He took out a blackened pipe.
John McLenan
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapter 22, "The Sea Still Rises."
8.4 cm high by 8 cm wide (3 ¼ by 3 ⅛ inches)
Harper's Weekly (10 September 1859): 589; appeared in UK on Saturday, 3 September in All the Year Round.
Scanned image by Philip V. Allingham; text by PVA and George P. Landow.
[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Passage Illustrated
"How goes it, Jacques?"
"All well, Jacques."
"Touch then!"
They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap of stones.
"No dinner?"
"Nothing but supper now," said the mender of roads, with a hungry face.
"It is the fashion," growled the man. "I meet no dinner anywhere."
He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and steel, pulled at it until it was in a bright glow: then, suddenly held it from him and dropped something into it from between his finger and thumb, that blazed and went out in a puff of smoke.
"Touch then." It was the turn of the mender of roads to say it this time, after these operations. They again joined hands.
"To-night?" said the mender of roads.
"To-night," said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth.
"Where?"
"Here."
He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking silently at one another, with the hail driving in between them like a pigmy charge of bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the village. [Book the Second — "The Golden Thread," Chapter XXII, "The Sea Still Rises," 589]
Other Illustrated Editions (1859-1910)
- Hablot K. Brown or 'Phiz' (16 illustrations, 1859)
- Sol Eytinge, Junior (8 illustrations, 1867)
- Fred Barnard (25 illustrations, 1874)
- A. A. Dixon (12 illustrations, 1905)
- Harry Furniss (32 illustrations, 1910)
Related Material
- John McLenan's Thirty-One Headnote Vignettes for A Tale of Two Cities in Harper's Weekly (7 May — 3 December 1859)
- Phiz's July 1859 Plates for Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities
- French Revolution
- Victorian Images of the French Revolution
- "A Tale of Two Cities (1859): A Model of the Integration of History and Literature"
Bibliography
Allingham, Philip V. "Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Illustrated: A Critical Reassessment of Hablot Knight Browne's Accompanying Plates." Dickens Studies. 33 (2003): 109-158.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 21 November 1859.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by John McLenan. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, 7 May through 3 December 1859.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities: A story of the French Revolution. Project Gutenberg e-text by Judith Boss, Omaha, Nebraska. Release Date: September 25, 2004 [EBook #98].
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. With illustrations by John McLenan and Rowland Wheelwright. Orinda, Cal.: Sea Wolf Press, 2021.
Guiliano, Edward, and Philip Collins. The Annotated Dickens. 2 vols. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1986.
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Created 28 November 2007
Last modified 12 November 2025