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NOTES ON ISSUE 3: GLOSSARY
PART 1 OF 4
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Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned
place, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty.
Tellson’s Bank is usually identified as the real-life
Child & Co.’s in Fleet Street, which leased rooms
above Temple Bar as a storage space for its records (Sanders
35). Temple Bar was “a gate-way … adjoining the
Temple, between Fleet Street and the Strand” (Baedeker
155) erected by the architect Sir Christopher Wren in 1670 (Wren
was also the architect of the present St. Paul’s Cathedral).
It was still in place when Dickens was writing A
Tale of Two Cities, but was removed in 1878 “to
permit of the widening of the street and to facilitate the enormous
traffic” of the late 19th century (Baedeker 155). A “Temple
Bar Memorial” was then erected at the west end of Fleet
Street, and Temple Bar was moved to the vicinity of Theobald’s
Park (Baedeker 155) in Hertfordshire, where it can be seen,
“mouldering away” (Woodley 140), even now. An 18th-century
account of it, from Harrison’s New
and Universal History, Description and Survey of … London
(1776), gives us both a short history of Temple Bar and a sense
of what it would have looked like during the period represented
in the novel:
TEMPLE BAR. On the spot where this gate stands,
were antiently posts, rails, and a chain, as in other places
where the city liberties terminated [Temple Bar marked the boundary
between the cities of London and Westminster]. Afterwards a
wooden house was erected across the street, with a narrow gate-way,
and an entry through the south side of it: but, since the fire
of London [1666] the present structure was erected, and is the
only gate remaining [by the time of this account, 1776] at the
extremity of the city liberties.
This is a very handsome and noble gate, with a postern on each
side for the convenience of foot-passengers. It is built entirely
of Portland stone, of rustic work below, and of the Corinthian
order. The great arch is elliptical, and very flat, and the
whole forms a very elegant appearance. Over the gateway, on
the east side, in two niches, are stone statues of queen Elizabeth
and king James I with the king’s arms over the keystone;
and on the west side are the statues of king Charles I and king
Charles II in Roman habits.
On this gate, of late years, have been placed the heads of several
distinguished characters, who were convicted and executed for
treasonable practices against their king and country. But not
any of them are now remaining. (480)
This illustration of Temple Bar, from Thornton’s
New, Complete, and Universal
History, Description, and Survey of … London (1784),
shows the gate as it looked at about 1780 – the year in
which this portion of A Tale
of Two Cities is set.
Temple Bar
Temple Bar is also visible on this portion of Thornton’s
map of London (1784), at the far left, next to Fleet Street
and above the Temple.
Click
on map for larger view
…the dingiest of windows, which were always under a
shower-bath from Fleet-street, and which were made the dingier
by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple
Bar.
Fleet Street, north of the Thames, runs east from Temple Bar,
joining (now without the Bar) Ludgate and the Strand. It takes
its name from the Fleet Brook, which was, by the early 20th
century, a main sewer flowing through Holborn Valley and under
Farringdon Street (Farringdon was Fleet Market Bridge Street
in the 18th century) to the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge. The
Fleet Prison (for debtors) stood on the east side of the bridge
until 1846 (Baedeker 148).
Tellson’s Bank, in “the shadow
of Temple Bar,” would have stood on the side of the Bar
that looked toward Fleet Street, under the statues of Queen
Elizabeth and James I (the other side of the Bar, facing the
Strand, supported statues of the more recent monarchs Charles
I and II). The “shower-bath” from Fleet Street was
apparently the result of poor paving and considerable commercial
traffic through the area (Sanders 55).
Fleet Street, Temple Bar, etc. are visible
on the portion of Thornton’s map of London (1784) shown
above.
Your bank notes had a musty odour, as if they were fast decomposing
into rags again.
