. Fidelity is not something one can see easily, or at all. It is not a physical trait. How often do we initially judge a person by their looks? Too often, I fear, myself certainly included. Sydney hopes that Charles will not judge him.
Now, as their conversation carries on it becomes (with a nod to Lewis Carroll), ‘curiouser and curiouser.” Sydney asks if he can drop by to visit Darnay and Lucie and be considered “a privileged person.” Carton assures Darnay he will not “abuse the permission.” Carton and Darnay agree and shake hands. “Within a minute afterwards” we read that Sydney was, “to all outward appearance, as unsubstantial as ever.” Now, I don’t know about you but I found their entire conversation unusual. Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton are polar opposites. They speak, present themselves, think, and act in totally different ways. However, their outward physical appearance is strikingly similar. Indeed, it is because of their similar physical appearance that Darnay was “recalled to life.” Ah, that phrase again! The way Sydney looks is the sole reason Darnay is still alive.
Later in the evening, after Carton had left, Miss Pross, the Doctor, Mr Lorry, and Charles Darnay speak about Carton as a “problem of carelessness and recklessness.” When Charles and Lucie are alone Charles notices Lucie is rather pensive. He asks why. Lucie asks her husband not to press any question on her if she tells Charles what is on her mind. Charles agrees. Lucie then says that Sydney Carton deserves more “consideration and respect” and that Charles should always be “generous with him … and very lenient of his faults when he is not by. I would ask you to believe that he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and that there are deep, wounds in it.” My dear,” continues Lucie, “I have seen it bleeding.” Lucie concludes by saying “I am sure that he is capable of good things, gentle things, even magnanimous things.” Charles Darnay responds by telling Lucie “I will always remember it, dear Heart! I will remember it as long as I live.” Ah, Curiosities, remember those words.
Thoughts
I have quoted from the text a great deal in this chapter. In the chapter Dickens brings Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay to the front of the stage. Surely there must be some reason for it in the narrative. The third component, and important character in this chapter, is Lucie. Once again, Dickens demonstrates Lucie’s compassion, sensitivity, and intuitive nature. For those who see Dickens reaching into his bag of sugary treats once again when he is writing about Lucie, you are right. Some of us may be tempted to pull out our hair. Little Nell, Little Dorrit, Florence, Dora, and now, even more so, Lucie. Shouldn’t Dickens be able by this time to develop more rounded young females, more psychologically interesting heroines? This question will follow us forever.
Mod
Echoing Footsteps
“Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody’s life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once stained red, the footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little circle sat in the dark London window.”
This chapter opens at the London residence of Lucie, Charles, and Dr Manette where Lucie is “listening to the echoing footsteps.” Do you recall how an earlier chapter placed us at the Manette residence and Lucie heard the sounds of hundreds of footsteps which upset her? Sydney Carton told her he hoped the footsteps would not come into her life but yet again we are told “there was something coming in the echoes, something light, afar off, and scarcely audible yet.” We are told that for years the echoes Lucie hears were none but friendly and “soothing sounds.” Suspense and foreshadowing. There must be something horrific on its way as Dickens repeatedly makes references to footsteps.
We learn that Lucie and Charles have a young daughter. The years are passing. We learn that Charles and Lucie also had a son but he died. Sounds, more sounds. We learn that Sydney Carton was the first visiter baby Lucie held her “chubby arms” out to in life. We learn that Stryver is now married but has remained as odious as earlier in the novel.
We also learn that in France, about the time of little Lucie’s sixth birthday, there was an “awful sound, as of a great storm in France with a dreadful sea rising.” In mid July, 1789, we find Jarvis Lorry making plans to go to France. France is in turmoil. At this point in the letterpress there is a page break.
We next read that “headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody’s life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once stained red, the footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little circle sat in the dark London window.” Remember the spilt wine cask in Saint Antoine? The desperate people licking the wine from the street’s gutters, chewing the wood of the broken wine casks, and one joker writing “Blood” on the wall of a building.
Dickens brings the French Revolution to his readers through the actions of the poor in the area of Saint Antoine. The poor grab weapons, stones, anything, everything, and were prepared to hold their life “to no account.” A “whirlpool of boiling waters” flooded out from the Defarge’s wine shop. “Come then!” cried Defarge, in a resounding voice ‘Patriots and friends, we are ready! The Bastille!’”
And so the French Revolution begins. I will not present a summary of the next paragraphs except to note that we are told the Defarge’s “had long grown hot.” I will pause, however, at one specific jail cell in The Bastille. One Hundred and Five, North Tower. Defarge demands that a turnkey pass his torch along the walls of the cell so he can see them clearly. On the wall is discovered the letters AM and the words “a poor physician.” The revolutionaries lead by Defarge search the cell but apparently find nothing.
There is violence and death in the streets. The revolutionaries show no mercy. No one is more destructive than Madame Defarge. What is it that drives such hate in her? Has there been any hints to date you can recall? Seven prisoners have been released and seven dead heads suspended on pikes. We are told that the revolutionaries had found some letters and other memorials of the prisoners.
As our chapter ends we find a prayer that Lucie will never be accosted by the footsteps that have erupted in Paris. Will Lucie be able to avoid the wine-red stains that ran years earlier through Saint Antoine?
Thoughts
We now have an answer to what the mysterious footsteps that Lucie has heard for years. But how can we link two such seemingly different and widely placed events? What/who is the link?
The events of the French Revolution had been a long time coming. Dickens has marked the time interval carefully. Why do you think Dickens did not introduce his reader to the French Revolution until this point in the text?
To what extent has Dickens been able to keep the reader’s attention to this point in the novel? What are the ways he has accomplished it?
Mod
The Sea Still Rises
“Haggard Saint Antoine had had only one exultant week, in which to soften his modicum of hard and bitter bread to such extent as he could, with the relish of fraternal embraces and congratulations…”
The above epigraph is the first sentence of this chapter. Did you notice the words ‘his,” “he” and “fraternal embraces” used to describe Saint Antoine? And, of course, a place cannot eat bread. The place and the people are made one by Dickens. The last sentence of the first paragraph states “the lamps across his streets had a portentously elastic swing with them.” I wonder how many people were hanged from those lamps?
There has been a shift in mood in Saint Antoine. It is now termed a “power enthroned.” Do you think Dickens would use the word “enthroned” to suggest the shift from the throne once so comfortably occupied by the kings of France?
In this chapter we meet the wife of a starved grocer named “The Vengeance.” Keep an eye on her as the novel progresses. Defarge comes to the wine-shop and announces that he has news from “the other world.” A hated member of the elite named Foulon, a man who had once told the poor to eat grass, and who was supposedly dead is, in fact, not dead. He feigned his death in order to avoid the wrath of the poor. Well, he is, in fact alive. Here I go again … Foulon is yet another example of a person who has been Recalled to Life.
The residents rally together, arm themselves, and go to the Hall of Examination to see Foulon. The group intend to find Foulon and then hang him from a lamppost. They do seize him, drag him into the streets, stuff his face with straw and attempt to hang him. Twice the rope breaks. The third time is the charm. The mob from Saint Antoine are successful in hanging Foulon but I fear they will not be satisfied with only his death. Dickens calls the mob a “Wolf-procession.”
As our chapter ends we find Madame Defarge and her husband remarking on how their long wait for justice has been. The Bastille has fallen, Foulon has been killed. What else, who else, will be next?
Thoughts
The title of the novel is A Tale of Two Cities. First, we need to reflect once more on the opening chapter of this novel. I’ll pose a couple of contrasts and comparisons. We have a seemingly idyllic couple in London and an angry and bitter couple in Paris. We have a court system in England that seems to ignore the due process of law and a group of citizens who enjoy the spectacle of drawing and quartering humans. Dickens calls them flies. In France, we have a group of citizens who enjoy beating and old man and then hanging him from a lamppost. Can you think of other similarities and differences between France and England?
The concept of being recalled to life is once again in evidence in this chapter. This motif seems to be constant. What might Dickens be preparing us for with such a constant repetition?
Mod
Fire Rises
“… flames burst forth, and the stone faces awakened, stared out of fire.”
For those of us who have had the pleasure to travel in Europe we have, no doubt, learned that the city or rural fountain is a fixture of life. My wife comes from a rural area of Portugal and in her childhood town there still is a fountain where people go for their water needs. She remembers going to the fountain daily with her father. She recalls how the people would gather to visit, to talk, and to be with their neighbours. Today the townspeople still gather at the fountain. Like outdoor coffee shops, the town fountain serves as a heartbeat for the people.
In this chapter we are in the countryside. The area is “all worn out.” We read that “Monseigneur as a class, somehow or other, brought things to this.” The mender of roads worked, solitary, in the dust. He is starving. As he works breaking stones for the roads, I see a metaphor the state of France. It too is broken. The poor have no road to take to a better life. One day a man comes upon the road mender “like a ghost” and both men great each other as Jacques. As they settle in to talk the word “To-night” enters the conversation. As they talk we are told that they sat “on a heap of stones” while “hail [drove] in between them like a pigmy charge of bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the village.” Ah, hail, an unpleasant weather event, surrounds the men. What is going on here? Remember that Dickens frequently used pathetic fallacy to heighten the essence of warnings in his narratives.
The wayfarer is in need of sleep and so he prepares to rest. We are told he “slipped off his great wooden shoes.” The mention of wooden shoes emphasizes he is a very poor man. It also links back to the sound heard when hundreds, indeed thousands of pairs of wooden shoes ran through the streets of France and were imagined by Lucie in her quiet corner of London. The road mender looks at the sleeping man. Let’s look at what he sees. The wayfarer “had travelled far, and his feet were footsore, and his ankles chafed and bleeding; his great shoes, stuffed with leaves and grass, had been heavy to drag over the many long leagues and his clothes were chafed into holes, as he himself was into sores.” The road mender sees in his mind “similar figures, stopped by no obstacle, tending to centres all over France.”
Why does Dickens focus on the man’s shoes? If we look back to Browne’s illustration of the dead child who was run over by the Marquis’s carriage found in Book 2 Chapters 7-13 message 40 the role of wooden shoes is discussed. Here again, in this chapter, Dickens focusses on shoes. Dickens is a master of building and repeating symbols. In this chapter he first reintroduces the wooden shoe. This time, however, Dickens looks closely at the feet of the poor man. Closer and closer. What do we see? Poverty and pain. Our first look at Doctor Manette reveals him at a workbench working on a shoe. Over and over Dickens weaves the idea of shoes, footprints, and sounds of feet into the text.
The wayfarer leaves, the road-mender goes home to the village. After his meal the road mender and the rest of the town gather around the town fountain and look to the sky . Why?
Dickens then abruptly changes our point of view to the chateau of the former Marquis. First, it is dark. Then, the chateau seems to become visible “by some light of its own.” Monsieur Gabelle sees the fire but can find no one to help as “the mender of roads and two hundred and fifty particular friends, stood with folded arms at the fountain.” The chateau burned. It was totally destroyed. The fountain of the chateau “ran dry.” As we look towards the massive destruction of the chateau there are “four fierce figures” who trudged away “towards their next destination.” Clearly, there is a select group of men who travel about France destroying the property of the aristocracy.
The townspeople turn on Gabelle who they saw as a tax collector. For the time being his life appears to be spared. As our chapter ends we read that the horrors of the Revolution are spreading throughout France. It seems no one was exempt from the grind of death and destruction.
Mod
Drawn to Loadstone Rock
“The peril of an old servant and a good one, whose only crime was fidelity to himself and his family, stared him so reproachfully in the face that, as he walked to and fro in the Temple considering what to do, he almost hid his face from the passers-by.”
Three years have passed since the last chapter. In their quiet corner of London Lucie and her family still live and still hear footsteps of a people “tumultuous under a red flag … changed into wild beasts.” We learn that the “Monseigneur, as a class,” the Court system, and Royalty were all gone. By 1792 all had changed in France. Meanwhile, in England, Tellson’s Bank remained its old self. The Monseigneurs who had escaped from France find themselves hanging about Tellson’s and fondly wishing for the old days and, no doubt, very happy that they still had their heads.
It is at Tellson’s one hot day we find Mr Lorry and Charles Darnay. Mr Lorry is planning to travel to Paris. He has no fear of the mob. He is old. Tellson’s is old. He is a man of business. He will gladly inconvenience himself for the sake of Tellson’s. His purpose is to save financial documents and records that pertain to Tellson’s French clients. Lorry believes that one way of saving the documents will be to bury them. In any case, he is leaving for Paris this very night. Jerry Cruncher will accompany him. Is their anything that isn’t buried in the novel?
Darnay thinks that perhaps he should also go to France. He believes he would be listened to and might even be able to persuade some people to restrain themselves. To me this makes little sense. Darnay has not been to France, with the exception of a quick visit to his uncle, in a very long time. Does he really think he is that important, that respected, that remembered? At this point, he has decided not to travel to France.
