A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [201]
Chapter 6: The Shoemaker
1 (p. 45) “One Hundred and Five, North Tower”: Dickens derives most of his description of the Bastille from Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837); but the North Tower is based on a more obscure source, Albert Smith’s novel The Marchioness of Brinvilliers (1846), in which it is also called, ironically, Liberty Tower.
2 (p. 52) “To the Barrier!”: The Barriers stood at the northern outskirts of Paris, at the towns of Saint-Denis and La Villette; they served as sites for collection of taxes on goods imported from the coastal ports to the north.
Book the Second: The Golden Thread
Chapter 1: Five Years Later
1 (p. 55) Noakes and Co.’s: “Noakes” was the generic name used in England for parties to a case in pro forma legal documents.
2 (p. 56) evil communications corrupted its good polish: Dickens is recalling a passage in the Bible, 1 Corinthians 15:33: “Evil communications corrupt good manners” (King James Version).
3 (p. 56) a Barmecide room, that always had a great dining-table in it and never had a dinner: Dickens read The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments as a child, and references to it are everywhere in his fiction. Here he alludes to the Barber’s tale of his sixth brother, in which the Barmecide, the head of the wealthy Barmaki household, invites a beggar to an imaginary feast.
4 (p. 56) in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty, . . . by the heads exposed on Temple Bar: Dickens is guilty of an anachronism here, since the last heads exposed on Temple Bar were those of two Jacobite rebels, Townley and Fletcher, in 1746. While heads sometimes remained suspended on their spikes for decades, the last reportedly blew down in a storm in 1772, eight years before the date of Dickens’s description (see also note 4 of chapter 2, the first book).
5 (p. 56) insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or Ashantee: The ferocity of the African kingdoms of Abyssinia (more commonly known today as Ethiopia) and Ashanti (now part of Ghana) was better known in Dickens’s lifetime than in the eighteenth century. Britain never controlled Abyssinia, but its consul was murdered there in 1860. The Ashanti tribe engaged in bloody conflicts with the Fanti tribe and the British army, and it may be the killing of the British governor Sir Charles McCarthy that Dickens is thinking of here; the governor’s skull served as a drinking cup in the Ashanti court.
6 (p. 57) the youthful occasion of his renouncing by proxy the works of darkness, in the easterly parish church of Houndsditch: The reference is to the baptismal service in the Book of Common Prayer (used in the Church of England since the sixteenth century), in which the godparents of the infant are called upon to “renounce the devil and all his works” in the infant’s name. Houndsditch was a poor quarter of London between Aldgate and Bish opsgate, named for its insalubrious medieval reputation as a repository for dead dogs; in the eighteenth century it was known as a Jewish district.
7 (p. 57) Mr. Cruncher’s private lodging in Hanging-sword-alley, Whitefriars: Jerry Cruncher lives just off Fleet Street in central London, very near to Tellson’s Bank. Whitefriars takes its name from the Carmelite order that dwelled there before the Reformation.
Chapter 2: A Sight
1 (p. 61) the Old Bailey: The Old Bailey still serves, in name at least, as London’s central criminal court; Dickens knew the building well from his days as a court reporter in the 1830s. The original building was damaged during the Gordon Riots of 1780 (the subject of Dickens’s 1841 novel Barnaby Rudge), and Dickens’s Old Bailey was built in 1809. This structure, together with Newgate Prison, was destroyed and rebuilt in the first decade of the twentieth century.
2 (p. 62) “That’s quartering. . . . Barbarous!”: This punishment for treason, which dates from the thirteenth century, involved hanging the prisoner and cutting him