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NOTES ON ISSUE 7: ALLUSIONS
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Mr. Cruncher sat watching the two
streams, like the heathen rustic who has for several centuries been on
duty watching one stream – saving that Jerry had no expectation of
their ever running dry.
It has been suggested that the “heathen rustic” Mr. Cruncher resembles
is Charon, the boatman who ferries souls across the river Styx (Sanders
104). Charon, however, is a god, and though he is heathen from a
Christian point of view, and rustic to the extent that he labors in
obscurity, he does not so much “watch” the Styx as carry the dead
across it; also, boating for all eternity, he probably does not harbor
any expectation of the Styx running dry. Sanders, in his Companion
to A Tale of Two Cities, suggests instead that the “heathen
rustic” is a statue of a river god, perhaps the Marforio in Rome, which
Dickens could have seen in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on his trip to
Italy in 1844 (105). Marforio, probably either a personification of a
river or a representation of Neptune, is mounted above a small
fountain, and dates from the 1st or 2nd century A.D. The statue has
lodged in the Palazzo dei Conservatori since 1644; a picture of it can
be viewed at the Capitoline Museum website, www.museicapitolini.org/en/museo/sezioni.asp?l1=4&l2=3
Time was, when a poet sat upon a stool in a public
place, and mused in the sight of men.
The poet alluded to here is Dante (1265-1321). Dickens refers to
Dante’s habit of setting up a stool in public in both Pictures
from Italy – “And here … is ‘the Stone of DANTE,’ where (so the
story runs) he was used to bring his stool, and sit in contemplation” –
and Little Dorrit, where Dante is known to the ill-educated
Sparkler as “an eccentric man in the nature of an Old File, who used to
put leaves round his head, and sit upon a stool for some unaccountable
purpose, outside the Cathedral at Florence” (qtd. in Sanders 104). The
“unaccountable purpose” may have been that of viewing the construction
of the cathedral, which was begun in 1296 (The Florence of Dante).
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