Well, wait just a moment. A letter is delivered to Mr Lorry addressed to the Marquis St Evremonde. This is our own Charles. This is the name Dr Manette learned on the day of Lucie’s wedding. This is the reason Doctor Manette regressed for nine days after Lucie’s wedding. This is the secret between Charles and the Doctor that was never to be shared unless the Doctor wished it. We learn that both the late Marquis and his unknown nephew are vilified by the Monseigneurs. Stryver puts in his two cents worth of hatred for the nephew as well. Darnay claims he knows how to find young Evermonde and will deliver the letter. In a way, here is another example of pairing. The English Darnay will go to France to find, or to become, the French Darnay/Evremonde.
Darnay seeks a private place and reads the letter. It is from Gabelle who announces he has been seized by the mob and will shortly be summoned before the tribunal. He will certainly be put to death. Gabelle recounts how he has been fair to the poor and had shown them compassion and sympathy. It matters not to the crowd. Gabelle says his only fault is that he has been loyal to Charles. Gabelle begs for Charles to help.
At this moment Charles realizes the horrid dilemma he faces and that he has acted “imperfectly.” He loves Lucie, he has renounced and hopefully buried his connection to his family, but yet he has kept secrets from his wife. Now, the secrets are surfacing, his past, his connection to the most hated family in France are arising from the past. His past that once was buried has now assumed life again. What was thought dead and buried has been recalled to life. Charles Darnay is a man of honour. He decides he must return to France and hopefully be able to recall Gabelle to life. Yes, “The Loadstone Rock was drawing him back.
Charles decides he will not tell Lucie or her father his plans. Rather, he will write them when he is in Paris.
Thoughts
I’ve always been uneasy about the way Charles Darnay is portrayed in the novel. What is your opinion of him?
Let’s take a look at how Dickens uses physical structures as emblems of an idea or even a society. In the novel Tellson’s bank is portrayed as a very ancient place. Its clerks are ancient, its accounts are old and well-established. Those who work there are old or kept in the back offices until they are old. Tellson’s foundation is its massive ledgers that record both the bank’s past and its patrons. Physically, the Tellson’s building is old as well. As one of its most senior employees Mr Lorry self-describes himself as a man of business.
Let's compare this to the Defarge’s wine shop. There are no massive and ancient ledgers in the wine shop. The record keeping is done with knitting needles and wool. The record of names in the knitting is guarded carefully. These records span many decades. Mme Defarge is the Jarvis Lorry of the wine shop. She is loyal, constant, and faithful to the wine shop just as Mr. Lorry is faithful to Tellson’s Bank. There is an ancient stability that is present in Tellson’s. There are ancient grudges found in the wine store. In Tellson’s we have a place that is build to be stable; in the wine shop we have a place built to centre a revolution.
We have seen these differences in the illustrations. To what extent do you find the illustrations enhance your reading experience and comprehension of the novel?
Peter wrote: "The obvious question is what exactly triggered the relapse? Putting on your hat as a psychologist/psychiatrist how would you explain what specially triggered Dr Manette’s relapse?"In an earlier chapter I was commenting on how ridiculous it was that Dr. M tells Charles Darnay not to reveal his real name to him, and the reason he's left France, until the morning he marries Lucie. At the time my thought was "well that will clearly be too late--what a clunky plot device to extend the tension."
Now I think differently. I think the Doctor knew it would be too late. He knew Lucie and Charles were right for each other and he didn't want to get in the way of their marriage, as he inevitably would have if it were clear it was a prospect that would upset him--through no fault of Charles's. Lucie's not going to enter a marriage that troubles her father. So Manette puts off knowing for sure what he already sees coming, until it will be too late to do anything about it. Charles delivers the news, everybody promptly heads off to the church and the waiting minister, the newlyweds head off for the honeymoon and Manette immediately has a breakdown carefully timed so as not to put a blight on the marriage.
I am also going to have to reverse myself on last installment's discussion with Mary Lou, in which I said maybe Lorry should be treating Lucie like an adult and telling her what's up with her father. I don't think that anymore. Manette was under excellent care and Lucie was on her honeymoon. She has given up enough to secure her father's welfare already--she deserves a few untroubled days off, and although I don't think Lorry knows this, Manette has timed things very well to give them to her.
Again, so many small sacrifices in this book!
The whole thing about Manette's split personality that Peter has pointed out--how he knows things and doesn't know them, and can compartmentalize so well--is fascinating to me, and I don't know what to make of it.
I also don't quite know what to make of this parallel. Here's the women of Saint Antoine: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.
And here's Dr. Manette on his shoemaking:
“You see,” said Doctor Manette, turning to him after an uneasy pause, “it is very hard to explain, consistently, the innermost workings of this poor man’s mind. He once yearned so frightfully for that occupation, and it was so welcome when it came; no doubt it relieved his pain so much, by substituting the perplexity of the fingers for the perplexity of the brain, and by substituting, as he became more practised, the ingenuity of the hands, for the ingenuity of the mental torture; that he has never been able to bear the thought of putting it quite out of his reach. Even now, when I believe he is more hopeful of himself than he has ever been, and even speaks of himself with a kind of confidence, the idea that he might need that old employment, and not find it, gives him a sudden sense of terror, like that which one may fancy strikes to the heart of a lost child.”
Peter wrote: "Let's compare this to the Defarge’s wine shop. There are no massive and ancient ledgers in the wine shop. The record keeping is done with knitting needles and wool. The record of names in the knitting is guarded carefully. These records span many decades. Mme Defarge is the Jarvis Lorry of the wine shop. She is loyal, constant, and faithful to the wine shop just as Mr. Lorry is faithful to Tellson’s Bank. There is an ancient stability that is present in Tellson’s. There are ancient grudges found in the wine store. In Tellson’s we have a place that is build to be stable; in the wine shop we have a place built to centre a revolution. "What a great parallel. In answer to the question of why bloodthirsty England gets off the hook in this book and France doesn't--I don't think England does get off. I think it becomes pretty clear as you read through the book that people are people, and it takes only a very slight turn to channel impulses that are very good into actions that are very bad.
Maybe not entirely, though. It is also clear that the Monseigneurs in the book are relentlessly negligent and persistently unaccountable in ways that don't have an English parallel. They never see their actions as contributing to the Revolution. The English and French mobs are both awful, but I'm not seeing any evil English nobles in the book to parallel the French. The English aristocracy is off the hook.
The closest we could get to this maybe is to look at Tellson's Bank as the enabler to the French aristocracy--which really it is! But it's hard to see Tellson's as a corruptive force when marvelous Lorry is its face to the world. Maybe the role of "just business" institutions in all this is a point we can take away from the picture that Dickens possibly did not intend to make. You all know I love Lorry, but I do see him and his bank as part of the problem here.
Peter wrote: "I’ve always been uneasy about the way Charles Darnay is portrayed in the novel. What is your opinion of him?"He is a well-meaning but vain fool. I find it interesting to juxtapose the grand sacrifice Charles takes here of going back and rescuing Gabelle, when as Peter points out, there is really no reason for him to believe he can pull this off, to the smaller daily domestic sacrifices people make in these books (Carton with his rare undrunken visits is looking good at the moment, folks!)--or to Lorry's well-informed decision to go back to France for a very specific and accomplishable purpose that he alone can carry out.
Darnay means well, but he is also impractical and too fond of his own image. He takes what he sees as the heroic step in renouncing the birthright he should have tended to. And when he realizes this was a mistake, he does the same thing all over again by taking what he sees as the heroic step in returning to France when it's too late to tend to things. His timing is off and he doesn't have a practical bone in his body.
Plus at this point, the not-telling-Lucie is inexcusable.
Mod
I..."
Hi Julie
Thanks for directing our attention to the number of sacrifices that occur in this novel. The more I think about it the more I see how densely packed TTC is with themes, motifs, and recurring symbols.
Like you I find the development of Dr. Manette a very accomplished bit of writing on Dickens’s part. We have certainly moved far from the over abundance of flat cardboard characters that populated the earlier novels.
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One of the first things I thought when I read about Doctor Manette was 'here is Lucie, who would be capable of becoming a very good second Little Dorrit, but her father won't let her.' Manette is quite the contrast as a father from William Dorrit, isn't he? Dorrit brings his whole family with him into jail, Manette makes sure they are sent away, even if that means he might never see them anymore. Where Dorrit wallows in self pity and idleness, Manette picks up a trade to occupy himself with the shoe making. And where Dorrit indulges and takes his daughter and her care for him for granted, Manette makes sure she gets as good a life as he can give her, even if that means he has to relive his old traumas in some way.
Mod
Hi Jantine
You are right. We have two very different father-daughter relationships in the past two novels. Thanks for pointing out the differences.
More and more as we move through the novels we find connections, comparisons, and contrasts in the novels of Dickens. I find this part of reading him very interesting.
I'm just catching up with last week's installment and discussion. So much to think about, and so many good observations. Dr. Manette: I'm not as appreciative of the way this plays out as Peter and Julie seem to be. As was mentioned, surely Manette had an inkling of what Darnay had hoped to confide when he asked for Lucie's hand. But no relapse. Even when Darnay finally revealed his true identity on the morning of the wedding, the doctor still managed to hold it together until the happy couple had departed. In an example of amazing timing, he comes out of his stupor just before their return. If he has this much control, is he truly having a psychotic break? Is this PTSD based on the past, or some kind of anxiety about Lucie's future as Mrs. Darnay? Perhaps both. But I do think the way this played out is more about plot contrivance than realism.
I appreciated Jantine's comparison of Dr. Manette to William Dorrit! Lucie isn't annoying me as much as "the other Marys" - perhaps having a good father has made a difference.
Regarding Julie's assessment of Darnay, I had been thinking of him as rather noble (as nobility should be, I suppose), but now that you've pointed out his weaknesses, I can't unsee them, darn it. It was the same with Clennam in "Little Dorrit". Interesting to compare and contrast these two books. As for Lucie, I hold to the same opinion I had last week. It would be nice to think that by the end of our story she has a moment like this one that Elizabeth Taylor has in the wonderful movie, Giant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUm2M...
But she won't.
Twice now, we've been subjected to conversations with Dr. Manette which are presented as being about a third party: when he and Lucie talk about his dreams of his child when he was imprisoned, and now with Lorry, pretending he has a "friend" who has suffered a mental breakdown. I find this unnecessarily muddled in the first instance, and condescending to the doctor - a medical man! - in the second. Any thoughts as to why Dickens would make this choice? Twice? Did you enjoy these conversations, or did you, too, find the third party presentation overly sensitive? Peter, do you consider this another example of the reflective theme?
Peter wrote: "I think it important that we look carefully at the ending of this chapter. Mr Lorry and Miss Pross...Well, it wasn't exactly subtle, was it? One of the things it showed me was that Lorry and Pross both have it in them to be somewhat brutal, though I'm not sure such ferocity was called for when destroying the cobbler's bench. Will they need to harness their violent tendencies again at some point?
Mod
This is a very interesting thought, Julie, and it chimes in well with the Fate motif that pervades the book, don't you think? There is the sound of the footsteps telling of things that are to come and people that are to rise, there is Mme Defarge knitting the thread of some people's fate and saying to her husband that whenever Charles Darnay comes to France and falls into the hands of the revolution, he has to take whatever consequences there may arise no matter whether he is Lucie's husband or no, and there are the fates of individual people woven into the fabric of history and events larger than themselves. Sometimes people can resign themselves voluntarily to these events and developments, sometimes they are just made to resign themselves.
Mod
All the women knitted. They knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a mechanical substitute ..."
Thinking of how people engage into activities in order to escape from their hunger, their sorrow and despair or from other thoughts and longings haunting them - may not Mr. Lorry's unbending devotion to his bank result from the fact that there is no one waiting at home for him?
Mod
Part of the explanation may lie in the fact that English and French nobilities were slightly different. In England, the title was passed on to the eldest son whereas his younger siblings had to earn their own money and make their own ways in life. Partly, this was done by investing in trade and industry, and any sort of business activity, provided it was not too menial, was not regarded as something to be ashamed of. French noblemen were more secluded as a class, and there was hardly any intermarriage between noble people and the higher bourgeoisie, and neither was there any productivity on the part of noble families. They simply led parasitic lives of consumption and showiness.
As a consequence, there was more resentment and discontent in the higher bourgeoisie in France than in England, which was one of the reasons for the outbreak of the French Revolution. In England, the higher bourgeoisie gained access to political power slowly, by reforms often, whereas in France, it all come in a kind of thunderstorm. I was quite astonished to find Dickens solely concentrate on the Sansculottes as the driving force of revolution, whereas in reality, the political revolution was started by the higher classes. Likewise, he also describes the Grande Peur, i.e. the burning of châteaux in the countryside as some kind of conspiracy, with mysterious men moving around in the country and doing the actual job. As far as I know, these outbreaks happened in a climate of mass hysteria, though. Dickens's main source on the Revolution seemed to be Burke and Carlyle, sources I have never read.
Mod
He is a well-meaning but vain fool. I find it interesting to juxtapose t..."
