A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [199]
5 (p. 7) France . . . rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it: In the process of financing the arms race with their military rival Britain, French Kings Louis XV and Louis XVI built up an enormous national debt; the resultant inflation, credit crisis, and food shortages laid the groundwork for the French Revolution.
6 (pp. 7-8) sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled . . . to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards: Dickens refers to an incident of 1766 recorded by the French writer Voltaire (1694-1778) as an example of religious oppression under the ancien régime (the political and social system of France before the Revolution). In reality, the punishment Dickens describes was commuted to decapitation; this is not the only occasion where he embellishes the excesses of the French state to make his argument for the inevitability of the Revolution.
7 (pp. 7-8) rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, . . . already marked by the woodman, Fate, . . . rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire . . . which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution: The “trees” will be used in the construction of the guillotine, invented in 1785 as a humane means of enforcing capital punishment. The “rude carts” will later serve as vehicles (called tumbrils) to transport the condemned, including Sydney Carton, to the guillotine.
8 (p. 8) In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting: Dickens’s library contained the British Annual Register for 1775, his source for the criminal episodes he refers to. His Victorian readers would have been struck, as we are, by the image of a lawless and violent city very different from the “modern” London of the mid-nineteenth century.
Chapter 2: The Mail
1 (p. 9) Shooter’s Hill: Located on the Dover Road, Shooter’s Hill was 8 miles southeast of London. As the name suggests, its steep incline and thick, surrounding woods provided the perfect conditions for a highwayman’s ambush.
2 (p. 9) Blackheath: Another lonely spot on the Dover Road, Blackheath was notorious for robberies that occurred there.
3 (p. 14) Tellson’s Bank: Dickens’s model for Tellson’s Bank was Child & Co., a venerable banking house dating from the seventeenth century. Their offices were located in the heart of the financial district, at 1 Fleet Street.
4 (p. 16) Temple Bar: A stone gate marking the entrance to the City of London, Temple Bar was built in the seventeenth century by Sir Christopher Wren; it stood between Fleet Street and the Strand until 1878. A later reference (see p. 56) recalls the eighteenth-century practice of placing severed heads on spikes on the gate.
Chapter 3: The Night Shadows
1 (p. 18) though the bank was almost always with him: Dickens is recalling a short poem by the English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) from “Miscellaneous Sonnets”: “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”
Chapter 4: The Preparation
1 (p. 20) the head drawer at the Royal George Hotel: The “head drawer” is the chief bartender. Dickens based the Royal George on a Dover hotel called the Ship, where he occasionally stayed prior to traveling across the English Channel to France.
2 (p. 26) Beauvais: Beauvais lies on the road from Paris to Boulogne. Before the introduction of the railway, the town was well known to nineteenth-century tourists as a hospitable resting place, as well as for its thirteenth-century cathedral.
3 (p. 27) the privilege of filling up blank forms for the consignment of any one to the oblivion of a prison for any length of time:The French Revolution (1837),