Paper was made, as Dickens implies, of old rags. Having co-authored
an article describing the process in 1850, Dickens was very
familiar with papermaking. “A Paper Mill,”
by Dickens and the journalist Mark Lemon, takes a fanciful turn
when the visitor to the paper mill in question takes the place
of a rag (“I am to go, as the rags go, regularly and systematically
through the Mill. I am to suppose myself a bale of rags. I am
rags” [265]) and describes the operation of papermaking
from the inside of the mill. A portion of the article runs as
follows:
White, pure, spick and span new paper, with
that fresh smell which takes us back to school and school-books;
can it ever come from rags like these? Is it from such bales
of dusty rags, native and foreign, of every colour and of every
kind, as now environ us, shutting out the summer air and putting
cotton into our summer ears, that virgin paper, to be written
on, and printed on, proceeds? We shall see presently. Enough
to consider, at present, what a grave of dress this rag-store
is; what a lesson of vanity it preaches. The coarse blouse of
the Flemish labourer, and the fine cambric of the Prussian lady,
the court dress of the Austrian jailer, and the miserable garb
of the Italian peasant; the woolen petticoat of the Bavarian
girl, the linen head-dress of the Neapolitan woman, the priest’s
vestments, the player’s robe, the Cardinal’s hat,
and the ploughman’s nightcap; all dwindle down to this,
and bring their littleness or greatness in fractional portions
here. (265)
Though Dickens and Lemon dwell on the democratic
aspects of papermaking (in which the rags of diverse individuals
are combined and equalized in the form of pristine new paper),
the reference to papermaking in A Tale of Two Cities is less affirmative (the
bank notes Dickens refers to are “fast decomposing”
into their constituent rags again). Dickens may have been influenced
here by a passage in his chief historical source, The French Revolution: Carlyle, in the
context of a pejorative account of “bank-paper”
(which the French government issued as its coffers became more
and more depleted of gold), remarks that “Paper is made
from the rags of things that did once exist; there are endless
excellences in Paper” (26).
Your plate was stowed away among the neighboring cesspools,
and evil communications corrupted the good polish in a day or
two.
Plate refers to silver or gold, or ornaments or utensils in
silver or gold (Oxford English
Dictionary); and “evil communications” invokes
Corinthians 15:33: “Be not deceived: evil communications
corrupt good manners.” The cesspools themselves (the source
of the “evil communications”) were a reality of
18th-century London. Previous to the 1760s, drainage had –
as in Paris – been conveyed down a gutter or “kennel”
in the middle of the road. By the 1780s, however, a system of
underground drains had been created, and domestic waste accumulated
in cesspools under dwellings. It was removed from the cesspool
by “night-soil men,” afterwards to become mulch
for market-gardens or material for brick-making (Johnson 21).
…by the heads exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate
brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or Ashantes.
According to Baedeker’s London
and Its Environs (1908), “The heads of criminals
used to be barbarously exhibited on iron spikes on the top of
the gate” (155) of Temple Bar. The practice of displaying
the heads of malefactors is of remarkably recent date, since
Temple Bar itself was only erected in the late 17th century,
in 1670. Tallis’s Illustrated
London (1851) gives the following account of the spikes:
On iron poles above the bar were affixed
the heads of many unhappy adherents of the Pretender, who were
decapitated for the part which they took in the rebellions of
1715 and 1745. One of the spikes employed for these barbarous
spectacles was not removed till the beginning of the present
[19th] century. (vol. 1, 51)
Though the last heads to be displayed on Temple
Bar were spiked in 1746, they apparently did not “blow
down” until 1772 (Sanders 55). Thus, though there would
have been no heads left on Temple Bar in 1780, the memory of
them would be reasonably recent.
The comparison of this barbarism to that of two African peoples
– the Abyssinians and the Ashantes (otherwise “Ashantis”
or “Ashantees”) – was particularly topical
in the 19th century. Abyssinia – modern-day Ethiopia (OED)
– was a turbulent kingdom. Some stability was achieved
in 1855 when Negus Theodore III declared himself emperor of
the country, which was divided amongst various political factions;
but the British consul of Abyssinia – Walter Chichele
Plowden, who was in favor with the emperor – was killed
in 1860 by a rebel chieftain while making his way back to England
(Sanders 56). This event would have tended, from a public point
of view, to justify Dickens’ sense of Abyssinian barbarity;
and Ashanti barbarism would have been similarly notorious in
England. In the 1820s, the British had attempted to mediate
between the Ashantis – “one of the Akan peoples
of West Africa” (OED) living in the northern part of what is
now Ghana – and their Fanti neighbors to the south. The
British (in possession of a series of forts along the coast)
managed a treaty between the Fanti and the Ashanti aggressors
in 1820, but it was later disowned by the British governor,
Sir Charles McCarthy. McCarthy led a force into Ashanti territory
in 1824, but was beaten at the battle of Bonsaso, and his skull
became the drinking-cup of the Ashanti king (Sanders 56).