I completely agree with you, Julie. He ought to have told his wife and his father-in-law instead of simply absconding. And then, I think he should not have gone in the first place, all the more so as there is a snowball's chance in hell for his mission to be successfully accomplished. Even if there were a chance, I daresay he owes his primary allegiance to his family, especially his child. He is obliged not to endanger his life for a lofty cause and to stay in England and provide for his family who depends on him. I think Darnays behaviour very egocentric and clearly spurred by the disdain his real name evokes in his fellow-noblemen and in that blundering ass Stryver.
Mod
Well, it wasn't exactly subtle, was it? One of the things it showed me was that ..."
It's just another instance of people destroying something and thinking they are doing a good job, liberating somebody - in a book on the French Revolution, this is quite a telling detail.
Mod
All the women knitted. They knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a mechanic..."
Tristram
Yes, I also think that many people engage deeply in one aspect of life in order to fill a void somewhere else in their life. That said, many of us read a great deal, or even too much, but can anyone read too much? We are all well-balanced … right? :-)
Mod
I read a lot, although certainly not too much, which is not possible; and my wife sometimes says I also identify too much with my work. I also have to check electric gadgets way too often before I leave my house.
That doesn't sound quite balanced, unluckily.
Tristram wrote: "Thinking of how people engage into activities in order to escape from their hunger, their sorrow and despair or from other thoughts and longings haunting them - may not Mr. Lorry's unbending devotion to his bank result from the fact that there is no one waiting at home for him?"That's very sad and would also explain why he's willing to take some time off once he finally has someone to care for. Tellson's is pretty much his family until then. Then again, Tellson's is not entirely undeserving, if not actually familial. The bank offers him stability and real appreciation of his talents.
Tristram wrote: "Dickens's main source on the Revolution seemed to be Burke and Carlyle, sources I have never read."That's helpful to know about the different positions of nobility in France and England at the time.
Regarding Dickens's sources, a million years ago I did a lot of grad school work on 19th novels and histories, including reading all of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Carlyle’s French Revolution. I don't see much of Burke here beyond the anti-revolutionary attitude (which is admittedly significant), but it really is striking how much Dickens borrowed from Carlyle not just in content but in style and imagery. Remember he admired him so much he dedicated Hard Times to him. Other period historians, Thomas Macaulay for instance, did not write in the sort of head-over-heels dashes and exclamation point rush that you see in both Carlyle and Dickens. Here’s an example of the influence, for anyone who’s curious:
This is Carlyle:
Nevertheless, as is natural, the waves still run high, hollow rocks retaining their murmur. We are but at the 22nd of the month, hardly above a week since the Bastille fell, when it suddenly appears that old Foulon is alive; nay, that he is here, in early morning, in the streets of Paris; the extortioner, the plotter, who would make the people eat grass, and was a liar from the beginning!—It is even so. The deceptive “sumptuous funeral” (of some domestic that died); the hiding-place at Vitry towards Fontainbleau, have not availed that wretched old man. Some living domestic or dependant, for none loves Foulon, has betrayed him to the Village. Merciless boors of Vitry unearth him; pounce on him, like hell-hounds: Westward, old Infamy; to Paris, to be judged at the Hôtel-de-Ville! His old head, which seventy-four years have bleached, is bare; they have tied an emblematic bundle of grass on his back; a garland of nettles and thistles is round his neck: in this manner; led with ropes; goaded on with curses and menaces, must he, with his old limbs, sprawl forward; the pitiablest, most unpitied of all old men.
Sooty Saint-Antoine, and every street, mustering its crowds as he passes,—the Place de Grève, the Hall of the Hôtel-de-Ville will scarcely hold his escort and him. Foulon must not only be judged righteously; but judged there where he stands, without any delay. Appoint seven judges, ye Municipals, or seventy-and-seven; name them yourselves, or we will name them: but judge him! Electoral rhetoric, eloquence of Mayor Bailly, is wasted explaining the beauty of the Law’s delay. Delay, and still delay! Behold, O Mayor of the People, the morning has worn itself into noon; and he is still unjudged!—Lafayette, pressingly sent for, arrives; gives voice: This Foulon, a known man, is guilty almost beyond doubt; but may he not have accomplices? Ought not the truth to be cunningly pumped out of him,—in the Abbaye Prison? It is a new light! Sansculottism claps hands;—at which hand-clapping, Foulon (in his fainness, as his Destiny would have it) also claps. ‘See! they understand one another!’ cries dark Sansculottism, blazing into fury of suspicion.—‘Friends,’ said “a person in good clothes,” stepping forward, ‘what is the use of judging this man? Has he not been judged these thirty years?’ With wild yells, Sansculottism clutches him, in its hundred hands: he is whirled across the Place de Grève, to the “Lanterne,” Lamp-iron which there is at the corner of the Rue de la Vannerie; pleading bitterly for life,—to the deaf winds. Only with the third rope (for two ropes broke, and the quavering voice still pleaded), can he be so much as got hanged! His Body is dragged through the streets; his Head goes aloft on a pike, the mouth filled with grass: amid sounds as of Tophet, from a grass-eating people.
And here’s Dickens with part of the same scene:
The men were terrible, in the bloody-minded anger with which they looked from windows, caught up what arms they had, and came pouring down into the streets; but, the women were a sight to chill the boldest. From such household occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from their children, from their aged and their sick crouching on the bare ground famished and naked, they ran out with streaming hair, urging one another, and themselves, to madness with the wildest cries and actions. Villain Foulon taken, my sister! Old Foulon taken, my mother! Miscreant Foulon taken, my daughter! Then, a score of others ran into the midst of these, beating their breasts, tearing their hair, and screaming, Foulon alive! Foulon who told the starving people they might eat grass! Foulon who told my old father that he might eat grass, when I had no bread to give him! Foulon who told my baby it might suck grass, when these breasts were dry with want! O mother of God, this Foulon! O Heaven our suffering! Hear me, my dead baby and my withered father: I swear on my knees, on these stones, to avenge you on Foulon! Husbands, and brothers, and young men, Give us the blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon, Give us the heart of Foulon, Give us the body and soul of Foulon, Rend Foulon to pieces, and dig him into the ground, that grass may grow from him! With these cries, numbers of the women, lashed into blind frenzy, whirled about, striking and tearing at their own friends until they dropped into a passionate swoon, and were only saved by the men belonging to them from being trampled under foot.
Nevertheless, not a moment was lost; not a moment! This Foulon was at the Hotel de Ville, and might be loosed. Never, if Saint Antoine knew his own sufferings, insults, and wrongs! Armed men and women flocked out of the Quarter so fast, and drew even these last dregs after them with such a force of suction, that within a quarter of an hour there was not a human creature in Saint Antoine’s bosom but a few old crones and the wailing children.
No. They were all by that time choking the Hall of Examination where this old man, ugly and wicked, was, and overflowing into the adjacent open space and streets. The Defarges, husband and wife, The Vengeance, and Jacques Three, were in the first press, and at no great distance from him in the Hall.
“See!” cried madame, pointing with her knife. “See the old villain bound with ropes. That was well done to tie a bunch of grass upon his back. Ha, ha! That was well done. Let him eat it now!” Madame put her knife under her arm, and clapped her hands as at a play.
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That's helpful to know about the different positions of nobility in France and ..."
Julie
Thank you for this informative and insightful posting. This novel is becoming much more interesting as we take a look at the history and the writers of the history that surround it.
Mod
That's helpful to know about the different positions of nobility in France and ..."
That little extract from Carlyle was already enough to make me buy his book on the French Revolution. Thanks, Julie, it sounds very like a gripping read. I also have Burke's book on the Revolution at home, and have read some odd passages. I generally like Burke quite a lot, and will one day intensify my knowledge on his revolutionary book. But Carlyle will be read first, for sure.
Tristram wrote: "Julie wrote: "Tristram wrote: "Dickens's main source on the Revolution seemed to be Burke and Carlyle, sources I have never read."That's helpful to know about the different positions of nobility ..."
I hope you like it. I have very mixed feelings about Carlyle but I do enjoy his writing style.
Mod
Well look at that, once again we agree on something.
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The Accomplices
Book II Chapter 19
Phiz
Text Illustrated:
"I would not keep it," said Mr. Lorry, shaking his head; for he gained in firmness as he saw the Doctor disquieted. "I would recommend him to sacrifice it. I only want your authority. I am sure it does no good. Come! Give me your authority, like a dear good man. For his daughter's sake, my dear Manette!"
Very strange to see what a struggle there was within him!
"In her name, then, let it be done; I sanction it. But, I would not take it away while he was present. Let it be removed when he is not there; let him miss his old companion after an absence."
Mr. Lorry readily engaged for that, and the conference was ended. They passed the day in the country, and the Doctor was quite restored. On the three following days he remained perfectly well, and on the fourteenth day he went away to join Lucie and her husband. The precaution that had been taken to account for his silence, Mr. Lorry had previously explained to him, and he had written to Lucie in accordance with it, and she had no suspicions.
On the night of the day on which he left the house, Mr. Lorry went into his room with a chopper, saw, chisel, and hammer, attended by Miss Pross carrying a light. There, with closed doors, and in a mysterious and guilty manner, Mr. Lorry hacked the shoemaker's bench to pieces, while Miss Pross held the candle as if she were assisting at a murder—for which, indeed, in her grimness, she was no unsuitable figure. The burning of the body (previously reduced to pieces convenient for the purpose) was commenced without delay in the kitchen fire; and the tools, shoes, and leather, were buried in the garden. So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime."
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The Sea Rises
Book II Chapter 22
Phiz
Text Illustrated:
"A moment of profound silence followed. Defarge and his wife looked steadfastly at one another. The Vengeance stooped, and the jar of a drum was heard as she moved it at her feet behind the counter.
"Patriots!" said Defarge, in a determined voice, "are we ready?"
Instantly Madame Defarge's knife was in her girdle; the drum was beating in the streets, as if it and a drummer had flown together by magic; and The Vengeance, uttering terrific shrieks, and flinging her arms about her head like all the forty Furies at once, was tearing from house to house, rousing the women.
The men were terrible, in the bloody-minded anger with which they looked from windows, caught up what arms they had, and came pouring down into the streets; but, the women were a sight to chill the boldest. From such household occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from their children, from their aged and their sick crouching on the bare ground famished and naked, they ran out with streaming hair, urging one another, and themselves, to madness with the wildest cries and actions. Villain Foulon taken, my sister! Old Foulon taken, my mother! Miscreant Foulon taken, my daughter! Then, a score of others ran into the midst of these, beating their breasts, tearing their hair, and screaming, Foulon alive! Foulon who told the starving people they might eat grass! Foulon who told my old father that he might eat grass, when I had no bread to give him! Foulon who told my baby it might suck grass, when these breasts were dry with want! O mother of God, this Foulon! O Heaven our suffering! Hear me, my dead baby and my withered father: I swear on my knees, on these stones, to avenge you on Foulon! Husbands, and brothers, and young men, Give us the blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon, Give us the heart of Foulon, Give us the body and soul of Foulon, Rend Foulon to pieces, and dig him into the ground, that grass may grow from him! With these cries, numbers of the women, lashed into blind frenzy, whirled about, striking and tearing at their own friends until they dropped into a passionate swoon, and were only saved by the men belonging to them from being trampled under foot.
Nevertheless, not a moment was lost; not a moment! This Foulon was at the Hotel de Ville, and might be loosed. Never, if Saint Antoine knew his own sufferings, insults, and wrongs! Armed men and women flocked out of the Quarter so fast, and drew even these last dregs after them with such a force of suction, that within a quarter of an hour there was not a human creature in Saint Antoine's bosom but a few old crones and the wailing children."
Commentary:
Although the intimate, furtive interior scene of "The Accomplices" appears to have little in common with the riotous mob-scene "The Sea Rises," both imply that the attempt — whether individual or collective — to demolish the past is a criminal act. The shoemaker's bench in the first plate is connected with the twin towers of the Bastille, occupied by the victorious revolutionaries in the second plate. Just as the cobbler's workbench is out of place in the physicians study with its three shelves of books, ornate screen, and comfortable chair — so the implements of destruction in the second plate — bloodied swords, knives, and meat-cleavers — and the military drum seem quite incongruous in the hands of women. Each scene involves a passive object about to be destroyed as symbolic of an odious and oppressive past, the glum Foulon (just left of centre) being the human counterpart of the bench.
A re-visiting of the poses and violent action of "The Rioters with their Spoils" and "The Rioters at Work" in Phiz's plates for Dickens's first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge twenty years earlier, "The Sea Rises" reiterates the left-to-right movement of the earlier crowd scenes, "The Stoppage at the Fountain" and "The Spy's Funeral," but centuries of pent-up anger, poverty, and near-starvation have transformed some of the participants in the Bastille riot into animals, as Phiz suggests through the gaunt figure and fury-like visage of the female, centre. Here, no thoughtful and respectably dressed bourgeoisie are present; there is no moderating influence; just up-right of rear centre, barely recognizable human heads are thrust above the level of the crowd's heads. What is new here, both in terms of the earlier novel's riot scenes and the earlier crowd scenes of A Tale of Two Cities is a sense of power unleashed, of a tidal wave of humanity about to sweep away everything before it; this crowd is not full of caricatures as the 83 plates' crowds are, and the objects of their destruction are not mere property but individuals (exemplified by the hapless Foulon) and a centuries-old oppression by institutions (represented by the Bastille).
