A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [198]
“I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years’ time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward.
“I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other’s soul, than I was in the souls of both.
“I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place—then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigurement—and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and faltering voice.
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
ENDNOTES
Book the First: Recalled to Life
Chapter 1: The Period
1 (p. 7) There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France: The kings and queens referred to are George III (1738-1820) and Queen Charlotte Sophia (1744-1818) of England, and Louis XVI (1754-1793) of France and his consort Marie-Antoinette (1755-1793), who was famous for her beauty. Dickens would have known of the English king’s “large jaw” from imprints on coins of his childhood; he would have seen Marie-Antoinette’s waxwork likeness at Madame Tus saud’s exhibition in London.
2 (p. 7) Mrs. Southcott . . . , of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster: Joanna Southcott (1750-1814) was a farmer’s daughter who converted to Methodism in 1791 at the prompting of a divine vision. She attracted a cult following when she published a volume of “prophecies” in 1801, in which she foretold of an imminent apocalypse. Southcott’s career in millennial predictions was anticipated by a celebrated nameless member of the British Army regiment the Life Guards, who, in 1750, heralded the destruction of London and Westminster. Dickens would have known of both popular celebrities from his youth.
3 (p. 7) Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs: In 1762 rumors flew about London of the ghost of a murdered woman that was terrorizing a house on Cock Lane in West Smithfield. After investigations by the eminent scholar Dr. Samuel Johnson, among others, the ghost was found to be a hoax, and the owner of the house was sent to the pillory. The craze for supernatural communications reached new heights in the 1850s, when the practice of séances was imported from America.
4 (p. 7) Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: The First Continental Congress was held by American colonists in September