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NOTES ON ISSUE 15: GLOSSARY
PART 1 OF 2
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Two score and twelve were told off. From
the farmer-general of seventy, whose riches could not buy his
life, to the seamstress of twenty, whose poverty and obscurity
could not save her.
Carlyle notes, toward the end of The
French Revolution, that “‘all the Farmers-General
[the tax-collectors under the ancien régime]
are arrested’; all, and shall give an account of their
moneys and incomings; and die for ‘putting water in the
tobacco’ they sold” (725). The contrast that Dickens
draws here (between the elderly Farmer-General, probably prosperous
for much of his life, and the humble, comparatively impoverished
twenty-year-old seamstress) represents the ultimate diversity
of victimization during the Terror. Though members of the nobility
and officials belonging to the overturned aristocratic government
(like the Farmers-General) were obvious targets of the Terror,
suspected by dint of their station of being traitors to the
Republic, common people went to the guillotine too. Anyone could
be denounced, and, if denounced, executed. As Carlyle notes,
Indictments cease by degrees to
have so much as plausibility…. If no speakable charge exist against a
man, or Batch of men, Fouquier [the Prosecutor of the Revolutionary
Tribunal] has always this: a Plot in the Prison. (724)
The seamstress with whom Carton
ultimately travels to his death is accused of such Plots.
He wrote a long letter to Lucie, showing her that
he had known nothing of her father’s imprisonment until he had heard of
it from herself…
The composition of letters like Darnay’s was allowed in the
prisons. Dickens’ source for this privilege is probably
Honoré Riouffe’s Mémoires
sur les prisons (an
account, published in 1823, of the Parisian prisons during the Terror)
(Sanders 160).
“Would it be much out of the way, to take me in,
near the great cathedral door between the two towers?”
The “cathedral door” at which Miss Pross plans to meet Mr. Cruncher is
the west front entrance of Notre Dame. By this period, Notre Dame had
been converted into a “Temple of Reason” by the Republic, and had been
significantly damaged by revolutionary zeal. For instance, the “Galerie des Rois”– the row of
statues above the three doors, visible in the engraving below from
the Histoire de Paris (1869) – had been destroyed. The 28
statues, representing the “kings of Judah, considered as the ministers
of the Virgin to whom the church was dedicated,” were mistaken for “the
early kings of France down to Philippe Auguste” (Dickens’s
Dictionary of Paris 166) and “decapitated.” Many of the interior
ornaments were also plundered or destroyed in this period, but – like
the façade – restored or replaced in the 19th century. Notre
Dame’s present gargoyles and steeple were 19th-century additions, and
did not exist during the Revolution (Baillie and Salmon 74-5).
“If those eyes of yours were bed-winches,” returned
Miss Pross, “and I was an English four-poster, they shouldn’t loose a
splinter of me.”
A bed-winch is “an instrument for tightening up or loosening the screws
of bedsteads” (Oxford English
Dictionary), and a
four-poster refers to a bedstead with four posts. According to the Dictionary
of Daily Wants (1859), which describes a number of bedsteads, the
“four-post bedstead is considered the most elegant and commodious, but
it is adapted only for large rooms; in small rooms, by monopolizing too
great a space, and obstructing the air and light, they are both
inconvenient and unhealthy” (116). However, 18th- and 19th-century
bedsteads seem to have been generally “inconvenient and unhealthy,” as
the Dictionary concludes its entry on “bedsteads” with the
following admonition:
Bedsteads
should be kept scrupulously clean, and periodically examined. They
should be dusted daily, especially the top part [in bedsteads with
testers, or canopies] which is frequently neglected…. [If] dust [is]
suffered to collect, … vermin are … bred. Every month during the summer
season, and every two months during the winter, the bedstead should be
taken to pieces, removed into the garden or yard, and there thoroughly
washed with hot water and soft soap. If the bedstead is infested with
vermin, from age and long use, the eradication of the evil is almost
hopeless; and the best and wisest plan is to get rid of the bedstead
altogether. (117)
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