Accordingly, the forger … ; the utterer of a bad note
… ; the unlawful opener of a letter …; the purloiner
of forty shillings and sixpence … ; the holder of a horse
at Tellson’s door, who made off with it … ; the
coiner of a bad shilling … ; the sounder of three-fourths
of the notes in the whole gamut of Crime, were put to Death.
All of the crimes listed here were punishable by death in the
18th century, and the application of the death penalty –
there were over two hundred capital crimes on the books (Gatrell
7) – was not reduced until the early 19th century. 40
shillings and sixpence is just over 2 pounds (2 pounds and 6
pence), and is a trifle considering the penalty involved; similarly,
a “bad shilling” would be the counterfeit equivalent
of 1/20 of an English pound.
Dickens’ representation of the absurd
rate of execution in London is especially appropriate to the
period he represents. In the 1780s (this part of the novel
takes place in 1780) the number of convictions and executions
in London reached a record high. Five times as many people were
convicted in the second half of the 18th century as in the first,
and England was more severe than its European neighbors: Between
1774 and 1777, 139 people were executed in London, compared
to 32 in Paris; and in the 1780s, the average number of annual
executions in London rose from 48 (in the 1770s) to 70, convicts
“dang[ling] outside Newgate prison up to 20 at a time,
a sight unknown elsewhere” (Gatrell 9). The death toll
did not fall considerably until reforms beginning in the 1820s
limited the number of capital crimes (Gatrell 618-9). Thus,
Dickens’ representation of English brutality in the 18th
century – and the implicit contrast he draws to the brutality
of the French – is well substantiated by statistics from
the period. Indeed, the French look clement in comparison.
They kept him in a dark place,
like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould
upon him.
Cheeses, especially aged cheeses, are prepared in much the same
way clerks are prepared at Tellson’s. The Dictionary
of Daily Wants (1859) gives detailed instructions for
the making of cheeses, and has the following to say about aging
and storage:
The cheese is put into the cheese-room [after
the whey is pressed out of it and it has been pressed into a
shape], and protected from excessive heat,
drought, or damp at first, heat causing new cheeses to sweat;
drought dries them too quickly and induces them to crack; and
damp prevents them hardening, and induces a bitter taste. Exposed
to a cool, dry and calm air upon the shelves, the cheeses will
dry by degrees and obtain a firm skin. The cheeses should be
wiped with a dry cloth to remove any moisture, and turned daily.
Some cheeses burst and throw out a serous-like fluid, in consequence
of whey fermenting, which ought to have been pressed out. A
cheese that changes its shape indicates some organic change
going on within; but if it do not crack so as to admit the air,
it will soon become ripe, and probably of fine flavour. (265)
“Blue mould” is “the mould
of this color produced upon cheese, consisting of a fungus,
Aspergillus glaucus” (OED); cheeses of which “blue mould”
are characteristic are “blue cheeses” like the English
Stilton cheese.
… casting his breeches and gaiters into the general
weight of the establishment…
Gaiters, according to Fairholt’s Costume
in England: A History of Dress (1860), are “[e]xtra
coverings for a man’s leg, formed of cloth, buttoning
from the knee to the ankle, and covering the instep” (453).
Breeches are pants extending to just above or just below the
knee. Originally loose, breeches became tight-fitting during
the reign of William III (1685-1701) (Fairholt 400), and “were,
from the close of George II’s reign (1760), worn over
the stocking … and fastened first by buckles and afterwards
by strings” (Planché 403). This would have been
the general style in 1780. In the 19th century, long trousers
became the usual attire for men, though breeches were still
worn as court dress in the period in which Dickens was writing
(Fairholt 400).
His surname was Cruncher, and on the youthful occasion of
his renouncing by proxy the works of darkness, in the easterly
parish church of Houndsditch, he had received the added appellation
of Jerry.
In the baptismal ceremony, according to the Book of Common Prayer,
the godparents of the child being baptized are asked to “renounce
the devil and all his works” (Sanders 57) – hence
young Cruncher does so “by proxy.” Houndsditch is
in the eastern part of London, just within the old city wall,
running from Aldsgate to Bishopsgate; an 18th-century History, Description, and Survey of … London
(1776) notes that it “takes its name from having been
an[c]iently a ditch, wherein were thrown dogs, carrion, and
all kinds of filth” (488). The area, as might be expected,
was a poor one. The parish church where young Cruncher was probably
baptized – in the parish of St. Botolph without Highgate
– dates from 1720-40 (Sanders 57).
