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Carton rejected
Harry Furniss
1910
13.5 cm high x 8.5 cm wide, vignetted
Fourteenth illustration for A Tale of Two Cities in A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Pictures from Italy, The Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing XIII, 144.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"Be comforted!" he said, "I am not worth such feeling, Miss Manette. An hour or two hence, and the low companions and low habits that I scorn but yield to, will render me less worth such tears as those, than any wretch who creeps along the streets. Be comforted! But, within myself, I shall always be, towards you, what I am now, though outwardly I shall be what you have heretofore seen me. The last supplication but one I make to you, is, that you will believe this of me."
"I will, Mr. Carton."
"My last supplication of all, is this; and with it, I will relieve you of a visitor with whom I well know you have nothing in unison, and between whom and you there is an impassable space. It is useless to say it, I know, but it rises out of my soul. For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything. If my career were of that better kind that there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you. Try to hold me in your mind, at some quiet times, as ardent and sincere in this one thing. The time will come, the time will not be long in coming, when new ties will be formed about you — ties that will bind you yet more tenderly and strongly to the home you so adorn — the dearest ties that will ever grace and gladden you. O Miss Manette, when the little picture of a happy father's face looks up in yours, when you see your own bright beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!"
He said, "Farewell!" said a last "God bless you!" and left her. [Book Two, "The Golden Thread," Chapter Thirteen, "The Fellow of No Delicacy," 142-143: the picture's original caption has been emphasized]
Just as, in Mr. Stryver, the egotistical attorney is due for a disappointment in pursuit of Lucie Manette, so the virtuous wastrel genuinely in love with the golden-haired beauty, she rejects Sydney Carton, who might have reformed himself under her benign influence, as a suitor — in favour of his serious double, Charles Darnay. Despite the fact that this emotionally-charged scene is crucial to Carton's later sacrificing his own life for Darnay's by trading places with him in La Force, only Fred Barnard among the nineteenth-century illustrators of the novel had previously attempted it. Furniss's emphasis is not divided like Barnard's as he focuses on the dejected Carton in the foreground, and places a pensive Lucie well into the background, so that the illustrator compels the reader-viewer to sympathize with the young lawyer. To further this identification, Furniss minimizes the setting, whereas Barnard particularizes the drawing-room with its eighteenth-century appurtenances: the screen, the embroidery frame, the large Chinese vase, the barley-cane legged table, and the mirror with paired candles. In the midst of this quiet, refined, domestic setting Barnard stages this romantic scene. In contrast, Furniss sketches in Carton with vigorous strokes in pen-and-ink, charging the figure with an energy that will carry him to the scaffold to protect the man whom Lucie has preferred to himself. An elegant detail which reveals his complex state of mind is Carton's gesture of farewell as Lucie, disregarding his exit entirely, look towards her future as the wife of Darnay.
In many of the ornamental title-pages' Characters in the Story for the eighteen-volume Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), Furniss shows Carton in just such a pose as we see him here, dejectedly walking away — not from Lucie Manette, but from his romantic rival, Darnay (lower left), in such volumes as The Dickens Companion (volume 18) and The Dickens Picture-Book (volume 17). As an Impressionist, Furniss must have felt that this sketch revealed not merely the emotional state of a single, interestingly conflicted character, but also much about the writer's ability to draw such compelling characters.
Left: John McLenan's study of the inebriated barrister, Headnote vignette for Book Two, Chapter Four. Right: Phiz's study of the alienated Carton in the aftermath of Carton's exoneration, "Congratulations" (July 1859).
Left: Fred Barnard's dual study of the departing Carton and Lucie Manette in "...there is a man who would give his life" (1874), and (right) Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s study of a decidedly more handsome Carton on the scaffold, "Sydney Carton and The Seamstress" (1867). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
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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 18 November 2013
Last modified 8 January 2020