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"I mark this cross of blood upon him, as a sign that I do it."
John McLenan
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book III, Chapter 10 ("The Substance of the Shadow")
9 by 9.2 cm (3 ⅜ inches high by 3 ½ inches wide), vignetted.
The twenty-seventh installment of the novel appeared in Harper's Weekly (5 November 1859): 717; it had originally appeared in the UK on Saturday, 29 October in All the Year Round.
"He! Proud as these nobles are, he is afraid to see me. Where is the man who was here? Turn my face to him.'
"I did so, raising the boy's head against my knee. But, invested for the moment with extraordinary power, he raised himself completely: obliging me to rise too, or I could not have still supported him.
"Marquis," said the boy, turned to him with his eyes opened wide, and his right hand raised, "in the days when all these things are to be answered for, I summon you and yours, to the last of your bad race, to answer for them. I mark this cross of blood upon you, as a sign that I do it. In the days when all these things are to be answered for, I summon your brother, the worst of the bad race, to answer for them separately. I mark this cross of blood upon him, as a sign that I do it."
"Twice, he put his hand to the wound in his breast, and with his forefinger drew a cross in the air. He stood for an instant with the finger yet raised, and as it dropped, he dropped with it, and I laid him down dead. [Book the Third — "The Track of a Storm," Chapter X, "The Substance of the Shadow," 717]
During the course of the flashback in Chapter 10 provided by Dr. Manette's written narrative, secreted in the Bastille for years, Therèse Defarge's brother with his dying breath curses the Marquis St. Evrémonde and his "race," which will therefore carry forward his malediction to the hapless Charles Darnay in the next generation. The illustration underscores the scene of the dying brother's cursing the St. Evrémnde brothers and their noble lineage for exercising their right as French nobles to have their way sexually with his recently married sister in December, 1757. Although it is now ten years since these events transpired, Dr. Manette recalls every detail with vivid accuracy. The climax is not the brother's denunciation of the haughty St. Evrémnde brothers depicted here, but Dr. Manette's abduction by their agents and his being consigned to the Bastille for his having denounced them to the Minister of Justice.
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.]
The illustrations appear here courtesy of the E. J. Pratt Fine Arts Library, University of Toronto; the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
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 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.
Sanders, Andrew. A Companion to "A Tale of Two Cities." The Dickens Companion Series, Vol. 4. London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
Created 25 November 2007
Last modified 30 November 2025