This reconsideration of Phiz's critically under-rated and neglected plates for A Tale of Two Cities and how best to read them was stimulated in part by Elizabeth Cayzer's critical reappraisal of seven of the sixteen plates in her Dickensian article. Some of her most perceptive observations occur in her analysis of "The Accomplices," in which an anxious and furtive Miss Pross and Mr. Lorry dismember the shoemaker's bench that was Dr. Manette's sole companion during his confinement in the Bastille:
Dickens suffuses his prose with irony describing them as feeling 'like accomplices in a horrible crime', with Miss Pross holding the candle as if she were assisting at a murder'. The reader would be fully alert to such textual implications by now while, at the same time, comparing this picture with its companion 'The Sea Rises' which does deal with murder. Further echoes with events in Paris are exhibited in the wooden bench (compare the lamp-posts) and the saw (compare the mob's axes and other improvised tools of destruction and murder). Browne, typically, adds his own touch of irony by placing a skull on top of the bookcase, and comments on Lucie's probable anxiety over her friends' actions by the inclusion of an oval portrait-head of a young woman peering down on the scene. [Cayzer: 35-36]
The skull, a memento mori for us all, serves to connect the books and desk with Alexandre Manette, physician, the true identity that the totalitarian regime sought to erase, substituting the more plebeian and docile occupation of shoe-making, as suggested by the artefact of the bench. The skull is both an object appropriate to a doctor's study and a grim foreshadowing of the maniacal forces of destruction (unleashed in the companion plate) that threaten many of the tale's principals. The bench, screen, and books acquire additional meanings when one juxtaposes "The Accomplices" and previous pictures. The inverted cobbler's bench is the same one on which the withdrawn, ill-clad ex-prisoner sits in "The Shoemaker" (June), and resembles that on which Dr. Manette sits in the lower-right register of the monthly wrapper. Later, monthly readers will encounter that same bench in the frontispiece "In the Bastille" (December). Thus, the bench comes to represent an irrepressible past to which in "The Accomplices" the well-meaning vandals attempt to prevent their friend returning. The screen, or one very like it, connects Dr. Manette to the Darnay family grouping in "The Knock at the Door" (November), in which he holds the candle (although Dickens specifies "a lamp" in Book III, Chapter 8), suggesting that he somehow performs something of the function of Miss Pross in "The Accomplices." Both screens imply a need for acting in secret and for concealment in order to preserve (sanity in the earlier plate, life itself in the latter). Finally, the shelves of books in Dr. Manette's private library connect this scene with the scenes at Tellson's and the wine-shop. They remind us that recorded knowledge (here, presumably, medical knowledge) is power.
To clarify why Browne has established these visual resonances in "The Accomplices" and to what extent these originate with Dickens himself, one must turn once again to the printed text. The details of light (Browne is probably wise in his choice of candle over lamp or rush-light), "chopper, saw, chisel, and hammer", as well as the "mysterious and guilty manner" of the pair are all there, but everything else in the plate is the artist's invention. The room, we note, is specifically Dr. Manette's, and not just a parlour or drawing-room; thus, the vacant chair that bears witness to the clandestine dismemberment is Dr. Manette's, a metonymy for the usual occupant himself, a man of taste, discernment, and learning, a counterpoint to his other identity, prisoner and automaton.
In contrast to the behind-the-scenes, close-up study of the destruction of the shoemaker's bench and implements intended to preserve the physician's sanity, "The Sea Rises" is a public panorama of anarchic natural forces that will sweep away innocent and guilty alike. In its composition, it is akin to earlier plates "The Stoppage at the Fountain" and "The Spy's Funeral" with its violent motion from right to left (accentuated in all three crowd scenes by fine, dense horizontal lines running through the lower half of the plate, suggestive of Shakespeare's "tide in the affairs of men" that, once set in motion, proves unstoppable) and its swirling figures all gripped by powerful emotion. However, the female masks of grief and compassion in "The Stoppage at the Fountain" have been replaced by haggard, jeering masks of sadistic delight, and the benign male drummer of "The Spy's Funeral" has been transformed into an ebullient female waving a bloodied meat-cleaver as she urges her fellows to commit further acts of bloodshed under the shadow of that implacable symbol of the ancien régime, the Bastille (stormed earlier in the same monthly installment, in Chapter 2). It is likely that this is Phiz's realization of the Vengeance, "The short, rather plump wife of a starved grocer" who Dickens indicates carries a drum that she keeps behind her shop counter. Our eyes are drawn to a glum face in the midst of the maelstrom, Foulon, then is deftly drawn forward to a woman who calmly regards him (although we cannot see her face, she is almost certainly intended to be Madame Defarge, distinguished by her cap while the other furies are characterized by "streaming hair,"). Already the crowd is approaching the fatal lamp standard (extreme left). Present participles ("panting, bleeding, yet always entreating and beseeching for mercy") in the printed text imply a highly active, groveling Foulon, not the rigid, passive figure in uniform in Phiz's plate. Nevertheless, Phiz achieves focus by Foulon's impassivity and the still figure of Madame Defarge who, as in the printed text, "silently and composedly" regards her prey as he approaches the lamp-post, pulled on by a musket-carrying male who may be Defarge, for he is described as carrying such a weapon when he enters Dr. Manette's cell in the chapter previous to "The Sea Still Rises" (Book II, Chapter 22). Finally, the lightly sketched-in face of Foulon (left of center)reminds us of another lightly sketched-in face, that of the Marquis (right of center) in "The Stoppage at the Fountain" — perhaps Phiz's way of suggesting that both men, like the system that they represent, are now less substantial than the oppressed masses who are rising against them.
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Book II Chapter 19
John McLenan
Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities Harper's Weekly August 1859
I find nothing in the chapter to match the illustration although it seems that the illustration is of Lucie and Charles, and they do get married in this chapter, so I guess I'll consider that close enough.
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The Auto da Fe
John McLenan
Book II, Ch. 19, "An Opinion"
Harper's Weekly (August 1859)
Text Illustrated:
"If the thing were gone, my dear Manette, might not the fear go with it? . . . "I would not keep it," said Mr. Lorry, shaking his head; for he gained in firmness as he saw the Doctor disquieted. "I would recommend him to sacrifice it. I only want your authority. I am sure it does no good. Come! Give me your authority, like a dear good man. For his daughter's sake, my dear Manette!"
Very strange to see what a struggle there was within him!
"In her name, then, let it be done; I sanction it. But, I would not take it away while he was present. Let it be removed when he is not there; let him miss his old companion after an absence."
Mr. Lorry readily engaged for that, and the conference was ended. They passed the day in the country, and the Doctor was quite restored. On the three following days he remained perfectly well, and on the fourteenth day he went away to join Lucie and her husband. The precaution that had been taken to account for his silence, Mr. Lorry had previously explained to him, and he had written to Lucie in accordance with it, and she had no suspicions.
On the night of the day on which he left the house, Mr. Lorry went into his room with a chopper, saw, chisel, and hammer, attended by Miss Pross carrying a light. There, with closed doors, and in a mysterious and guilty manner, Mr. Lorry hacked the shoemaker's bench to pieces, while Miss Pross held the candle as if she were assisting at a murder — for which, indeed, in her grimness, she was no unsuitable figure. The burning of the body (previously reduced to pieces convenient for the purpose) was commenced without delay in the kitchen fire; and the tools, shoes, and leather, were buried in the garden. So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime."
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Headnote Vignette
John McLenan
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapter 21, "Echoing footsteps"
Harper's Weekly September 1859
Text Illustrated:
I think this is the text, closest I can find anyway:
"That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among the advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and the sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they would, the young mother at the cradle side could always hear those coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny with a child's laugh, and the Divine friend of children, to whom in her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take her child in his arms, as He took the child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.
Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all together, weaving the service of her happy influence through the tissue of all their lives, and making it predominate nowhere, Lucie heard in the echoes of years none but friendly and soothing sounds. Her husband's step was strong and prosperous among them; her father's firm and equal. Lo, Miss Pross, in harness of string, awakening the echoes, as an unruly charger, whip-corrected, snorting and pawing the earth under the plane-tree in the garden!"
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"In the name of all the angels or devils, work!"
John McLenan
Book II, Chapter 21
Harper's Weekly September 1859
Text Illustrated:
"Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of scarecrows heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above the billowy heads, where steel blades and bayonets shone in the sun. A tremendous roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine, and a forest of naked arms struggled in the air like shriveled branches of trees in a winter wind: all the fingers convulsively clutching at every weapon or semblance of a weapon that was thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off.
Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began, through what agency they crookedly quivered and jerked, scores at a time, over the heads of the crowd, like a kind of lightning, no eye in the throng could have told; but, muskets were being distributed—so were cartridges, powder, and ball, bars of iron and wood, knives, axes, pikes, every weapon that distracted ingenuity could discover or devise. People who could lay hold of nothing else, set themselves with bleeding hands to force stones and bricks out of their places in walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever strain and at high-fever heat. Every living creature there held life as of no account, and was demented with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it.
As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a center point, so, all this raging circled round Defarge's wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself, already begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued arms, thrust this man back, dragged this man forward, disarmed one to arm another, labored and strove in the thickest of the uproar.
"Keep near to me, Jacques Three," cried Defarge; "and do you, Jacques One and Two, separate and put yourselves at the head of as many of these patriots as you can. Where is my wife?"
"Eh, well! Here you see me!" said madame, composed as ever, but not knitting to-day. Madame's resolute right hand was occupied with an axe, in place of the usual softer implements, and in her girdle were a pistol and a cruel knife.
"Where do you go, my wife?"
"I go," said madame, "with you at present. You shall see me at the head of women, by-and-bye."
"Come, then!" cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. "Patriots and friends, we are ready! The Bastille!"
With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bells ringing, drums beating, the sea raging and thundering on its new beach, the attack began.
Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. Through the fire and through the smoke—in the fire and in the smoke, for the sea cast him up against a cannon, and on the instant he became a cannonier—Defarge of the wine-shop worked like a manful soldier, Two fierce hours.
Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. One drawbridge down! "Work, comrades all, work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand, Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name of all the Angels or the Devils—which you prefer—work!" Thus Defarge of the wine-shop, still at his gun, which had long grown hot."
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Headnote Vignette
John McLenan
Book II, Chapter 22, "The Sea still rises"
Harper's Weekly (September 1859)
Text Illustrated:
"See!" cried madame, pointing with her knife. "See the old villain bound with ropes. That was well done to tie a bunch of grass upon his back. Ha, ha! That was well done. Let him eat it now!" Madame put her knife under her arm, and clapped her hands as at a play. . . . Madame Defarge had but followed and turned her hand in one of the ropes with which he was tied — The Vengeance and Jacques Three were not yet up with them, and the men at the windows had not yet swooped into the Hall, like birds of prey from their high perches — when the cry seemed to go up, all over the city, "Bring him out! Bring him to the lamp!"
Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building; now, on his knees; now, on his feet; now, on his back; dragged, and struck at, and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands; torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always entreating and beseeching for mercy; now full of vehement agony of action, with a small clear space about him as the people drew one another back that they might see; now, a log of dead wood drawn through a forest of legs; he was hauled to the nearest street corner where one of the fatal lamps swung, and there Madame Defarge let him go — as a cat might have done to a mouse — and silently and composedly looked at him while they made ready, and while he besought her: the women passionately screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly calling out to have him killed with grass in his mouth. Once, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the rope was merciful, and held him, and his head was soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of."
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He took out a blackened pipe
John McLenan
Book II, Chapter 22, "The Sea still rises"
Harper's Weekly September 1859
Text Illustrated:
"How goes it, Jacques?"
"All well, Jacques."
"Touch then!"
They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap of stones.
"No dinner?"
"Nothing but supper now," said the mender of roads, with a hungry face.
"It is the fashion," growled the man. "I meet no dinner anywhere."
He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and steel, pulled at it until it was in a bright glow: then, suddenly held it from him and dropped something into it from between his finger and thumb, that blazed and went out in a puff of smoke.
"Touch then." It was the turn of the mender of roads to say it this time, after observing these operations. They again joined hands.
"To-night?" said the mender of roads.
"To-night," said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth.
"Where?"
"Here."
He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking silently at one another, with the hail driving in between them like a pigmy charge of bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the village."
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Headnote Vignette
John McLenan
Book II, Chapter 24
Harper's Weekly September 1859
Text Illustrated:
"That night—it was the fourteenth of August—he sat up late, and wrote two fervent letters; one was to Lucie, explaining the strong obligation he was under to go to Paris, and showing her, at length, the reasons that he had, for feeling confident that he could become involved in no personal danger there; the other was to the Doctor, confiding Lucie and their dear child to his care, and dwelling on the same topics with the strongest assurances. To both, he wrote that he would despatch letters in proof of his safety, immediately after his arrival.
