A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [213]
Chapter 8: A Hand at Cards
1 (pp. 291-292) After peeping into several wine-shops, she stopped at the sign of The Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity: The French Revolution adopted the Roman Republic as its model of enlightened government, inspiring a fashion for all things Roman. But by showing that homage to antiquity in this mock-heroic form—where the fate of Lucius Junius Brutus, who helped expel the Tarquin tyrants from Rome during the sixth century B.C., is to emblazon the door of a sleazy Parisian wine-shop—Dickens exemplifies Karl Marx’s dictum that “history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.”
2 (p. 292) somebody was assassinated by somebody vindicating a difference of opinion: The most famous such assassination was that of the doctor and journalist Jean-Paul Marat, murdered in his bath on July 13, 1793. The incident might have been forgotten down the generations but for Jacques-Louis David’s iconic painting The Death of Marat (1793).
3 (p. 296) Sheep of the Prisons: This was a spy placed in a cell with a prisoner in the guise of being a prisoner himself. “Sheep-biter” was the English slang equivalent (see the Introduction, p. xxiii).
4 (p. 299) Inference clear as day in this region of suspicion, that Mr. Barsad, still in the pay of the aristocratic English government, is the spy of Pitt: Rumors were rife in revolutionary France that English intelligence agents, under the orders of Prime Minister William Pitt (1759-1806), were acting as provocateurs, inciting violence and confusion so as to destabilize the new government (see the Introduction).
5 (p. 300) the reigning terror: In June 1793 Robespierre led the Jacobins against the more moderate republicans called the Girondists and took control of the National Convention. In July a Committee of Public Safety was formed, with Robespierre as its unofficial head. It was the decision of this committee to institute the repressive and violent police measures collectively known as the Reign of Terror. Its purpose was to cleanse France of counter-revolutionary elements and to institute republican virtue by force. As a record of the actual consequences of this policy, A Tale of Two Cities stands as a damning indictment of state violence used to ideological ends. The Reign of Terror persisted into 1794.
6 (p. 302) the Cow with the crumpled horn in the house that Jack built: The reference is to the well-known children’s rhyme: “This is the cow with the crumpled horn / That tossed the dog / That worried the cat / That killed the rat / That ate the malt / That lay in the house that Jack built.”
Chapter 9: The Game Made
1 (p. 311) “you know the consequences of mixing them?”: The use of ether, some form of which Sydney Carton appears to be planning to concoct, was better known in Victorian England than in Georgian England. Nevertheless, the drug was first discovered and developed in France, so the purchase is not implausible.
2 (p. 311) “I am the resurrection and the life . . . : whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die”: The words are from the Bible, John 11:25-26 (KJV), which serves as the opening of the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer.
3 (p. 311) and still of to-morrow’s and to-morrow’s: An allusion to Macbeth’s soliloquy (in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, act 5, scene 5), particularly appropriate to the “sound and fury” of the Revolution, and the “dusty death” it brought to so many.
4 (p. 311) in the towers of the churches, where no prayers were said: Anti-clericalism peaked at this period of the Revolution, with the enthronement of the “Goddess of Reason” at Notre-Dame at the express behest of the Convention; other churches were converted to workshops, prisons, and even taverns.
5 (p. 312) it seemed as if Creation were delivered over to Death’s dominion: Dickens is alluding to the Bible, Romans 6:9: