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Sydney Carton
Harry Furniss
1910
13.3 cm high x 7 cm wide, vignetted
Twenty-second illustration for A Tale of Two Cities in A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Pictures from Italy, Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing XIII, 225.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"Genuine truth, Mr. Darnay, trust me! I have gone aside from my purpose; I was speaking about our being friends. Now, you know me; you know I am incapable of all the higher and better flights of men. If you doubt it, ask Stryver, and he'll tell you so."
"I prefer to form my own opinion, without the aid of his."
"Well! At any rate you know me as a dissolute dog, who has never done any good, and never will."
"I don't know that you 'never will."
"But I do, and you must take my word for it. Well! If you could endure to have such a worthless fellow, and a fellow of such indifferent reputation, coming and going at odd times, I should ask that I might be permitted to come and go as a privileged person here; that I might be regarded as an useless (and I would add, if it were not for the resemblance I detected between you and me, an unornamental) piece of furniture, tolerated for its old service, and taken no notice of. I doubt if I should abuse the permission. It is a hundred to one if I should avail myself of it four times in a year. It would satisfy me, I dare say, to know that I had it."
"Will you try?"
"That is another way of saying that I am placed on the footing I have indicated. I thank you, Darnay. I may use that freedom with your name?"
"I think so, Carton, by this time." [Book Two, "The Golden Thread," Chapter Twenty, "A Plea," 195]
The caption which J. A. Hammerton has provided — "Tallest and most unpromising of men" — is not situated by either a chapter or a page number, although Hammerton has juxtaposed the image of Sydney Carton dressed as a barrister against his legal partner Stryver's complaining outside Tellson's about the iniquities of the revolutionary regime across the Channel in Chapter 24, "Drawn to the Loadstone Rock." However, the illustration corresponds to Carton's last major appearance, in Chapter 20, "A Plea," when the Darnays, returning home from their honeymoon, receive the dissolute attorney's congratulations.
Even as Charles Darnay feels "drawn to the loadstone rock" to rescue the functionary of the house of St. Evrémonde, Gabelle, the reader of the 1910 edition encounters this bold, freehand ink drawing of Carton, which recalls him to our minds, and thus reinforces our image of him as Darnay's double. In retrospect, then, this image would have pointed to Carton's outward likeness to Darnay as the vehicle for the young liberal aristocrat's escape from La Force at the end of the novel. Furniss makes Carton seem less physically attractive than the other illustrators have conceived of him; certainly, if not a pathetic figure, he is isolated and despondent , with unruly hair, in the Furniss study.
In the original monthly sequence of illustrations, readers encountered the Hablot Knight Browne image of the disaffected but brilliant Carton twice in the two illustrations for the second instalment, in court and then after Darnay's acquittal, outside the Old Bailey. Similarly, in his weekly illustrations for the American periodical Harper's John McLenan introduced Carton early in his narrative pictorial sequence. Although Fred Barnard in his Household Edition illustrations of 1874 realizes The Lion and the Jackal as dissolute attorneys burning the midnight oil, he does not present a study of Carton until much later on, when he vows to protect those whom Lucie cherishes.
That Carton is dressed for court, despite the absence of a wig, and appears to be leaning on a rail (perhaps of the prisoner's box) suggests that Furniss is recalling his appearance when first introduced, at Darnary's Old Bailey trial for sedition in Book One, Chapter Three, "A Disappointment," a scene vividly realized by Phiz in one of the July engravings, The Likeness. Although Furniss has depicted Carton as thoroughly inebriated in Carton Finds Consolation and as a dejected suitor in Carton Rejected, perhaps at this point in the narrative, when in the summer of 1792 France's revolutionary government has abolished titles and is feeling threatened by its neighbours, Furniss felt it necessary to remind the reader of Carton's professional competence. In contrast to Furniss's choice of illustration for this chapter, Barnard presents Carton's bombastic partner, Stryver, playing the role of a militaristic Tory, advocating Britain's intervening on the side of the aristocracy to put down the revolution.
Above: Phiz's The Likeness, set in the sedition trial of Darnay at the Old Bailey in the second monthly number (July 1859).
Left: McLenan's 11 June 1859 depiction of the courtroom scene of Darnay and his lookalike attorney, The Prisoner and His Double. Centre: Sol Eytinge, Junior's Diamond Edition only study of Sydney Carton — as a romantic hero in Sydney Carton and the Little Seamstress (1867). Right: Dixon's study of Carton and the seamstress in the third tumbril in "To the guillotine, all aristocrats!" (1905).
Above: Barnard's Household Edition illustration depicting Carton's regretful parting from Lucie Manette in Book Two, Chapter Thirteen,". . . there is a man who would give his life" (1874).
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. , 1988.
Bolton, H. Phili "A Tale of Two Cities." Dickens Dramatized. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, 395-412.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974. IX (1859-61).
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. All the Year Round. 30 April through 26 November 1859.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by John McLenan. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. 7 May through 3 December 1859.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). London: Chapman and Hall, 1859.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by A. A. Dixon. London: Collins, 1905.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 13.
Sanders, Andrew. A Companion to "A Tale of Two Cities." London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
Created 16 December 2013
Last modified 11 January 2020