It was a hard day, that day of being among them, with the first reservation of their joint lives on his mind. It was a hard matter to preserve the innocent deceit of which they were profoundly unsuspicious. But, an affectionate glance at his wife, so happy and busy, made him resolute not to tell her what impended (he had been half moved to do it, so strange it was to him to act in anything without her quiet aid), and the day passed quickly. Early in the evening he embraced her, and her scarcely less dear namesake, pretending that he would return by-and-bye (an imaginary engagement took him out, and he had secreted a valise of clothes ready), and so he emerged into the heavy mist of the heavy streets, with a heavier heart.
The unseen force was drawing him fast to itself, now, and all the tides and winds were setting straight and strong towards it. He left his two letters with a trusty porter, to be delivered half an hour before midnight, and no sooner; took horse for Dover; and began his journey. "For the love of Heaven, of justice, of generosity, of the honour of your noble name!" was the poor prisoner's cry with which he strengthened his sinking heart, as he left all that was dear on earth behind him, and floated away for the Loadstone Rock."
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"I know the fellow"
John McLenan
Book II Chapter 24, "Drawn to the Loadstone Rock"
Harper's Weekly September 1859
Text Illustrated:
"The hands of the clock verging upon the hour of closing the Bank, there was a general set of the current of talkers past Mr. Lorry's desk. He held the letter out inquiringly; and Monseigneur looked at it, in the person of this plotting and indignant refugee; and Monseigneur looked at it in the person of that plotting and indignant refugee; and This, That, and The Other, all had something disparaging to say, in French or in English, concerning the Marquis who was not to be found.
"Nephew, I believe—but in any case degenerate successor—of the polished Marquis who was murdered," said one. "Happy to say, I never knew him."
"A craven who abandoned his post," said another—this Monseigneur had been got out of Paris, legs uppermost and half suffocated, in a load of hay—"some years ago."
"Infected with the new doctrines," said a third, eyeing the direction through his glass in passing; "set himself in opposition to the last Marquis, abandoned the estates when he inherited them, and left them to the ruffian herd. They will recompense him now, I hope, as he deserves."
"Hey?" cried the blatant Stryver. "Did he though? Is that the sort of fellow? Let us look at his infamous name. D—n the fellow!"
Darnay, unable to restrain himself any longer, touched Mr. Stryver on the shoulder, and said:
"I know the fellow."
"Do you, by Jupiter?" said Stryver. "I am sorry for it."
"Why?"
"Why, Mr. Darnay? D'ye hear what he did? Don't ask, why, in these times."
"But I do ask why?"
"Then I tell you again, Mr. Darnay, I am sorry for it. I am sorry to hear you putting any such extraordinary questions. Here is a fellow, who, infected by the most pestilent and blasphemous code of devilry that ever was known, abandoned his property to the vilest scum of the earth that ever did murder by wholesale, and you ask me why I am sorry that a man who instructs youth knows him? Well, but I'll answer you. I am sorry because I believe there is contamination in such a scoundrel. That's why."
Mindful of the secret, Darnay with great difficulty checked himself, and said: "You may not understand the gentleman."
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"Still, the Doctor, with shaded forehead, beat his foot nervously on the ground."
Book II Chapter 19
Fred Barnard
The Household Edition 1870s
Text Illustrated:
"My dear Lorry, I doubt if that could easily be. There has been a violent stress in one direction, and it needs a counterweight."
"Excuse me, as a persistent man of business. Assuming for a moment, that he was overworked; it would show itself in some renewal of this disorder?"
"I do not think so. I do not think," said Doctor Manette with the firmness of self-conviction, "that anything but the one train of association would renew it. I think that, henceforth, nothing but some extraordinary jarring of that chord could renew it. After what has happened, and after his recovery, I find it difficult to imagine any such violent sounding of that string again. I trust, and I almost believe, that the circumstances likely to renew it are exhausted."
He spoke with the diffidence of a man who knew how slight a thing would overset the delicate organisation of the mind, and yet with the confidence of a man who had slowly won his assurance out of personal endurance and distress. It was not for his friend to abate that confidence. He professed himself more relieved and encouraged than he really was, and approached his second and last point. He felt it to be the most difficult of all; but, remembering his old Sunday morning conversation with Miss Pross, and remembering what he had seen in the last nine days, he knew that he must face it.
"The occupation resumed under the influence of this passing affliction so happily recovered from," said Mr. Lorry, clearing his throat, "we will call—Blacksmith's work, Blacksmith's work. We will say, to put a case and for the sake of illustration, that he had been used, in his bad time, to work at a little forge. We will say that he was unexpectedly found at his forge again. Is it not a pity that he should keep it by him?"
The Doctor shaded his forehead with his hand, and beat his foot nervously on the ground.
"He has always kept it by him," said Mr. Lorry, with an anxious look at his friend. "Now, would it not be better that he should let it go?"
Still, the Doctor, with shaded forehead, beat his foot nervously on the ground."
Commentary:
The intimate scene between the French émigré, Dr. Manette, and his friend and confidant, the elderly English banker Jarvis Lorry, occurs some ten days after the marriage of Lucie Manette and Charles Darnay. The scene is in sharp contrast to the previous illustration's realization of Saint Antoine's poverty and discontent in "An Opinion," in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book 2, chap. 19.
Barnard deftly realizes the confessional scene in which Dr. Manette confronts obliquely — in the third person — his reversion to insanity immediately after his daughter's marriage. In his book-lined study and apparently having reverted his saner self after nine days of relapsing into the Bastille identity of the shoe-mender, Dr. Manette (left) avoids making eye-contact with Lorry (right, dressed much as he is in the third illustration at the very beginning of the volume) as he attempts to assess the psychological condition of his "friend." The textual moment realized in the nineteenth chapter of the second book, "An Opinion," occurs immediately after Dr. Manette's recovery.
Rather than the static scene in which Dickens has Dr. Alexandre Manette confront his recent retreat into his Bastille persona, Phiz chose to realize the emotionally charged conclusion of chapter 19 when Miss Pross and Mr. Lorry clandestinely destroy their friend's shoe-making bench and equipment in "The Accomplices", one of two illustrations for the October 1859 monthly part. Compare the romantic headnote illustration for chapter nineteen by John McLenan in Harper's Magazine, August 27, 1859:, to the character study offered by Barnard and the suspense offered by Phiz.
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"Dragged, and struck at, and stifled by bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands"
Book II Chapter 22
Fred Barnard
The Household Edition 1870s
Text Illustrated:
"It was known directly, to the furthest confines of the crowd. Defarge had but sprung over a railing and a table, and folded the miserable wretch in a deadly embrace—Madame Defarge had but followed and turned her hand in one of the ropes with which he was tied—The Vengeance and Jacques Three were not yet up with them, and the men at the windows had not yet swooped into the Hall, like birds of prey from their high perches—when the cry seemed to go up, all over the city, "Bring him out! Bring him to the lamp!"
Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building; now, on his knees; now, on his feet; now, on his back; dragged, and struck at, and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands; torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always entreating and beseeching for mercy; now full of vehement agony of action, with a small clear space about him as the people drew one another back that they might see; now, a log of dead wood drawn through a forest of legs; he was hauled to the nearest street corner where one of the fatal lamps swung, and there Madame Defarge let him go—as a cat might have done to a mouse—and silently and composedly looked at him while they made ready, and while he besought her: the women passionately screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly calling out to have him killed with grass in his mouth. Once, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the rope was merciful, and held him, and his head was soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of.
Nor was this the end of the day's bad work, for Saint Antoine so shouted and danced his angry blood up, that it boiled again, on hearing when the day closed in that the son-in-law of the despatched, another of the people's enemies and insulters, was coming into Paris under a guard five hundred strong, in cavalry alone. Saint Antoine wrote his crimes on flaring sheets of paper, seized him—would have torn him out of the breast of an army to bear Foulon company—set his head and heart on pikes, and carried the three spoils of the day, in Wolf-procession through the streets.
Commentary:
Barnard follows up the tranquil interior scene between the Dr. Manette and Jarvis Lorry, which dramatized a psychological conflict, with a violent mob scene that Dickens based on actual historical events that occurred in the early stages of the French Revolution — namely the mob's attacking an official named Foulon de Doué at the Hotel de Ville, Paris, and subsequently hanging him at the Place de Grève on 22 July 1789. Probably having had access to Jean-Louis Prieur's famous graphic rendering of the event or of another that depicts the execution of Bertier de Sauvigny at the same location later that same day, Barnard has achieved a dynamic realization of Dickens's account of revolutionary violence that is all the more interesting in that it invites the reader to compare the Household Edition's handling of his material and that of Phiz in the original serial sequence's in "The Sea Rises" in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities in the October 1859 monthly number.
Although he was probably not acquainted with John McLenan's headnote vignette for "The Sea Still Rises" in Harper's Weekly (10 September 1859), Barnard has certainly responded effectively to the Phiz illustration bearing the same title, which appeared in the twenty-second chapter of the second book in the serial sequence.
With such vigorous writing in the historic present, which the vivid illustrations of Phiz and Barnard complement so well, it is no wonder that some modern readers believe that A Tale of Two Cities provides an accurate account of events leading up to the French Revolution — and that Madame Defarge and her publican husband are historical figures rather than purely literary inventions. Dickens describes her in the midst of the action, playing with the hapless Foulon "as a cat might have done to a mouse" while her compatriots from Saint Antoine revile him and continue to stuff his mouth with grass. According to such historians of the period as Charles Knight (1857), the group that abducted and hanged Foulon from a lamp standard near the city hall were peasants from Vitry, near Fontainebleau where Foulon had fled after the fall of the Bastille on July 14 — but why spoil a good story? Dickens expropriated and assimilated "The Murder of Foulon and Berthier" in the fashion of such historical novelists as Sir Walter Scott, having the urban unemployed of Saint Antoine rather than agricultural workers from south of the metropolis punish Foulon for his hubris: "Foulon . . . has been denounced as a speculator in famine — one who said the poor should eat grass if they could not get bread". Other sources give "hay," so that Dickens's text refers to both forms of animal fodder.
Using his imagination to realize the violent moment from history and literature, Barnard has wooden-shoed peasants and urban proletarians with slippers and even bare feet truss up Foulon, in preparation for hoisting him up on the lamp post (right rear, opposite the Hotel de Ville), the Jacobin cap and revolutionary cockade being historical artifacts that Barnard repeats throughout the scene to lend it verisimilitude. One of the guards who had lately had custody of Foulon lies beneath his feet, presumably struck down by the meat-cleaver wielded by the gaunt, muscular Jacobin (left). Although he has incorporated a number of female heads and limbs among the "forest of legs," curiously Barnard has not included the recognizable figures of Defarge and his wife. Shortly, as in McLenan's headnote vignette, the mob will severe Foulon's head and parade it through the streets on a pike. Whereas in Phiz's "The Sea Rises" Foulon in military uniform is still standing, the center of verbal abuse which the harridans of Saint Antoine hurl at him, in Barnard he has been swept off his feet and is barely recognizable as the uniformed official of Phiz's illustration. Whereas Phiz gives us a sea of figures waving swords aloft and clearly shows the Bastille in the background, Barnard focuses on the foreground, giving us fewer but more solid figures in contrast to the October 1859 illustration. Muting the violence somewhat as he emphasizes the release of pent-up energy in the swirling mass of Saint Antoine women, Phiz has placed several bodies lying on the pavement, but these do not arrest our attention as does the single corpse at the center of Barnard's composition. Dickens and his illustrators seem to have been far more sympathetic to the universally disliked Joseph-Francois Foullon de Doué (1715-1789) than was Dickens's source, Thomas Carlyle, who in The French Revolution: A History (3 vols., Chapman & Hall, 1837) vilified the finance official who briefly replaced the corrupt royal minister Jacques Necker as a venial military profiteer who reaped what he sowed.
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""Among the talkers was Stryver, of the King's Bench Bar, . . . . broaching to Monseigneur his devices for blowing the people up, and exterminating them from the face of the earth"
Book II Chapter 24
Fred Barnard
The Household Edition 1870s
Text Illustrated:
"This dialogue had taken place at Mr. Lorry's usual desk, with Monseigneur swarming within a yard or two of it, boastful of what he would do to avenge himself on the rascal-people before long. It was too much the way of Monseigneur under his reverses as a refugee, and it was much too much the way of native British orthodoxy, to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown—as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it—as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw. Such vapouring, combined with the extravagant plots of Monseigneur for the restoration of a state of things that had utterly exhausted itself, and worn out Heaven and earth as well as itself, was hard to be endured without some remonstrance by any sane man who knew the truth. And it was such vapouring all about his ears, like a troublesome confusion of blood in his own head, added to a latent uneasiness in his mind, which had already made Charles Darnay restless, and which still kept him so.
