A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [208]
2 (p. 153) Time was, when a poet sat upon a stool in a public place, and mused in the sight of men: A piece of Florentine folklore that caught Dickens’s imagination on his travels through Italy relates that the poet Dante (1265-1321) was accustomed to sit contemplatively on a stool outside the Duomo. Dickens also refers to this legend in his novel Little Dorrit (1855-1857).
3 (p. 157) bear-leader: Traveling showmen who earned their living by presenting a bear that performed dancing, counting, or other tricks were still readily found in mid-Victorian London.
4 (p. 157) old church of Saint Pancras: At the time of the novel, this ancient church, now within the city of London, stood in the heart of Middle-sex County on the main road leading from King’s Cross to Kentish Town. Its isolated situation and large graveyard gave it a ghoulish reputation, which Dickens later plays upon in the scene of little Jerry Cruncher’s nighttime adventure.
5 (p. 160) disciple of Izaak Walton: The English writer Izaak Walton wrote The Compleat Angler; or, the Contemplative Man’s Recreation (1653).The image of Jerry Cruncher and his accomplices as contemplative men of leisure on a nighttime fishing jaunt is a delicious, quintessentially Dickensian irony.
6 (p. 163) Resurrection-Man: The original body snatchers, the “resurrection men” of Georgian England, earned good money by exhuming recently deceased bodies and selling them to medical schools, which were restrained from procuring cadavers for instruction in the developing field of anatomy. In 1832, as a concession to the wholesale and unstoppable trade from London’s poorer graveyards, Parliament passed the Anatomy Act, which allowed medical schools to legally acquire unclaimed bodies. At about that time, the young Dickens, on being asked to leave his name at an office, left the following: “Charles Dickens. Resurrectionist in Search of a Subject.”
Chapter 15: Knitting
1 (p. 169) his right hand, armed with the knife, will be burnt off before his face; . . . all this was actually done to a prisoner who made an attempt on the life of the late King, Louis Fifteen: An unsuccessful attempt on Louis XV’s life was made in 1757 by the unfortunate Robert Damiens, who apparently hoped in killing the king to solve the sectarian disputes then facing the Church. However, he merely wounded Louis, and was sentenced to death in the manner Dickens describes. Once again, what Dickens represents as typical was in fact highly unusual. The spectacle of Damiens’s execution in this deliberately anachronistic, medieval manner won sympathy for him he would not otherwise have had, and was an important episode in the drift of public sentiment away from the monarchy.
2 (p. 172) the large-faced King and the fair-faced Queen came in their golden coach, attended by the shining Bull’s Eye of their Court: The Salon de l’oeil de Boeuf (room of the bull’s eye) was the anteroom to the king’s apartments at Versailles, where the ritual of the monarch’s levee (a reception held when he arose from bed) unfolded daily before a crowd of courtiers and attendants. The royal family also dined there in public view.
Chapter 16: Still Knitting
1 (p. 185) when the military drums should be beating to drown a wretched voice: The reference is to the execution of King Louis XVI on January 21, 1793. The monarch tried to speak to his people, but at a signal from his executioners, drums drowned out his final words.
Chapter 21: Echoing Footsteps
1 (p. 208) Suffer them and forbid them not: Dickens is referring here to the Bible, Matthew 19:14: “Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven” (KJV).
2 (p. 212) muskets were being distributed: This detail is borrowed from Thomas Carlyle, who