A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [207]
7 (p. 129) a new version of the German ballad of Leonora: The reference is to a ballad by German poet Gottfried Bürger (1747-1794); the ballad is far better known today for its illustrators, William Blake (1796) and Daniel Maclise (1847), than for its story, which tells the characteristically maudlin eighteenth-century tale of a woman whose lover is killed in the wars, only for him to return as a ghost and claim his marital rights. Leonora thus dies for love in a singularly literal manner.
Chapter 10: Two Promises
1 (p. 130) Mr. Charles Darnay was established in England as a higher teacher of the French language. . . . In this age, he would have been a Professor; in that age, he was a Tutor: With its program in modern languages, the University of London, where it is implied Darnay teaches, distinguished itself from its ancient counterparts, Oxford and Cambridge, where such instruction took far longer to establish itself in the curriculum. No teachers of modern European languages appear in the eighteenth-century faculty records at Cambridge, for example. Nevertheless, the English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) learned Italian there at around this time.
2 (p. 130) Such masters were not at that time easily found; Princes that had been, and Kings that were to be, were not yet of the Teacher class: Louis-Philippe (1773-1850), the eldest son of Louis-Philippe-Joseph, duc d’Orléans, fled France after his father’s execution in 1793. While in exile in Switzerland, he earned his living teaching mathematics. He later returned to France and ruled as the “citizen king” between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848.
3 (p. 130) no ruined nobility had dropped out of Tellson’s ledgers, to turn cooks and carpenters: Aristocrats began fleeing France for England in the summer of 1789; those who were unable to transfer liquid assets to institutions such as the fictional Tellson’s Bank were often forced to take up menial trades.
4 (p. 130) he had expected neither to walk on pavements of gold, nor to lie on beds of roses: According to legend, Dick Whittington (c.1358-1423), a future lord mayor of London, believed the streets of London were paved with gold. The “beds of roses” are Christopher Marlowe’s (1564-1593), from his well-known poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”: “And I will make thee beds of roses / And a thousand fragrant posies, / A cap of flowers, and a kirtle / Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle.”
5 (p. 131) from the days when it was always summer in Eden, to these days when it is mostly winter in fallen latitudes: The “scarce tolerable” season of “decrepit winter” is represented by the English poet John Milton (1608-1674) in book 10 of Paradise Lost as a heaven-ordained consequence of the Fall.
Chapter 11: A Companion Picture
1 (pp. 137-138) before the setting in of the long vacation: The Hilary, Easter, and Trinity terms are followed by the summer furlough, called “long vacation,” which comes to an end with Michaelmas on September 29.
Chapter 12: The Fellow of Delicacy
1 (p. 142) Vauxhall Gardens . . . Ranelagh: The Vauxhall, laid out on the south bank of the Thames in 1661, were the most popular public pleasure gardens of Georgian London, famous for their music, masquerades, and theatrical entertainments, and immortalized in novels by Henry Fielding and Fanny Burney. The gardens were still hugely popular in Dickens’s youth, but they declined with the advent of the more circumspect Victorian era, and were finally closed in 1859, the year Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities. Vauxhall’s rival the Ranelagh Gardens, located east of the Chelsea Hospital, offered supper and entertainment to London’s fashionable set for a shilling’s admission; they closed in 1804.
Chapter 14: The Honest Tradesman
1 (p. 153) Mr. Cruncher sat watching the two streams, like the heathen rustic who has for several centuries been on duty watching