Among the talkers, was Stryver, of the King's Bench Bar, far on his way to state promotion, and, therefore, loud on the theme: broaching to Monseigneur, his devices for blowing the people up and exterminating them from the face of the earth, and doing without them: and for accomplishing many similar objects akin in their nature to the abolition of eagles by sprinkling salt on the tails of the race. Him, Darnay heard with a particular feeling of objection; and Darnay stood divided between going away that he might hear no more, and remaining to interpose his word, when the thing that was to be, went on to shape itself out.
The House approached Mr. Lorry, and laying a soiled and unopened letter before him, asked if he had yet discovered any traces of the person to whom it was addressed? The House laid the letter down so close to Darnay that he saw the direction—the more quickly because it was his own right name. The address, turned into English, ran:
"Very pressing. To Monsieur heretofore the Marquis St. Evremonde, of France. Confided to the cares of Messrs. Tellson and Co., Bankers, London, England."
On the marriage morning, Doctor Manette had made it his one urgent and express request to Charles Darnay, that the secret of this name should be—unless he, the Doctor, dissolved the obligation—kept inviolate between them. Nobody else knew it to be his name; his own wife had no suspicion of the fact; Mr. Lorry could have none.
"No," said Mr. Lorry, in reply to the House; "I have referred it, I think, to everybody now here, and no one can tell me where this gentleman is to be found."
The hands of the clock verging upon the hour of closing the Bank, there was a general set of the current of talkers past Mr. Lorry's desk. He held the letter out inquiringly; and Monseigneur looked at it, in the person of this plotting and indignant refugee; and Monseigneur looked at it in the person of that plotting and indignant refugee; and This, That, and The Other, all had something disparaging to say, in French or in English, concerning the Marquis who was not to be found.
"Nephew, I believe—but in any case degenerate successor—of the polished Marquis who was murdered," said one. "Happy to say, I never knew him."
Commentary:
Scions of the morally as well as fiscally bankrupt royalist regime, these elderly but stylishly turned out French aristocrats — "Monseigneurs" in the fashions of the 1790s — gather at Tellson's London headquarters (but sketchily realized in the background) to revile the leaders of their erstwhile country's revolution at a safe distance and wonder at the news of the latest atrocities posted on the Anglo-French banking house's windows. These five (only three of whom are interested in what a mere bourgeois from outside their national circle has to remark) are rather more expensively dressed than Dickens suggests in the text, but these snuff-taking gossips must be among the more provident émigrés who stored away some of their guineas (more likely Louis d'or) against the day when they would have to take to their heels after summoning up the horrors of revolution through years of callous disregard for the welfare of the most indigent and disenfranchised members of the Third Estate. Their tail-coats, snuff box, cane, fobs, waistcoats, riding-crop, silk stockings, and laced cuffs and shirt fronts, are the appropriate appurtenances of affluence.
Stryver ironically derides the "heretofore" Marquis St. Evrémonde, the recipient of a letter posted through Tellson's Paris branch, as a "craven" — a negligent master who has abrogated his ancestral obligations by abandoning his land and servants to preserve his life. Little does "Bully Stryver" know that in denouncing the Marquis St. Evrémonde to Charles Darnay that he is denouncing Darnay himself. Apparently, on the marriage morning Doctor Manette had sworn his son-in-law to secrecy about his real name, so that even Lucie does not know her own husband of three years as a member of the accursed race of St. Evrémonde. A thorough Liberal, Darnay will now, out of a misguided sense of responsibility towards the old family retainer Gabelle (whom Dickens named after the infamous salt tax), is about to leave wife and child as he is "drawn to the "Loadstone Rock". More economically, in the Harper's Weekly series of illustrations, John McLenan in the headnote vignette for Ch. 24 shows Charles Darnay, mounted on horseback, determined the brave the risks of the London-to-Paris journey to rescue Gabelle.
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Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross
Sol Eytinge Jr.
Book II Chapter 19
Commentary:
Both of Dickens's original illustrators — Hablot Knight Browne in October 1859 instalment (the fifth monthly part) in "The Accomplices", and John McLenan in the Harper's Weekly instalment for 27 August 1859 — chose to illustrate the passage in which, to prevent a further relapse for their old friend, Dr. Manette, Jarvis Lorry and Miss Pross destroy his shoemaker's bench, his sole companion and solace throughout his eighteen years in the Bastille. The passage that the 1859 serial illustrators and Eytinge have realised is this:
....."If the thing were gone, my dear Manette, might not the fear go with it? . . . "I would not keep it," said Mr. Lorry, shaking his head; for he gained in firmness as he saw the Doctor disquieted. "I would recommend him to sacrifice it. I only want your authority. I am sure it does no good. Come! Give me your authority, like a dear good man. For his daughter's sake, my dear Manette!"
Very strange to see what a struggle there was within him!
"In her name, then, let it be done; I sanction it. But, I would not take it away while he was present. Let it be removed when he is not there; let him miss his old companion after an absence."
Mr. Lorry readily engaged for that, and the conference was ended. They passed the day in the country, and the Doctor was quite restored. On the three following days he remained perfectly well, and on the fourteenth day he went away to join Lucie and her husband. The precaution that had been taken to account for his silence, Mr. Lorry had previously explained to him, and he had written to Lucie in accordance with it, and she had no suspicions.
On the night of the day on which he left the house, Mr. Lorry went into his room with a chopper, saw, chisel, and hammer, attended by Miss Pross carrying a light. There, with closed doors, and in a mysterious and guilty manner, Mr. Lorry hacked the shoemaker's bench to pieces, while Miss Pross held the candle as if she were assisting at a murder — for which, indeed, in her grimness, she was no unsuitable figure. The burning of the body (previously reduced to pieces convenient for the purpose) was commenced without delay in the kitchen fire; and the tools, shoes, and leather, were buried in the garden. So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime. [Book 2, Ch. 19, "An Opinion"]
......Dramatic as this textual moment may be, Household Edition illustrator Fred Barnard elected not to attempt it, perhaps because Phiz had already handled it so well. Other than Miss Pross's clenched left hand and slightly shocked expression, nothing in Eytinge's illustration suggests that the artist intends the dual character study to be a realization of their destruction of the shoemaker's bench. However, since the pair appear alone together so rarely in the novel, Eytinge's object would seem to have been to complement their surreptitious act. As in Phiz's "The Accomplices," the pair are dressed in the fashion of the mid-eighteenth century, Miss Pross's cap, sleeves, and apron being identical to their counterparts in Phiz's more dynamic and detailed illustration.
The McLenan serial illustration, "The Auto da Fe", Eytinge may very well have seen; however, the earlier American illustration appears not to have influenced the composition of the second. Whereas Eytinge has Mr. Lorry, in a snuff-colored suit, standing beside Miss Pross, McLenan has the pair facing one another as Lorry, in a dark suit, wields a cleaver at the bench while Miss Pross illuminates his actions with a candle. As in Phiz's illustration, a screen behind McLenan's figures suggests the secretive nature of their destructive act intended to preserve Dr. Manette's sanity. The moral issue which these illustrations and the passage ask the reader to confront (and one that lies at the heart of a work about political revolution) is, "Do the ends ever justify the means?" Doubtless, the revolutionaries, well represented in the novel by the Defarges, felt that they were virtuous and acting in accordance with the principles of natural justice, but at some point they crossed the boundary between natural justice and personally motivated retribution that impacted innocent lives and those without significant guilt. Miss Pross and Mr. Lorry mean well when they destroy the workbench, but they fail to take into account the possible consequences to Dr. Manette's mental well-being. Eytinge's illustration, although effective as an imaginative portrait of these significant secondary characters, fails to address this moral issue because it fails to contextualize the moment realized by offering, as Phiz and McLenan do, the specifics of the workbench and the screen.
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The Vengeance
Sol Eytinge Jr.
The Diamond Edition 1867
Final illustration for Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities in A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations in the Ticknor & Fields (Boston, 1867) Diamond Edition.
Commentary:
"Even had he been able to study Hablot Knight Browne's 1859 illustrations for models of The Vengeance through some pirated edition or a Chapman and Hall volume smuggled into the United States in violation of American copyright law, Sol Eytinge, Junior, would have found little upon which to base his imaginative construction of this personification of the forces that motivate the devil-women of Saint Antoine in the assault upon the Bastille in Book Two, Chapter 21 ("Echoing Footsteps") and subsequently upon Foulon in Chapter 22 ("The Sea Still Rises"). The passage upon which Eytinge has based his final illustration is most probably this, even though it does not specifically reference The Vengeance:
....'To me, women!' cried madame his wife. 'What! We can kill as well as the men when the place [i. e., The Bastille] is taken!' And to her, with a shrill thirsty cry, trooping women variously armed, but all armed alike in hunger and revenge. [Book Two, Chapter 21, "Echoing Footsteps]"
In the subsequent chapter, The Vengeance emerges as a particular character in the mob's quest for Old Foulon:
....."Instantly Madame Defarge's knife was in her girdle; the drum was beating in the streets, as if it and a drummer had flown together by magic; and The Vengeance, uttering terrific shrieks, and flinging her arms about her head like all the forty Furies at once, was tearing from house to house, rousing the women. [Book Two, Chapter 22, "The Sea still Rises"]
Harry Stone provides a reasonable schema for the figures in the foreground of Phiz's October 1859 illustration "The Sea Rises": detail 1 is Madame Defarge from the left-hand register, back towards the viewer, regarding Foulon (she is identified by Harry Stone on the basis of her bloody knife); detail 2 is "the three Harpies at the center" (Stone 174): "the wild Fury 'with streaming hair' featured at the front (probably the Vengeance), exhorting the mob, knife in one hand, sword in the other“ (Stone 174); and detail 3 is Phiz's invention, a "formidable drummer rounding out the right, meat cleaver raised on high" (Stone 174). Although Dickens stipulates that The Vengeance is the "custodian of the drum" (Book Two, Chapter 22), Phiz imagines that the plump grocer's wife carrying the drum in the assault upon Foulon is a figure separate from that of The Vengeance (centre). Of The Vengeance (the cool, controlled, strategic Madame Defarge's atavistic, blood-thirsty, anarchic double and devoted deputy), Stone notes that this character is never named in the normal manner, and therefore personifies Saint Antoine's lust for retribution in the form of aristocratic blood. Although The Vengeance may be regarded as a psychological projection of the "dark" side of Madame Defarge herself, as Stone asserts, neither Phiz in his group study nor Eytinge in his individual study seems to be offering such a psychological interpretation:
"One of Madame Defarge's leading female lieutenants, mirroring her commander's ferocity, is known only as "The Vengeance." Later, in the time of the Terror, Madame Defarge and The Vengeance sit every day in their accustomed, choice seats to feast upon and to participate in the daily blood-drinking of that thirsty female saint — to continue with Dickens' imagery—Sainte Guillotine.) Madame Defarge's ferocity, relentless and bloodthirsty, has been growing and maturing for many years. She is the product of unendurable grievances. She has good reasons for being what she is and doing what she does. She embodies in her person what mobs — or at least most Dickensian mobs — embody in their corporate being. Like the mobs of Oliver Twist and Barnaby Rudge, like the mobs she leads but also follows, Madame Defarge is righteous as well as savage, aggrieved as well as wantonly destructive. However disordered her vision, however distorted her actions, she is still a rough embodiment of perceived justice in pursuit of perceived evil. She is an embodiment, in short, of human and righteous impulses become wild and savage. Dickens fully empathizes with her wounded beginnings, he can savor, even glory in, her fierce flourishing's; but at the same time he views her with horror as a monstrous harpy, and he revels in her destruction." [Stone 175]
In calling her compatriots to arms, the cleaver-wielding female drummer (left) is Phiz's parody of the Goddess of Liberty at the barricades, an iconic image well known throughout post-1820s Europe as a result of Delacroix's painting "Liberty Leading the People" ("La Liberte guidant le peuple"), commemorating the July Revolution of 1830. In her dress and leadership role, she resembles the respectably-clad Madame Defarge rather than the harpies at the vortex of the illustration who grab and threaten to rend the immobilized figure in uniform, Old Foulon (the Controller General of Finances under Louis XVI), representative of the class which has oppressed the denizens of Saint Antoine for centuries. Artfully, Phiz leaves the reader to imagine the mixed expression of elation, triumph, and blood-lust on Madame Defarge's face. On the other hand, Eytinge's portrait of Madame Defarge's lieutenant is a caricature of a human monster: goggle-eyed, swift-moving, and knife-wielding. With powerful arms and broad shoulders, Eytinge's virago figure is an emblem of revolutionary retribution for past injustices rather than a realistically-drawn female, a giantess or ogre out of fairytale and nightmare, and therefore a foreshadowing of Stone's symbolist and psychological interpretation of Dickens's character rather than a literal realization of the "short, rather plump wife of a starved grocer" that Dickens himself describes in the second paragraph of Book Two, Chapter 22 ("The Sea Still Rises"). Eytinge's exaggerated Vengeance is hardly "the mother of two children," unless those offspring be Mindless Destruction and Unmitigated Retribution. Under Eytinge's hand she becomes the very spirit of the proletarian phase of the French Revolution, which succeeded the bourgeois and constitutional phases and led immediately to the excesses of the Reign of Terror, at the conclusion of which Dickens forecasts that this grocer's wife from Saint Antoine will perish under the very blade near, as one of the knitters in the front row, she has applauded the extermination of so many aristos and their sympathizers.
