Annotating GuideBOOK THE FIRST

Epoch: (noun) the beginning of a distinctive period in the history of someone or something.

Superlative: (adjective) of the highest quality or degree.

Revelation: (noun) the divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something relating to human existence or the world.ALSO a surprising and previously unknown fact, especially one that is made known in a dramatic way.

VOCABULARY

List of Opposites in the first paragraph:

DUALITIES AND OPPOSITES

The period invoked by the opening chapter of A Tale of Two Cities is the late 18th century – specifically (as we learn a little later on) 1775; and Dickens’ “best of times” and “worst of times” initiates a theme that helps prepare us for one of the major causes of the French Revolution – the coexistence of opposed extremes (such as the coexistence of immense wealth and immense poverty in France) in the pre-revolutionary period.

The “season of Light,” coexisting with the “season of Darkness,” invokes another irony of the period. 

DUALITIES AND OPPOSITES

The “present period” of the novel is of course 1859, when A Tale of Two Cities first began serial publication. This period is introduced as “so far like” 1775 perhaps because of the persistence of contrasting extremes: In the 19th century, England led the Industrial Revolution (for which the ground was laid by 18th-century developments like the steam engine); yet unprecedented scientific, technological, and industrial progress coexisted with the vogue of “spirit rappers,” mediums, phrenologists, and so forth. Dickens makes reference to such phenomena in the opening chapter when he notes that “Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this” (Ch.1).

DUALITIES AND OPPOSITES

Who are the “king with a large jaw and [a] queen with a plain face?”

George the Third And

Queen Charlotte

THE KING AND QUEEN

“King with a large jaw and queen with a fair face”

King Louis XVI And

Marie-Antoinette

THE KING AND QUEEN

In 1775 (the year in which the story of A Tale of Two Cities begins), the King and Queen of France were Louis XVI (r. 1774-93) and his consort, Marie-Antoinette. In England, George III (r. 1760-1820) and his queen, Charlotte Sophia, were the ruling couple.

AND WE’LL NEVER BE ROYALS…

Joanna Southcott was known for alleged oracular powers that eventually made her famous.

In 1775 she was not yet known as the prophetess that she became thereafter (though her story would have been well known to Dickens’ readers in 1859.

She began to write prophecies in 1792, and- when they were disbelieved- “adopted the plan of sealing up her writings, to be opened when the predicted evnts had matured.”

Joanna Southcott was indeed 25 years old in 1775, though not yet known for the alleged oracular powers that eventually made her famous.

WHO IS MRS. SOUTHCOTT?

The Cock-lane ghost ostensibly began to disturb the residents of a house in Cock Lane, West Smithfield (in London) in the first few months of 1762 (and had thus been laid to rest slightly more than a dozen years in 1775). Its knockings and scratchings were supposed to derive from the spirit of woman who had been murdered and was buried nearby. Though the phenomenon was ultimately exposed as a fraud, it attracted considerable popular interest; and when Mr. Parsons, the father of the 12-year-old girl first disturbed by the “Ghost,” was sent to prison for a year and forced to stand in the pillory for perpetrating the sham, Londoners collected a subscription for his well-being (Sanders 30).

WHAT’S UP WITH SPIRITS?

Between September 5 and October 26, 1774, the first Continental Congress of England’s American colonies met in Philadelphia; it presented a list of grievances to the English government in January of the following year. This “message” from the “British subjects in America” preceded the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the ensuing Revolutionary War (Sanders 30; Maxwell 442; Roberts 345). The Annual Register of 1775 gives a long account of the Continental Congress’ meeting and the various “messages” sent to the crown, including a

NOW WE’RE TALKING ABOUT AMERICA?

Since the figure of Britannia was often found on the backs of pennies in the 1850s, and was the basic design for the flip side of all pennies from 1860 to 1970 (Clayton, “The Penny”), Dickens’ reference to England as France’s “sister of the shield and trident” makes use of a symbol of Englishness specifically associated with currency at the time A Tale of Two Cities appeared. Moreover, Britannia appeared on English coins, which retain a closer association to precious metals (and thus a gold or silver standard) than paper money, which France began to print in great quantities (and without sufficient reserves of gold to assure its value) in the years before the French Revolution.

SHIELD, TRIDENT, AND PAPER MONEY

Dickens’ figure of “the Woodman, Fate,” may have been partly suggested by a passage in his chief historical source, Carlyle’s French Revolution. Describing the imperceptibility of the growth and termination of great things, Carlyle writes,

The oak grows silently, in the forest, a thousand years; only in the thousandth year, when the woodman arrives with his axe, is there heard an echoing through the solitudes; and the oak announces itself when, with far-sounding crash, it

falls. (24)

According to Sanders, the “best lengths of pine” used for building were imported from Norway (31).

NOW NORWAY?

…to make a certain moveable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history.The “moveable framework with a sack and knife in it” is the guillotine, named for its inventor, Joseph Ignace Guillotin (1738-1814), who was active in French politics before and during the French Revolution. A member of the Constitutional Assembly prior to the Revolution, Guillotin proposed the use of his machine in 1785; it was frequently though erroneously thought, in Dickens’ time, that Guillotin had been executed by his own instrument. (Though Guillotin was imprisoned during the Reign of Terror, he was not guillotined [Sanders 32].)

THE GUILLOTINE

The Dover road that lay … beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter’s Hill.The Dover road, 70.75 miles long, ran from London Bridge (on the Surrey side of the Thames River) to Dover (Harper, “The Road to Dover”). Shooter’s Hill, 8.25 miles along the Dover Road from London Bridge, is an eminence from which the city of London could be seen during the daytime; in the 18th century it was known for a mineral spring where Queen Anne herself (r. 1702-1714) was said to take the waters. At night, however, it was dangerous.

DOVER

"Discovering Dickens” - A Community Reading Project. Stanford University, 2004.

WORKS CITED