A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [200]
4 (p. 30) a great Stilton cheese: Stilton is a famous English blue cheese that, in its wholesale quantity, has a cylindrical, drum-like shape.
Chapter 5: The Wine-shop
1 (p. 31) wine-shop: Wine-shops were popular social gathering places in the poorer districts of eighteenth-century Paris, and thus were natural centers of political ferment. Dickens seems to have based his character Monsieur Defarge on Claude Cholat, mentioned in Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837), who was one of more than twenty wine-shop proprietors to participate in the storming of the Bastille.
2 (p. 32) the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine: A poor and crowded manufacturing district in what is now the eighth arrondissement of Paris, Saint-Antoine was a hotbed of the Revolution and conveniently located near the Bastille. The district maintained its radical reputation through Dickens’s time and into the 1850s and 1860s, when Paris’s director of public works, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, oversaw the construction of wide boulevards, which thinned the population and disabled the revolutionary practice of erecting barricades.
3 (p. 33) fabulous mill which ground old people young: A popular folk-legend of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries told of a magical mill capable of reversing the advance of age.
4 (p. 33) and upon them . . . was the sign, Hunger: Here and elsewhere Dickens relies on an allegorical figure to stand in for a detailed examination of economic conditions in France in the years leading up to the Revolution. Britons traveling in France habitually remarked on how much poorer the French population seemed compared to back home; the reasons for the poor French economy lay in a complex of factors: poor distribution mechanisms, a laissez-faire economic policy, overinvestment in the army and navy, and a series of disastrous harvests that culminated in near-famine conditions in 1789.
5 (p. 34) hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their condition: As Dickens here intimates, the ropes used to suspend street lanterns in Paris were put to deadly use by the revolutionaries. The first victim, the state counselor Foulon, was strung up in such a fashion on July 22, 1789 (see note 3 for chapter 22, the second book).
6 (p. 35) Her knitting was before her: One of the most enduring popular images of the French Revolution is that of the tricoteuses, the knitting-women who sat each day of the Reign of Terror at the foot of the guillotine, counting the heads that rolled. The Reign of Terror is a term applied to a period of the French Revolution, from 1793 to 1794, when organized violence became the principal political tool of the revolutionary leadership; thousands of people, aristocrats and patriots alike, were arrested, summarily tried, and executed.
7 (p. 36) “How goes it, Jacques?”: Jacques is a nickname for a French peasant; its collective noun, Jacquerie, is associated with the peasant uprising in 1358, which occurred near Beauvais; this no doubt prompted Dickens to choose Beauvais as Dr. Manette’s birthplace, where Defarge was presumably in service to him.
8 (p. 41) a white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes: While touring the Philadelphia State Prison in 1842, Dickens met a shoemaker in solitary confinement (see the Introduction, pp. xxiii-xxiv). Shoemaking also had close historical associations with the French Revolution: in the popular newspaper character Jacques Cor donnier (“Jack the Shoemaker”) as well as in novels of the Revolution by Alexandre Dumas the elder, including