A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [203]
6 (pp. 76-77) that vile and infamous character of evidence too often disfiguring such cases, and of which the State Trials of this country were full: The radical journalist William Cobbett produced a multivolume collection of reports of state trials in Great Britain (Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, 1809-1826), an edition of which Dickens owned.These published reports, which detailed evidence brought against individuals charged with crimes against the state, are more proof of the relative openness of the British justice system compared to that of the French.
Chapter 4: Congratulatory
1 (p. 88) a long winding-sheet in the candle: The image evokes the curl of melted wax around the stem of a tallow candle, a folkloric omen of death. Foreshadowing of Sydney Carton’s fate thus begins early in the novel.
Chapter 5: The Jackal
1 (p. 88) Court of King’s Bench: The King’s Bench, a division of the English High Court of Justice that dealt with cases of bankruptcy, became synonymous in popular usage with bankruptcy prison. Many people in the nineteenth century, including members of the respectable middle class, routinely spent time on the King’s Bench when unable to pay their debts.
2 (p. 89) Sydney Carton: Dickens originally chose “Dick” as Carton’s Christian name, which evoked the nickname given the author by many of his friends and also created a mirror-image of his own initials. Dick was also the name of a principal character in The Frozen Deep (1857), a melodrama coauthored by Dickins and Wilkie Collins, which Dickens acknowledges in the Preface; Dickens himself played the part in an amateur production. (See the Introduction, p. xxx), for a discussion of Sydney Carton’s role as author surrogate.)
3 (p. 89) between Hilary Term and Michaelmas: The legal year, beginning in January (Hilary Term) and ending on September 29 with Michaelmas, was broken only by Easter and the summer furlough, called “long vacation.”
4 (p. 89) twice pacing the pavements of King’s Bench-walk and Paper-buildings: King’s Bench Walk is a long walkway in the Inner Temple, the heart of London’s legal district; the Paper Buildings, in the northeast corner of the Inner Temple, are named for their method of construction, known as “paperwork,” which uses timber, lath, and plaster.
5 (p. 89) portrait of Jeffries: This is a strange judicial portrait to be hanging in the offices of a liberal lawyer, especially one who has just successfully defended a client against a charge of treason. George Jeffreys (1645?-1689) was notorious as the drunken hanging judge appointed by James II to conduct the so-called Bloody Assizes in the aftermath of the 1685 rebellion of the duke of Monmouth (known as the Monmouth Rebellion). Those Assizes, in which hundreds of rebels, expecting clemency, were executed after the most perfunctory of trials, remained a rallying cry for English liberals in Dickens’s time, as a historical symbol of monarchical tyranny and excess. In his A Child’s History of England (1854), Dickens draws a significant parallel between England under James II and the Reign of Terror in revolutionary Paris: “You will hear much of the horrors of the great French Revolution. Many and terrible they were, there is no doubt; but I know of nothing worse, done by the maddened people of France in that awful time, than was done by the highest judge in England, with the express approval of the King of England, in The Bloody Assize.”
6 (p. 91) old Shrewsbury School: Shrewsbury School, a highly prestigious English public school, adhered strictly to classical instruction. Dickens himself thought little of the utility of Latin and Greek, and Carton’s air of dissipated promise reflects poorly on his education. The fact that Charles Darnay teaches modern languages is a form of favorable comparison, representing him as practical and progressive, a man of the