Houndsditch is visible on this portion of Thornton’s map
of London (1784), at the upper right.
Click
on map for larger view
Mr. Cruncher’s private lodging in Hanging-sword-alley,
Whitefriars…
Whitefriars, which branches off Fleet Street, running south
toward the Thames, is named for a pre-Reformation house of the
Carmelites (“Whitefriars”) located in the area (Sanders
57). As a region under the jurisdiction of the friars, Whitefriars
was originally exempt from the jurisdiction of the city. This
exemption was claimed by its residents long after the order
no longer existed there, but was finally abolished in 1697.
Hanging-sword Alley ran east off Whitefriars, and was originally
known as “Blood-bowl Alley” – it was apparently
renamed after a house (Sanders 57). In Hanging-sword Alley,
the Crunchers are not far (perhaps an eighth of a mile) from
Mr. Cruncher’s place of employment at Tellson’s
(in Fleet Street near Temple Bar).
Though Hanging-sword Alley is not visible on Thornton’s
1784 map of London (above) – the map does not give the
street names under Fleet Street in great detail – we can
find its general location nonetheless: It lay south of Fleet
Street and ran east off Whitefriars. (On the map, Whitefriars
is labeled in the Thames, just to the left of Blackfriars Bridge).
Mr. Cruncher himself always spoke of the year of our Lord
as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the Christian
era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who
had bestowed her name upon it.
“Anna Dominoes” is Mr. Cruncher’s malapropism
for Anno Domini (“A.D.”), which means
“in the year of our Lord” and refers to the period
beginning with the birth of Christ and continuing to the present
moment (OED). Dominoes (the game) is of a much more
recent date than the birth of Christ, having probably been invented
(in its original form) in China in the 14th century A.D. However,
the game seems to have made its appearance in England only in
the late 18th century, imported by way of France; the name “dominoes”
itself is not of Chinese origin, but rather alludes to the coloring
of the domino pieces, which – black and white –
resembled the “domino” (a kind of hood) worn by
priests in the wintertime, or a masquerade garment of the same
name (OED). If the
name of the game derives from the name of the priests’
garment, Jerry’s “Anna Dominoes” retains some
vestige of the religious associations of Anno Domini.
The Dictionary of Daily Wants (1859) gives the following
account of the procedure for English dominoes:
DOMINOES. – This game is played by
two or four persons, with twenty-eight pieces of oblong ivory,
plain at the back, but on the face divided by a black line in
the middle, and indented with spots, from one to a double six,
which pieces are a double-blank, ace-blank, double-ace, deuce-blank,
deuce-ace, double-deuce, trois-blank, trois-ace, trois-deuce,
double-trois, four-blank, four-ace, four-deuce, four-trois,
double-four, five-blank, five-ace, five-deuce, five-trois, five-four,
double-five, six-blank, six-ace, six-deuce, six-trois, six-four,
six-five, and double-six. Sometimes a double set is played with,
of which double twelve is the highest. At the commencement of
the game, the dominoes are well mixed, with their faces downwards.
Each person draws one, and if four play, those who choose the
two highest are partners, against those who draw the two lowest;
drawing the latter also serves to determine who is to lay down
the first piece, which is reckoned a great advantage. Afterwards
each player takes seven pieces at random. The eldest hand having
laid down one, the next must pair him at either end of the piece
he may choose, according to the number of pips or the blank
in the compartment of the piece; but whenever any party cannot
match the part, either of the domino last put down, or of that
unpaired at the other end of the row, then he says “go,”
and the next is at liberty to play. Thus they play alternately,
either until one party has played all his pieces, and thereby
won the game, or till the game be blocked; that is, when neither
party can play by matching the pieces when unpaired at either
end, then that party wins who possesses the smallest number
of pips on the pieces remaining. In playing this game it is
to the advantage of the player to dispossess himself as early
as possible of the heavy pieces, such as a double-six, five,
four, &c. Sometimes when two persons play, they take each
only seven pieces, and agree to play or draw, that is when one
cannot come in or pair the pieces on the board at the end unmatched,
he then is to draw from the fourteen pieces in stock till he
find one to suit. (382)
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