A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [202]
3 (p. 62) They hanged at Tyburn: Tyburn, near what is now known as Marble Arch in Hyde Park, London, was a site of public execution until 1783, when this dubious distinction was shifted to the street outside Newgate Prison itself. Dickens himself witnessed hangings at Newgate (see the Introduction, page xiv). Tyburn enjoys literary celebrity, too, as the scene of the hero’s eleventh-hour rescue in Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1749).
4 (p. 62) the gaol was a vile place . . . where dire diseases were bred: The gaol fever, later identified as typhus, killed judges, lawyers, and the Lord Mayor in 1750. It required another deadly outbreak in 1772 before reforms were undertaken to improve sanitary conditions, at least in the vicinity of the courtroom; these included the sprinkling of herbs and vinegar, referred to on page 65.
5 (p. 62) the pillory: The pillory (or stocks), a wooden frame with holes for locking in the head and hands, was used as a common punishment in London until 1830. The prisoner stood in stocks in the street for a specified period of time, an open target for any missiles directed at him by the public; shocking injuries could be suffered in a very short time while in the pillory, and deaths were not unknown.
6 (p. 63) the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of the precept, that “Whatever is is right”: This is a disdainful allusion to Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1734), which, for a Victorian social critic such as Dickens, seemed to capture the callow overoptimism of the Enlightenment in its conclusion that “One truth is clear, ‘Whatever is, is right’ ” (epistle 1, lines 293-294).
7 (p. 63) people then paid to see the play at the Old Bailey, just as they paid to see the play in Bedlam: Dickens is guilty of a minor anachronism here: The public could pay a fee to watch the lunatics in their cells at Bethlehem Royal Hospital (contracted to “Bedlam” in vernacular speech) until 1770.
8 (p. 65) revealing to the said French Lewis what forces our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, had in preparation to send to Canada and North America: The Revolutionary War in America concluded with the Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783.
9 (p. 66) as the ocean is one day to give up its dead: This is a reference to the Bible, Revelation 20:13: “And the sea gave up the dead which were in it” (KJV).
Chapter 3: A Disappointment
1 (p. 67) a person who was beyond fear and beyond reproach: Pierre Terrail (c.1473-1524), the seigneur de Bayard, served as a captain in the French army’s Italian campaigns of the early fifteenth century. Dickens here adapts his heroic epithet, le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche (the knight without fear or reproach).
2 (p. 67) most honourable Privy Council: The Privy Council was a council of close advisers appointed by the British monarch; it later became the name for the highest court of appeal.
3 (p. 68) Virtue, as had been observed by the poets . . . was in a manner contagious; more especially the bright virtue known as patriotism, or love of country: Patriotism was a favorite theme of eighteenth-century poets such as James Thomson and William Cowper, although Dr. Johnson supposedly called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel” (see James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791).
4 (p. 75) that garrison-and-dockyard town: Dickens is referring to Chatham, where he spent his early boyhood, and for which he always retained a fond fascination. His father was employed as a clerk at the naval dockyard there from 1817 to 1822.
5 (p. 76) some family affairs in France, . . . though what those affairs were, a consideration for others who were near and dear to him, forbad him, even for his