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NOTES ON ISSUE 4: GLOSSARY
PART 2 OF 4
He had that rather wild,
strained, seared marking about the eyes, which may be observed in all
free livers of his class, from the portrait of Jeffries downward, and
which can be traced, under various disguises of Art, through the
portraits of every Drinking Age.
The portrait of George Jeffreys, who became Lord Chief Justice
of England in 1683, and Lord Chancellor in 1686, is probably
the one attributed to William Claret, which has belonged to
the National Portrait Gallery (in London) since 1858 (Sanders
71). There are, however, five portraits of Jeffreys in the National
Portrait Gallery – Claret’s being the one in the
Primary Collection – all of which depict a rather young
man. The portrait below, taken from Terrors of the Law, Being the Portraits of Three
Lawyers (1902), is “after the Picture by Kneller,”
which also lodges in the National Portrait Gallery, in the Archives.
It is very similar to the portrait by Claret, which can be viewed
online at http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person.asp?LinkID=mp02409
or http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person.asp?search=ss&sText=
george+jeffreys&LinkID=mp02409.
Both portraits (Claret’s and the one
reproduced above) portray Jeffreys as a youngish man of stern
appearance (the portrait reproduced here shows Jeffreys at 30), in wig
and gown. It is perhaps possible, however, to distinguish the “rather
wild, strained, seared marking about the eyes” that Dickens attributes
to “free livers” like Jeffreys or Carton. In A Child’s History of
England (1851-3), Dickens describes Jeffreys – who was notorious
for the severity of his sentences – as follows:
These merry times [of the 17th
century] produced, and made Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench,
a drunken ruffian in the name of JEFFREYS; a red-faced, swollen,
bloated, horrible creature, with a bullying, roaring voice, and a more
savage nature perhaps than ever was lodged in any human breast. (qtd.
in Sanders 71)
This depiction of Jeffreys is based on
Macaulay’s representation of him in The History of England, a
copy of which Dickens owned. According to Macaulay, Jeffreys was
…a man of quick and vigorous
parts, but constitutionally prone to insolence and to the angry
passions.... His countenance and his voice must always have been
unamiable…. Even when he was sober his violence was sufficiently
frightful. But in general his reason was overclouded and his evil
passions stimulated by the fumes of intoxication. His evenings were
ordinarily given to revelry. People who saw him only over his bottle,
would have supposed him to be a man gross indeed, sottish and addicted
to low company and low merriment, but social and good humoured…. But
though wine at first seemed to soften his heart, the effect a few hours
later was very different. He often came to the judgment seat, having
kept he court waiting long, and yet having but half slept off his
debauch, his cheeks on fire, his eyes staring like those of a maniac.
(qtd. in Sanders 71)
Since Macaulay and Dickens, Jeffreys
has had some defenders, but perhaps not of a persuasive kind. Watt’s Terrors
of the Law, Being the Portraits of Three Lawyers (1902) gives the
following account:
Jeffreys was fond of company: in
that age this meant that he was fond of the bottle. Yet, as a student,
he gave quite as much attention to the pedantries of old English law as
they deserved. That he made himself reasonably agreeable to those on
whom his future fortune depended should surely be no reproach. But, in
truth, his talent from the first was so evident that attorneys competed
for his services. As a cross-examiner he was unsurpassed; and his style
of oratory, however wanting in elegance, was admirably suited to the
taste of his day. As he went through a great deal of arduous work which
no drunkard could have done, the slanders on his early career may be
fairly imputed to the malice of disappointed rivals. Scarce ever was
[a] rise so rapid as his. He was Common Serjeant of the City of London
at twenty-three, and he was Lord High Chancellor at thirty-seven…. He
died ere he was forty-one. That he was of a hasty temper must be
admitted. But his was a coarse and violent, nay, brutal age, not given
to sentimental reflection or to half-measures. In fine, he must be
proved worse than his contemporaries, or his conduct calls for no
special measure of blame. (22-3)
…and in the midst of the wreck
of papers a table shone, with plenty of wine upon it, and brandy, and
rum, and sugar, and lemons.
The table, containing brandy, rum, sugar and lemons, furnishes the
ingredients for punch. The following account of punch, and a recipe for
it, is given by the Dictionary of Daily Wants (1859):
PUNCH. – A name given to a mixture
composed of water, spirit, sugar, and acid. The punch most generally
made is composed of equal parts of rum and brandy; but any mixture of
spirits, or one spirit alone, if there be acid with it, is called
punch. The following are among the most approved receipts for
compounding this beverage. Ordinary punch. – Take two large
rough lemons, juicy, and with rough skins; rub some large lumps of loaf
sugar over the lemons till they have acquired the oil from the rind,
then put them into a bowl, with as much more sugar as is necessary to
sweeten the punch to taste; squeeze the lemon-juice upon the sugar, and
bruise the sugar in the juice; add a quart of boiling water, and mix
well; then strain through a fine sieve, and add a quart of rum, or a
pint of rum and a pint of brandy, or a pint and a half of rum and half
a pint of porter; then add three quarts more of water, and mix well.
[The Dictionary goes on to give recipes for “Oxford Punch,”
“Roman Punch,” “Regent’s Punch,” “Norfolk Punch,” and “Tea Punch,” and
follows the instructions with a list of ingredients for each respective
kind of punch.]