Here as elsewhere in his sequence of eight full-page illustrations Eytinge is not much interested in dressing his narrow stage. Even the Vengeance, that personification of proletarian indignation at the oppression of l'Ancien Régime (The Old Order) and frustration at the urban economic and social malaise that bred the Revolution, is not depicted against the backdrop of the prison-fortress of the Bastille or the palace of Tuileries, or even the slum of Saint Antoine, in "The Vengeance." Rather, an androgynous personification of malicious joy, with a toothy, open-mouthed smile betokening blood-lust, she emerges out of a haze of male Jacobin heads and brandished weapons. For Eytinge the whirlwind revolutionary Tale is an intersecting series of personal narratives enacted in narrow, generalized space rather than against a panoramic urban context. Setting is incidental, character is all."
Here is "Liberty Leading The People"
Liberty Leading the People (1830) is a painting by Eugène Delacroix commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, which toppled King Charles X of France. A woman personifying the concept and the goddess of Liberty leads the people forward over the bodies of the fallen, holding the flag of the French Revolution – the tricolour flag, which remains France's national flag – in one hand and brandishing a bayonetted musket with the other. The figure of Liberty is also viewed as a symbol of France and the French Republic known as Marianne.
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Patriots and friends, we are ready
Book II Chapter 21
A. A. Dixon
Collins Edition 1905
Text Illustrated:
"As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled round Defarge's wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself, already begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued arms, thrust this man back, dragged this man forward, disarmed one to arm another, laboured and strove in the thickest of the uproar.
"Keep near to me, Jacques Three," cried Defarge; "and do you, Jacques One and Two, separate and put yourselves at the head of as many of these patriots as you can. Where is my wife?"
"Eh, well! Here you see me!" said madame, composed as ever, but not knitting to-day. Madame's resolute right hand was occupied with an axe, in place of the usual softer implements, and in her girdle were a pistol and a cruel knife.
"Where do you go, my wife?"
"I go," said madame, "with you at present. You shall see me at the head of women, by-and-bye."
"Come, then!" cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. "Patriots and friends, we are ready! The Bastille!"
With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bells ringing, drums beating, the sea raging and thundering on its new beach, the attack began."
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"Help, Gabelle! Help, every one"
Book II Chapter 23
A. A. Dixon
Collins Edition 1905
Text Illustrated:
"The night deepened. The trees environing the old chateau, keeping its solitary state apart, moved in a rising wind, as though they threatened the pile of building massive and dark in the gloom. Up the two terrace flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at the great door, like a swift messenger rousing those within; uneasy rushes of wind went through the hall, among the old spears and knives, and passed lamenting up the stairs, and shook the curtains of the bed where the last Marquis had slept. East, West, North, and South, through the woods, four heavy-treading, unkempt figures crushed the high grass and cracked the branches, striding on cautiously to come together in the courtyard. Four lights broke out there, and moved away in different directions, and all was black again.
But, not for long. Presently, the chateau began to make itself strangely visible by some light of its own, as though it were growing luminous. Then, a flickering streak played behind the architecture of the front, picking out transparent places, and showing where balustrades, arches, and windows were. Then it soared higher, and grew broader and brighter. Soon, from a score of the great windows, flames burst forth, and the stone faces awakened, stared out of fire.
A faint murmur arose about the house from the few people who were left there, and there was a saddling of a horse and riding away. There was spurring and splashing through the darkness, and bridle was drawn in the space by the village fountain, and the horse in a foam stood at Monsieur Gabelle’s door. “Help, Gabelle! Help, every one!” The tocsin rang impatiently, but other help (if that were any) there was none. The mender of roads, and two hundred and fifty particular friends, stood with folded arms at the fountain, looking at the pillar of fire in the sky. “It must be forty feet high,” said they, grimly; and never moved.
The rider from the chateau, and the horse in a foam, clattered away through the village, and galloped up the stony steep, to the prison on the crag. At the gate, a group of officers were looking at the fire; removed from them, a group of soldiers. “Help, gentlemen—officers! The chateau is on fire; valuable objects may be saved from the flames by timely aid! Help, help!” The officers looked towards the soldiers who looked at the fire; gave no orders; and answered, with shrugs and biting of lips, “It must burn.”
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"Sydney Carton"
Book II Chapter 20
Harry Furniss
Charles Dickens Library Edition 1910
Text Illustrated:
"Genuine truth, Mr. Darnay, trust me! I have gone aside from my purpose; I was speaking about our being friends. Now, you know me; you know I am incapable of all the higher and better flights of men. If you doubt it, ask Stryver, and he'll tell you so."
"I prefer to form my own opinion, without the aid of his."
"Well! At any rate you know me as a dissolute dog, who has never done any good, and never will."
"I don't know that you 'never will.'"
"But I do, and you must take my word for it. Well! If you could endure to have such a worthless fellow, and a fellow of such indifferent reputation, coming and going at odd times, I should ask that I might be permitted to come and go as a privileged person here; that I might be regarded as an useless (and I would add, if it were not for the resemblance I detected between you and me, an unornamental) piece of furniture, tolerated for its old service, and taken no notice of. I doubt if I should abuse the permission. It is a hundred to one if I should avail myself of it four times in a year. It would satisfy me, I dare say, to know that I had it."
"Will you try?"
"That is another way of saying that I am placed on the footing I have indicated. I thank you, Darnay. I may use that freedom with your name?"
"I think so, Carton, by this time."
Commentary:
The caption which J. A. Hammerton has provided — "Tallest and most unpromising of men" — is not situated by either a chapter or a page number, although Hammerton has juxtaposed the image of Carton dressed as a barrister against his legal partner Stryver's complaining outside Tellson's about the iniquities of the revolutionary regime across the Channel in Chapter 24, "Drawn to the Loadstone Rock." However, the illustration corresponds to Sydney Carton's last major appearance, in Chapter 20, "A Plea," when the Darnays, returning home from their honeymoon, receive the dissolute attorney's congratulations.
Even as Charles Darnay feels "drawn to the loadstone rock" to rescue the functionary of the house of St. Evrémonde, Gabelle, the reader of the 1910 edition encounters this freehand ink drawing of Carton, which recalls him to our minds, and thus reinforces our image of him as Darnay's double. Furniss makes Carton seem less physically attractive than the other illustrators have conceived of him; certainly, if not a pathetic figure, he is isolated and despondent in the Furniss study.
In the original monthly sequence of illustrations, readers encountered the image of the disaffected but brilliant Sydney Carton twice in the two illustrations for the second installment, in court and then after Darnay's acquittal, outside the Old Bailey. Similarly, in his weekly illustrations John MacLenan introduced Carton early in his narrative pictorial sequence. Although Fred Barnard in his Household Edition illustrations of 1874 realizes The Lion and the Jackal as dissolute attorneys burning the midnight oil, he does not present a study of Carton until much later on, when he vows to protect those whom Lucie cherishes.
That Carton is dressed for court, despite the absence of a wig, and appears to be leaning on a rail (perhaps of the prisoner's box) suggests that Furniss is recalling his appearance when first introduced, at Darnay's Old Bailey trial for sedition in Book One, Chapter Three, "A Disappointment," a scene vividly realized by Phiz in one of the July engravings, The Likeness. Although Furniss has depicted Carton as thoroughly inebriated in Carton Finds Consolation and as a dejected suitor in Carton Rejected, perhaps at this point in the narrative, when in the summer of 1792 France's revolutionary government has abolished titles and is feeling threatened by its neighbors, Furniss felt it necessary to remind the reader of Carton's professional competence. In contrast to Furniss's choice of illustration for this chapter, Fred Barnard presents Carton's bombastic partner, Stryver, playing the role of a militaristic Tory, advocating Britain's intervening on the side of the aristocracy to put down the revolution.
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"The Fall of the Bastille"
Book II Chapter 21
Harry Furniss
Charles Dickens Library Edition 1910
Text Illustrated:
"In the howling universe of passion and contention that seemed to encompass this grim old officer conspicuous in his grey coat and red decoration, there was but one quite steady figure, and that was a woman's. "See, there is my husband!" she cried, pointing him out. "See Defarge!" She stood immovable close to the grim old officer, and remained immovable close to him; remained immovable close to him through the streets, as Defarge and the rest bore him along; remained immovable close to him when he was got near his destination, and began to be struck at from behind; remained immovable close to him when the long-gathering rain of stabs and blows fell heavy; was so close to him when he dropped dead under it, that, suddenly animated, she put her foot upon his neck, and with her cruel knife-long ready-hewed off his head.
The hour was come, when Saint Antoine was to execute his horrible idea of hoisting up men for lamps to show what he could be and do. Saint Antoine's blood was up, and the blood of tyranny and domination by the iron hand was down - down on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville where the governor's body lay — down on the sole of the shoe of Madame Defarge where she had trodden on the body to steady it for mutilation. "Lower the lamp yonder!" cried Saint Antoine, after glaring round for a new means of death; "here is one of his soldiers to be left on guard!" The swinging sentinel was posted, and the sea rushed on.
The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive upheaving of wave against wave, whose depths were yet unfathomed and whose forces were yet unknown. The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them.
But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression was in vivid life, there were two groups of faces — each seven in number — so fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did sea roll which bore more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners, suddenly released by the storm that had burst their tomb, were carried high overhead: all scared, all lost, all wondering and amazed, as if the Last Day were come, and those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits."
Commentary:
Whereas the novel's first American illustrator, John McLenan, provided Two illustrations to convey the violence of the outbreak of the Revolution, the wood-engraving within Chapter 21 for the 3 September 1859 installment entitled "In the name of all the angels or devils, work!", and a gruesome headnote vignette for the following week's installment, in which Foulon is hanged from a lamp-standard in the twenty-second chapter, Phiz in one of his two monthly illustrations for October 1859 focuses on the swirling action of the mob itself and the destruction of a uniformed Foulon, the Bastille's towers being suggested in the distant skyline. Although he includes the lamp-standard upon which Foulon will be hanged (upper right), Fred Barnard in the Household Edition illustration that parallels Phiz's eliminates the Vengeance and Madame Defarge, and places the hapless victim of the mob's outrage and the muscular Ernest Defarge at the center of the chaotic composition entitled Dragged, and struck at, and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands, the scene set outside the Hôtel de Ville in Chapter Twenty-two, "The Sea Still Rises," in Book Two). In Furniss's illustration of the mob inside the main courtyard of the Bastille, in contrast, there is perhaps but one recognizable figure from Dickens's narrative (implying that the artist is seeing the moment illustrated through the mists of history rather than through a literary text), whereas the other sanctioned Dickens illustrator, Sol Eytinge, Jr., focused on the ghoulish leader of the ragged insurgents, The Vengeance, in his depiction of the outbreak of the Revolution in the streets of the faubourg Saint Antoine, and offered no architectural context or informing cityscape, but only a sea of angry faces.
The effect of Furniss's lithograph is both impressionistic and photographic, whereas another illustrator (Edmund Joseph Sullivan) that same year depicting the The Walls of Jericho (The Fall of the Bastille) took an allegorical approach for his representation of this historical turning-point in his kinetic line drawing for Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution, Chapter Six, "Storm and Victory. July 14th, 1789":
....."For four hours now has the World-Bedlam roared: call it the World-Chimera, blowing fire! The poor Invalides have sunk under their battlements, or rise only with reversed muskets: they have made a white flag of napkins; go beating the chamade, or seeming to beat, for one can hear nothing. The very Swiss at the Portcullis look weary of firing; disheartened in the fire-deluge: a porthole at the drawbridge is opened, as by one that would speak. See Huissier Maillard, the shifty man! On his plank, swinging over the abyss of that stone Ditch; plank resting on parapet, balanced by weight of Patriots, — he hovers perilous: such a Dove towards such an Ark! Deftly, thou shifty Usher: one man already fell; and lies smashed, far down there, against the masonry! Usher Maillard falls not: deftly, unerring he walks, with outspread palm. The Swiss holds a paper through his porthole; the shifty Usher snatches it, and returns. Terms of surrender: Pardon, immunity to all! Are they accepted? — "Foi d' officier, On the word of an officer," answers half-pay Hulin, — or half-pay Elie, for men do not agree on it, — "they are!" Sinks the drawbridge, — Usher Maillard bolting it when down; rushes-in the living deluge: the Bastille is fallen! Victoire! La Bastille est prise!*
In the shadowy "dark plate" Furniss depicts the mob as a many-headed hydra rather than a succession of characters, some even recognizable from Dickens's account. Through the archway in the rear we see three round objects — undoubtedly the severed heads of a trio of Swiss defenders — but the effect is chaotic and nightmarish rather than gruesome. The single identifiable figure, just right of center, beating a drum would be The Vengeance, but one could hardly term this blotchy rendition a characterization in the sense that Eytinge's distorted figure offers a pointed interpretation of the inciter of mob violence. Nor should we confuse Furniss's version with the highly realistic realizations of the event published at the time, graphics such as Berthault's Fall of the Bastille: De Launay Governor of the Bastille is Arrested and Killed by the Crowd and Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel's Prise de la Bastille (14 July 1789), in both of which the artist takes the perspective of those outside, while the assault is still in progress and white smoke rises above the eight towers of the political prison. In contrast, in this dark plate we have entered the belly of the beast, Revolution, and strive to make sense of what is happening in the mezzotint-like half-light. Furniss discards heroism, idealism, and even the individual actor in the historic scene as irrelevant in the ebb and flow of historical events seen from the perspective of over a century later, through a glass darkly.
