The Companion to 'A Tale of Two Cities'

Andrew Sanders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000384758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

This book, first published in 1988, reveals the great care Dickens took with the planning and preparation of A Tale of Two Cities and its roots. It also explores the aspects of Dickens's life, especially his interest in private theatricals, which contributed to the genesis of the novel. For the first time the historical sources for the very individual account of the French Revolution presented in A Tale of Two Cities are examined, and the book investigates the novelist's debt to French and English eye-witnesses. This Companion identifies the multitude of allusions to what Dickens often regarded as the whims of eighteenth-century justice, religion, philosophy, fashion and society. It provides the modern reader with both fundamental sources of information and a fascinating account of the creation of a complex historical novel.

BOOK THE SECOND.
THE GOLDEN THREAD.

The meaning of this title for the second book of the novel is essentially contained in its fourth chapter (‘Congratulatory’) where Lucie is described as her father’s restorer. ‘She was the golden thread that united him to a Past beyond his misery, and to a Present beyond his misery: and the sound of her voice, the light of her face, the touch of her hand, had a strong beneficial influence with him almost always.’ The reference is also to Ariadne’s thread (see note, p. 67). ‘The Thread of Gold’ was one of Dickens’s working titles for the novel.

Book 2, Chapter 1

Fifth weekly part
Saturday, 28 May 1859
Second monthly number
July 1859

FIVE YEARS LATER.

Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar

Noakes and Co.’s] Noakes is a generic name used in pro forma legal documents, much as the name ‘John Doe’ is used in the United States. Compare PP 33: ‘be he plaintiff or be he defendent, be his name Pickwick, or Noakes, or Stoakes, or Stiles, or Brown, or Thompson’.

Any one of these partners

on a par with the Country] A reference both to contemporary events in America and to the general national opposition to reform. This comment would seem to parallel Dickens’s often satirical remarks concerning the tardiness of Chancery reform in BH and the allusions to resistance to change, legal as much as constitutional, in BR. One aspect of such ‘disinheritance’, in a reverse sense, is Dennis’s remark in chapter 37 of BR: ‘And in times to come... if our grandsons should think of their grandfathers’ times, and find these things altered, they’ll say “Those were days indeed, and we’ve been going down hill ever since” ...’ The reference to the American situation, and a parallel pig-headed confidence in the perfection of the British penal system, is made more explicit in chapter 3 below.

Thus it had come to pass

a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street] Timbs remarks in his Curiosities of London (1855): ‘Before the Great Fire, and long after, Fleet-street was badly paved ...’ (305). As the main thoroughfare between the cities of London and Westminster, Fleet Street was much frequented by commercial traffic. In damp conditions its mud presumably resembled that of Ludgate Hill (which joins it to the east), which is remarked on in the opening paragraph of BH.

iron bars proper] ‘Proper’ is used here in its heraldic sense meaning ‘in natural colours’; the iron bars are unpainted.

a species of Condemned Hold] Presumably a reminiscence of one of the notorious condemned cells in Newgate Prison. Dickens had described such a cell in his ‘A Visit to Newgate’ in SB:

It was a stone dungeon, eight feet long by six wide, with a bench at the upper end, under which were a common rug, a bible, and prayerbook. An iron candlestick was fixed into the wall at the side, and a small window in the back admitted as much air and light as could struggle in between a double row of heavy, crossed iron bars. It contained no other furniture of any description.

evil communications corrupted its gold polish] A play on 1 Corinthians 15.33: ‘Evil communications corrupt good manners.’

a Barmecide room] A reference to the Barber’s Story of his Sixth Brother in the Arabian Nights, in which a beggar is treated to an imaginary feast of splendid dishes by a member of the Barmecide family.

heads exposed on Temple Bar] This is not quite an accurate statement with reference to 1780. The heads of executed criminals had indeed been exposed on spikes on Temple Bar earlier in the century. The first such head was that of Sir Thomas Armstrong, executed in 1684 for his part in the Rye House Plot. The last heads set up on the gate were those of Townley and Fletcher, both Jacobite rebels, beheaded in 1746. Horace Walpole noted in August of that year: ‘I have been this morning at the Tower, and passed under the new heads at Temple Bar, where the people make a trade of letting spying-glasses at a halfpenny a look.’ The last of these gory relics seems to have been blown down in 1772 and none of the spikes was left in situ by the beginning of the nineteenth century (Timbs, 1855, 705). The poet Samuel Rogers, who died aged 92 in 1855, remembered in his youth ‘one of the heads of the rebels upon a pole at Temple Bar, a black shapeless lump. Another pole was bare, the head having dropped’ (Timbs, 1868, 773).

Abyssinia or Ashantee] Both were prominent black African kingdoms in 1859. The reference to Abyssinia is probably related to the long period of internecine warfare which had characterized its politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. Factionalism, provincial separatism and the rule of local bandit chiefs continued even under the rule of the Negus Theodore III (1818-68) who proclaimed himself emperor in 1855. The British consul at the time, Walter Chichele Plowden, who had had some influence over the emperor, was murdered by a rebel chieftain during his return journey to England in 1860.

