A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [204]
7 (p. 92) Student-Quarter of Paris: This district of Paris is better known as the Latin Quarter for its historical association with students, who spoke a famously sophisticated form of “pig Latin.” In the late-eighteenth century, the Latin Quarter still retained its medieval character, with small labyrinthine streets and centuries-old buildings; but by the time A Tale of Two Cities was written, Baron Haussmann (see endnote 2 for chapter 5, the first book) was transforming the left bank into the elegant Renaissance revival neighborhood we know today.
Chapter 6: Hundreds of People
1 (p. 93) The quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street-corner not far from Soho-square: Dickens chooses Soho, a district of Westminster, London, for its historical associations with French refugees. Many French Protestants, known as Huguenots, fled to England following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which had protected the rights of Protestants in France) in 1685. It is from the descendants of these immigrants that Miss Pross later seeks to learn the secrets of French cuisine.
2 (p. 94) Clerkenwell: A semirural enclave of London in the late-eighteenth century, Clerkenwell was home to the famous spa and theater house Sadler’s Wells. Clerkenwell’s atmosphere of suburban serenity disappeared rapidly during the nineteenth century, however, and in Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865), set in 1859, it is portrayed as a squalid place.
3 (p. 94) There were few buildings then, north of the Oxford-road, and forest-trees flourished, and wild flowers grew, and the hawthorn blossomed, in the now vanished fields: Once rolling farmland, Soho was rapidly developed during the seventeenth century, and by the late-eighteenth century was a relatively well-heeled neighborhood. There were open fields, however, to the north of Soho Square and beyond the British Museum.
4 (p. 94) like stray paupers without a settlement: One of the oppressive provisions of the Poor Laws, first established in 1601, was that any poor person who moved out of his legal residence was no longer entitled to the charitable assistance of his parish.
5 (p. 95) a golden arm starting out of the wall: Golden arms were typically placed above the entrance of goldsmith’s shops. One such arm, which once belonged to a shop in the Soho district, can now be seen in the Charles Dickens Museum in London. A replica hangs above a residence in what is now Manette Street in Soho.
6 (p. 101) in search of impoverished French: Dickens is referring to the Huguenots (see note 1 for this chapter); Soho was still a haven for French emigrés in Victorian times, “a kind of Petty France” as Peter Cunningham called it in his A Handbook for London, Past and Present (1850).
Chapter 7: Monseigneur in Town
1 (p. 105) his morning’s chocolate could not so much as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without the aid of four strong men besides the Cook: Dickens’s description of the aristocratic “Monseigneur” is borrowed from Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Le Tableau de Paris (1781-1788). Here, as elsewhere, Dickens’s representations of the excesses of the ancien régime are based in truth, but exaggerated; Mercier says nothing of five men carrying a pot of chocolate, a fashionable beverage among the eighteenth-century nobility.
2 (p. 106) the regretted days of the merry Stuart who sold it: The reference is to Charles II, king of England, Ireland, and Scotland from 1660 to 1685, who was called “merry” for his love of art, fashion, and entertainment. The Treaty of Dover (1670), signed in secret, guaranteed Charles a pension from his cousin Louis XIV of France in exchange for declaring himself Roman Catholic and joining the war against the Dutch.
3 (p. 106) “The earth and the fulness thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur”: This allusion to the Bible, Psalm 24:1—“The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof” (KJV)—creates a pun on the French word seigneur, which can refer to lords both worldly and divine.
4 (p. 106) Farmer-General: Farmers-general were the provincial