"A white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes." — illustration by John McLenan for "A Tale of Two Cities" in "Harper's Weekly," No. III, No. 125 (21 May 1859)

A white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes by John McLenan. Illustration for Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book I, Ch. 6, "The Shoemaker" [Dr. Manette is discovered, making shoes in the garret above the Defarges' wine-shop in St. Antoine, near The Bastille.] 8 cm high by 7.8 cm wide (3 ¼ by 3 ⅛ inches), McLenan's illustration appeared in Harper's Weekly on Saturday, 21 May (p. 325); in the T. B. Peterson volume, facing p. 41. This third instalment of the novel appeared in the UK on Saturday, 14 May, 1859, in All the Year Round. Compare this woodblock illustration to Phiz's steel-engraving The Shoemaker (June 1859). [Click on the illustration to enlarge it.]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. [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.]

The illustrations appearing here are courtesy of the E. J. Pratt Fine Arts Library, University of Toronto, and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia.

Passage Fully Realized: The Solitary Shoemaker, Late of The Bastille's 105 North Tower

The garret, built to be a depository for firewood and the like, was dim and dark: for, the window of dormer shape, was in truth a door in the roof, with a little crane over it for the hoisting up of stores from the street: unglazed, and closing up the middle in two pieces, like any other door of French construction. To exclude the cold, one half of this door was fast closed, and the other was opened but a very little way. Such a scanty portion of light was admitted through these means, that it was difficult, on first coming in, to see anything; and long habit alone could have slowly formed in any one, the ability to do any work requiring nicety in such obscurity. Yet, work of that kind was being done in the garret; for, with his back towards the door, and his face towards the window where the keeper of the wine-shop stood looking at him, a white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes. [Book the First, "The Golden Thread," Chapter V, "The Wine-Shop," 326]

Book the First, "The Golden Thread," Chapter VI, "The Shoemaker"

The shoemaker stopped his work; looked with a vacant air of listening, at floor on one side of him; then similarly, at the floor on the other side of him; then, upward at the speaker.

“What did you say?”

“You can bear a little more light?”

“I must bear it, if you let it in.” (Laying the palest shadow of a stress upon the second word.)

The opened half-door was opened a little further, and secured at that angle for the time. A broad ray of light fell into the garret, and showed the workman with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his labour. His few common tools and various scraps of leather were at his feet and on his bench. He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very long, a hollow face, and exceedingly bright eyes. The hollowness and thinness of his face would have caused them to look large, under his yet dark eyebrows and his confused white hair, though they had been really otherwise; but, they were naturally large, and looked unnaturally so. His yellow rags of shirt lay open at the throat, and showed his body to be withered and worn. He, and his old canvas frock, and his loose stockings, and all his poor tatters of clothes, had, in a long seclusion from direct light and air, faded down to such a dull uniformity of parchment-yellow, that it would have been hard to say which was which.

He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light, and the very bones of it seemed transparent. So he sat, with a steadfastly vacant gaze, pausing in his work. He never looked at the figure before him, without first looking down on this side of himself, then on that, as if he had lost the habit of associating place with sound; he never spoke, without first wandering in this manner, and forgetting to speak. [Book One: "Recalled to Life," Chapter VI, "The Shoemaker," 349]

Commentary: Recalled to Life and Identity, to the Present from the Past

Compare this woodblock illustration to Phiz's steel-engraving The Shoemaker (June 1859). Instalment No. 4 ran in the All the Year Round weekly numbers on 21 May. The third vignette has merely taken us as far as the curtain of the 21 May 1859 (fourth) number, but compels us to read the following chapter in volume (originally, in the next number) to discover who the shoemaker really is.

Other Illustrated Editions (1859-1910)

Related Material

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 John McLenan. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, 7 May through 3 December 1859.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by John McLenan (33 illustrations). Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 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.

Created 26 November 2007

Last modified 24 November 2025