Ordinary punch. – Lemons, 2; sugar, sufficient;
boiling water, 1 quart; rum, 1 quart; or, rum, 1 pint, brandy, 1 pint;
or, rum, 1½ pints, porter, ½ pint; boiling water, 3
quarts.
The jackal then invigorated
himself with a bumper for his throttle…
According to the OED, a bumper is a “cup or glass of wine,
etc., filled to the brim, esp[ecially] when drunk as a toast” and
derives from the word “bump,” in connection with a “‘bumping,’ i.e. [a]
large, ‘thumping’ glass.” The jackal’s throttle is his throat.
The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School…
Shrewsbury School, located in the town of Shrewsbury in the
county of Shropshire, is a prestigious English public school.
It dates from the 16th century and is still in operation. (Public
schools in England are more or less equivalent to private institutions
in America, funded by private sources and charging fees for
entrance and attendance [OED].) At the time of Carton’s
attendance, public schools specialized in a classical education
(including extensive studies in ancient languages – Latin
and Greek). In general, Dickens considered such an education
impractical, though he sent his own sons to public schools (Sanders
73).
“Even when we were fellow-students in the Quartier
Latin, picking up French, and French law, and other French crumbs that
we didn’t get much good of, you were always somewhere, and I was always
– nowhere.”
The “Quartier Latin” – in English the “Latin Quarter” – is the area on
the “Left Bank” in Paris associated with student life. The name derives
from the language of the universities – Latin – originally spoken in
the Quarter. The Sorbonne – still an operational and quite prestigious
institution of learning – is at the heart of the Quartier Latin.
One 19th-century guidebook remarks that
…the name [Quartier Latin] is
very old, for Rabelais, who lived in the middle of the 16th century,
speaks of the “Pays Latin,” referring to the quarter of the town in
which Latin and Greek were taught. And before the days of Rabelais,
when Paris was divided, rigidly enough, into three divisions, that part
situated south of the river was known as the University, for it was
there that the learned men or the clerks lived. The islands were spoken
of as la Cité, and all north of the Seine was called la Ville. (Dickens’s
Dictionary of Paris 210)
“The picturesque doctor’s
daughter, Miss Manette.”
In the 18th century, “picturesque” was an aesthetic term invested with
rather precise significance in both the literary and the visual arts.
The OED defines the word, as it was used in the 18th and 19th
centuries, as follows: “Like or having the elements of a picture; fit
to be the subject of a striking or effective picture; possessing
pleasing and interesting qualities of form and colour (but not implying
the highest beauty or sublimity): said of landscape, buildings,
costume, scenes of diversified action, etc., also of circumstances,
situations, fancies, ideas, and the like.” In 18th-century aesthetic
philosophy, the picturesque was supposed to have an emotional or
spiritual significance, and was added to Burke’s aesthetic categories
(the beautiful and the sublime) as a third category of aesthetic
experience. Rarely applied to people – as Dickens’ characters apply it
to Lucie Manette – the picturesque referred originally to landscapes or
paintings of landscapes like those of Salvator Rosa (a 17th-century
painter famous for his picturesque canvases). As an attribute of
18th-century fiction, the picturesque is most frequently associated
with Gothic novels – those of Ann Radcliffe, for instance – which
tend to be dark in tone and full of descriptions of rough, sweeping
landscapes.
Dickens’ use of the term “picturesque” to describe Lucie (and, later in
the novel, her father) does not seem to reflect much of its special
18th-century significance, drawing rather on the simplest meaning of
“fit to be the subject of a picture.” Yet it is possible to argue that
Lucie and her father acquire a picturesqueness from the events in which
they are and will be implicated – from the historical landscape, as it
were. In a letter to John Forster, Dickens wrote,
I set myself the little task of
making a picturesque story, rising in every chapter with the characters
true to nature, but whom the story itself should express, more than
they should express themselves, by dialogue. I mean, in other words,
that I fancied that a story of incident might be written, in place of
the odious stuff that is written under that pretence, pounding the
characters out of its own mortar, and beating their own interests out
of them. If you could have read the story all at once, I hope you
wouldn’t have stopped halfway. (qtd. in Sanders 6)
This account seems to suggest that the
characters of A Tale of Two Cities are picturesque to the
extent that they are determined by and represented against a landscape
of dramatic historical events.
“If a girl … swoons within a yard or two of a man’s
nose, he can see it without a perspective-glass.”
Here, “perspective glass” is probably used in a generic sense,
referring to a glass used to enlarge or clarify an image (the OED
identifies the word “perspective glass” with “various optical
instruments or devices”). It is sometimes assumed that a perspective
glass is the same as a telescope, but the term pre-dates the
telescope’s invention; and though usage has often conflated the
perspective glass with the telescope, the words have also sometimes
been distinguished from one another – e.g. a 17th-century notice in the
London Gazette
advertising the sale of “all sorts of Perspective Glasses, as well
as Telescopes and Microscopes” (OED). Some definitions of
“perspective glass” identify the instrument with the “zograscope” – an
instrument (probably invented in about 1750) for viewing flat images
(prints, engraving, etc.) in “magnified form and with stereoscopic
effects” like three- dimensionality (OED). If Lucie Manette is
“picturesque” in the sense of being picture-like or fit to be the
subject of a picture, it is possible that Carton is actually referring
to the use of a zograscope. But it is more likely that he is merely
exaggerating – magnifying, as it were.
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