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"The End of Foulon"
Book II Chapter 22
Harry Furniss
Charles Dickens Library Edition 1910
Text Illustrated:
"The favour was too much to bear; in an instant the barrier of dust and chaff that had stood surprisingly long, went to the winds, and Saint Antoine had got him!
It was known directly, to the furthest confines of the crowd. Defarge had but sprung over a railing and a table, and folded the miserable wretch in a deadly embrace — Madame Defarge had but followed and turned her hand in one of the ropes with which he was tied — The Vengeance and Jacques Three were not yet up with them, and the men at the windows had not yet swooped into the Hall, like birds of prey from their high perches — when the cry seemed to go up, all over the city, "Bring him out! Bring him to the lamp!"
Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building; now, on his knees; now, on his feet; now, on his back; dragged, and struck at, and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands; torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always entreating and beseeching for mercy; now full of vehement agony of action, with a small clear space about him as the people drew one another back that they might see; now, a log of dead wood drawn through a forest of legs; he was hauled to the nearest street corner where one of the fatal lamps swung, and there Madame Defarge let him go — as a cat might have done to a mouse — and silently and composedly looked at him while they made ready, and while he besought her: the women passionately screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly calling out to have him killed with grass in his mouth. Once, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the rope was merciful, and held him, and his head was soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of."
Commentary:
Whereas the novel's first American illustrator, John McLenan, reinforces the violence of the outbreak of the Revolution through the wood-engraving within Chapter 21 for the 3 September 1859 installment entitled "In the name of all the angels or devils, work!", and a gruesome headnote vignette for the following week's installment (10 September), in which Foulon de Doué, the Controller-General of Finances, is hanged from a lamp-standard near the Hôtel de Ville in the twenty-second chapter, Phiz in one of his two monthly illustrations for October 1859 focuses on the swirling action of the mob itself just prior to the destruction of a uniformed Foulon at the City Hall of Paris. Although he includes the lamp-standard upon which the heartless functionary of the Old Regime is about to be hanged (upper right), Fred Barnard in the Household Edition wood-engraving that parallels Phiz's steel-engraving eliminates the Vengeance and Madame Defarge, but places the hapless victim of the mob's outrage and the muscular Ernest Defarge at the center of the chaotic composition entitled Dragged, and struck at, and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands, the scene set outside the Hôtel de Ville in Chapter Twenty-two, "The Sea Still Rises," in Book Two).
Thirty-five years after Barnard's illustration and fifty years after Phiz's, Harry Furniss, apparently having studied both of these illustrations of the scene of mob violence, synthesizes the illustrations in his lithograph, moving Foulon to the right, but enlarging his figure considerably, and indicating to the left of the center the handful of hay that a zealous Jacobin (as denoted by his Phrygian cap) will presently cram down the bureaucrat's throat. On the other hand, only eight years after the original serial publication, the other sanctioned Dickens illustrator, Sol Eytinge, Jr., focused on the ghoulish leader of the ragged insurgents, The Vengeance, in his depiction of the outbreak of the Revolution in the streets of the faubourg Saint Antoine, and offered no architectural context or informing cityscape, but only a sea of angry faces. Dixon in his 1905 lithograph identifies the Saint Antoine wine-shop as ground zero for the revolution, but only suggests the ensuing violence by having the Defarges hand out sabres to the assembled mob. Whereas both Phiz and Barnard offer some contextual elements such as the towers of the Bastille on the skyline to establish the setting (in front of the Hôtel de Ville, about two miles from the prison-fortress, and therefore within easy walking distance of Saint Antoine), Furniss like Eytinge has elected not to offer such clues and to focus instead upon the faces in the mob.
In the turbulent lithograph from an ink-and-wash drawing Furniss focuses upon the Phrygian caps that, as Sanders notes, "became both an emblem of the Revolution and a common item of dress amongst sansculottes". Sanders further notes that Dickens's account of the death of Foulon at the hands of the Defarges and their Saint Antoine compatriots "is substantially from Carlyle", as on the 22nd of July, a week after the fall of the Bastille (which is being demolished on the skyline in Phiz's illustration), the financier who had hastily remarked that "The people may eat grass" now faces the wrath of the many-headed hydra:
With wild yells, Sansculottism clutches him, in its hundred hands: he is whirled across the Place de Grève, to the 'Lanterne', Lamp-iron which there is at the corner of the Rue de la Vannerie; pleading bitterly for life, — to the deaf winds. Only with the third rope (for two ropes broke, and the quavering voice [of Foulon] still pleaded,) can he be so much as got hanged! His Body is dragged through the streets; his Head goes aloft on a pike, the mouth filled with grass: amid sounds as of Tophet, from a grass-eating people. [as cited by Sanders, 122]
Although the figures are generalized sans culottes in the main (except for the uniformed Foulon himself), Furniss has inserted to the extreme the drum-beating Vengeance, who is also recognizable in Furniss's previous illustration, The Fall of the Bastille. Foulon looks shocked as he realizes that the Jacobin in the left foreground intends to stuff his mouth with straw, but at least four other members of the mob are clutching fistfuls of straw. Like Phiz and Barnard, Furniss depicts Foulon caught up by the mob and buffeted, but not yet hanged and beheaded. Although the mob are pointing towards the right, Furniss has not indicated where the surging sea of humanity is drifting, namely towards a lamp standard, as described in the accompanying text. Whereas Furniss has made Foulon's torso a vertical and has rendered his thighs on a right-to-left diagonal, the crowd is overwhelmingly aligned on an opposing, left-to-right diagonal, so that the lone victim seems to be fruitlessly resisting the tidal movement from left to right, from past to future, and from repression to freedom.
The male and female figures (center) immediately to the left of the ensnared and embattled Foulon may be the Defarges, although these figures do not resemble the publicans of the earlier scenes, Defarge and Knitting. Whereas the women appear to be the leaders of the mob in Dickens's text and are accorded prominence in Phiz's October 1859 illustration, The Sea Rises, Furniss's post-Bastille Saint Antoine mob is overwhelmingly male. More significant than the issue of gender is the impression that Furniss conveys through this vigorous, insistent mass of humanity on the move, unstoppable and inexorable, but of one mind, so that the very composition of the scene underscores the inevitability of the destruction of Foulon and all of his ilk who in serving the establishment served themselves rather than the people of France.
Consideration of the issues underlying the French Revolution, prompted by examining Furniss's wash drawings The Fall of the Bastille and The End of Foulon (unlike Phiz's somewhat allegorical The Sea Rises, titles suggestive of their chronicling historical events) prompts one to consider Furniss's sources of inspiration, for his style of illustration here is so markedly different from the line drawings that dominate the first half of the book. On the one hand, as the captions beneath these historically-based illustrations suggest, Furniss is realizing scenes in the Dickens text. However, the general absence of specific characters from A Tale of Two Cities and the antecedents in Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution both suggest that, aside from his usual extra-textual sources, the illustrations of Hablot Knight Browne and Fred Barnard, Furniss has consulted Carlyle and other historical commentaries. In this illustration, we have both history (the destruction of a noteworthy member of the ancien régime on a particular day and at a particular place) and literature, as the presence of The Vengeance suggests. The shift in style, then, from line drawings realizing characters in the text to wash drawings reproduced lithographically, surely signals some intention on Furniss's part to convey impressionistically the sheer power of actual events in the Revolution, as well as their influence on the history of Europe over the nineteenth century. Taking this century-long perspective, Furniss would have us realize that, whereas we view literary characters and events directly and have sufficient authorial comment to assess them accurately, we view the reportage of history in a fragmented and flawed manner, subject to omissions and biases, through a glass darkly. The result of this shift in style is not nearly so satisfying to the viewer as Phiz's detailism and Barnard's realism.
An Opinion
“Come! Give me your authority, like a dear good man. For his daughter’s sake, my dear Manette!”
Lots is happening in this novel. And happening quickly. No doubt the demands of a weekly publishing schedule put increased pressure on Dickens to keep the pace up and the number of characters and secondary plot lines down. It was time for a breather. It's also nice to prepare shorter chapters for our discussion. Let’s see what is in store for us this week.
On the tenth day of his vigil Mr Lorry wakes to find the doctor’s bench and tools put away and the doctor reading by his window. Lorry and Miss Pross decide to see how the morning unfolds. Dr Manette seems slightly confused but otherwise nothing seemed disjointed. Mr Lorry asks the doctor’s opinion on a strange medical case in the hope he can bring Dr Manette’s mind into the present awkward situation. Dr Manette looks at his hands and sees that they were “discoloured by his late work.”
Dr Manette realizes that Mr Lorry’s interest in the medical case is, in fact, what has recently happened to himself. Dr Manette learns that his relapse was “in all aspects” like what had occurred many years ago in France. The Doctor learns from Lorry that Lucie is unaware of the events of the last 10 days.
Mr Lorry asks Doctor Manette to explain and offer guidance as to how he can best help his “friend.” Manette tells Lorry that the relapse was not unexpected but it was very much dreaded by the subject. By now, we as readers know that Dr Manette knows exactly what has occurred to himself. We also learn that Dr Manette finds it almost impossible to bear the weight of his secret knowledge. Lorry asks if it would help Dr Manette if he could unburden himself to someone else. Dr Manette appreciates the offer but says it would be “quite impossible.”
Dr Manette says the reason for his recent actions is the result of a “strong and extraordinary revival of the train of thought and remembrance that was the first cause of the malady.” The Doctor tells Lorry that he is unable to recall what happened during his relapse. As to the future, Doctor Manette hopes the worst is over.
Thoughts
Let’s pause and sort out what has happened to this point in the chapter. Dr Manette’s relapse has been triggered by some event that recently occurred. The relapse was severe, but Manette hopes it will not occur again. Manette is aware that both Mr Lorry and Miss Pross are aware of the past 10 days but Lucie is unaware of any issues with her father. The obvious question is what exactly triggered the relapse? Putting on your hat as a psychologist/psychiatrist how would you explain what specially triggered Dr Manette’s relapse?
As to the future, Mr Lorry wants to know if Doctor Manette should return to his previous active life. The answer is yes. The second question is what should be done with the shoemaker’s bench and tools. The is a painful question for Dr. Manette. Shoemaking was an activity that helped Dr Manette through the horrible times of his incarceration. The question is will the retention of the bench also continue to help retain the horrid events of the past. Mr Lorry wants Dr. Manette’s permission to destroy the bench and, with that action, to destroy a trigger object of the doctor’s past.
This suggestion presents a painful choice for Dr.Manette but he finally relents. Dr Manette requests that the bench be removed when he is not present. “Let it be removed,” says Manette, “when he is not there; let him miss his old companion after an absence.”
And so as the chapter concludes Mr Lorry and Miss Pross hack the shoemaker’s bench to pieces and burn it in the kitchen fire along with the tools, shoes, and leather. Everything was then buried in the garden. The chapter ends with the following sentence. “So wicked the destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime.”
Thoughts
The chapter title is “An Opinion.” What is your opinion of the actions taken by Mr Lorry and Miss Pross?
To what extent is it possible to bury the past, either physically or psychologically?
I think it important that we look carefully at the ending of this chapter. Mr Lorry and Miss Pross have appeared in the novel thus far as kind, good, and supportive friends. Now, let’s look a bit more closely. They go to the room that contains the shoemaker’s bench with “a chopper, saw, chisel, and hammer.” We are told that Miss Pross acted as if she was “assisting at a murder.” They “hack” the bench to pieces, burn it, and bury it. The very last word of the chapter is “crime.” This novel has involved much violence so far. In the Old Bailey court we read that death sentences are gruesome and the people who attend court as spectators are compared to flies waiting for carrion. The coach on Shooter's Hill almost became a violent encounter. There is violence is almost every nook and cranny of the novel. What up? Why do we have so much violence? To what extent is it accurate to condemn the French for the Revolution and excuse the English for their own lust for blood and destruction?
Could the destruction of Dr. Manette’s workbench by Lorry and Pross be foreshadowing anything?
In the conversation between Mr Lorry and Doctor Manette we see Doctor Manette assuming two roles. One is the person he is in the present and the second role occurs when Dr. Manette objectifies himself as another person. This is another example of characters being twinned in some manner. We have the twinning of Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay, Charles’s father and uncle, and the opposites of Lucie and Mme. Defarge and Sydney Carton and Mr Stryver. Do you think there is any reason for this apparent pattern?