The Ashantee, or Ashanti, kingdom stretched over what is now the northern part of modern Ghana. The southern part was the territory of the Fanti tribe, while the British presence was confined to a series of forts along the coast, the old Gold Coast. In 1817, after repeated incursions of the Ashanti into Fanti territory, a British mission was sent north and a treaty signed in 1820, only to be disowned by the British governor, Sir Charles McCarthy. In 1824, McCarthy led a small British force into Ashanti territory, but he was heavily defeated at the battle of Bonsaso. McCarthy was killed in the action and his skull was later used as the royal drinking cup by the king of the Ashanti. It may have been this particular fact which prompted Dickens’s comment concerning parallels between the heads on Temple Bar and the ferocity of the Ashanti. Dickens had, however, published three articles on the Gold Coast in HW: ‘An Ashanti Palaver’ (29 October 1853, 8.207-9), ‘Bush and Beach’ (19 March 1859, 19.364-7) and ‘On the West African Coast’ (30 April 1859, 19.510-14). Of these, the first was most likely to have been in Dickens’s mind, for its refers to the mission to the king of the Ashanti led by Ensign Brownell in 1853. After a ‘palaver’ (a parley) with the king, Brownell was held hostage and only released after protracted negotiations.

But indeed, at that time

putting to death was a recipe much in vogue] This remark recalls the allusion to the execution of the chevalier de la Barre in book 1, chapter 1 (see note, p. 51). In the Annual Register for 1781, which Dickens used for its references to the trial of de la Motte (see below, chapter 2), he may have noticed the entry for 12 January which notes the death sentences passed on James Smith for stealing 2½ crowns, on Charles Shepherd for breaking and entering a house with intent to steal, on Abraham Dry for robbing a pedlar of a bundle of stockings, on William Dorby for stealing shoe-buckles, and on Thomas and Joseph Maple for stealing a tablecloth. In June of the same year fourteen death sentences are noted; in September a further twenty-two.

Outside Tellson’s

Cruncher] This name may perhaps be a variation on that of Ben Crouch, a member of the notorious ‘Borough Gang’ of body-snatchers active in the early years of the nineteenth century.

the youthful occasion of his renouncing by proxy the works of darkness] In the baptism service in the Book of Common Prayer the child’s godparents are bidden, in the name of the infant, to ‘renounce the devil and all his works’. The phrase ‘the works of darkness’ is from Romans 13.12: ‘let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light’.

the easterly parish church of Houndsditch] Houndsditch leads from Aldgate High Street in the east of the City of London to Bishopsgate in the north. Its name derives from the filthy condition ascribed to the eastern defensive ditch of the medieval City, often a repository for dead dogs. It lies in the parish of St Botolph Without Aldgate. The present parish church was built in 1720-40. According to both Timbs (1855) and Cunningham (1850), Houndsditch had long been a poor district, a centre for ‘sellers of old apparel’ and the core of the Jewish quarter of London.

The scene was Mr Cruncher’s private lodging

Hanging-sword-alley, Whitefriars] Hanging Sword Alley is a street leading eastwards out of Whitefriars just off Fleet Street. The street was formerly known as ‘Blood-bowl-alley’ and seems to have changed its name in Elizabethan times, being renamed after a house. Whitefriars itself recalls the site of the pre Reformation house of the Carmelites (or ‘Whitefriars’). Later inhabitants of the area claimed in 1580 to be exempt from the jurisdiction of the City, as the friars had been, and in 1608 obtained further local privileges from James I. All such privileges were abolished by Parliament in 1697.

It is just possible that Dickens deliberately placed his body-snatcher’s residence in Whitefriars as a comment on his former publishers, Bradbury & Evans, whose premises stood in Dogwell Court close to Hanging Sword Alley. Dickens quarrelled with the house over their refusal to print a statement about his separation from his wife in Punch. He terminated HW (published by Bradbury & Evans) and in 1859 returned to his old publishers, Chapman & Hall, who issued both AYR and the monthly parts of TCC. Most volumes published by Bradbury & Evans bear the simple address ‘Whitefriars’.

A woman of orderly and industrious appearance

rose from her knees in a corner] Mrs Cruncher’s religious enthusiasm reflects Dickens’s earlier comments, in the opening chapter of TCC and in BR, on the state of late eighteenth-century English Protestantism. Though not a bigot, Mrs Cruncher has an element of Mrs Varden’s ‘enthusiasm’ in her. In none of his novels does Dickens show much sympathy with Nonconformity.

‘Worth no more than that,’

choused] Slang for ‘duped, deprived of’.

as rickety as a hackney-coach] The MS reads...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Preface by the Editors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations for Dickens’s Works and Related Material
• Introduction
• A Note on the Text
• How to Use the Notes
• The Notes
• The Illustrations to A Tale of Two Cities
• Preface
• Book the First. Recalled to Life.
• Book the Second. The Golden Thread.
• Book the Third. The Track of a Storm.
• The Illustrations to a Tale of Two Cities
• Select Bibliography
• Index