Headnote vignette by John McLenan for Book I, "Recalled to Life," Chapter V, "The Wine-shop," in Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities" in "Harper's Weekly" (Part 3: 21 May 1859): "A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street."

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Headnote vignette: Book I, "Recalled to Life," Chapter V, "The Wine-shop."

John McLenan

7 cm high by 4.3 cm wide (3 inches by 1 ¾ inches)

Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book I, Chapter 5, "The Wine-shop."

Harper's Weekly, Vol. III, No. 125 (21 May 1859): 325. This text previously appeared in the UK in All the Year Round on 14 May 1859.

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use the images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned it and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

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

John McLenan's initial illustration for the third weekly number of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book I, Ch. 5, "The Wine-shop." [The St. Antoine mob is momentarily galvanized by a gigantic wine-cask breaking open. In the first larger illustration, a sans-culotte (Gaspard) prophetically scrawls "blood" (as in "the blood of the oppressors") on a wall near the Defarges' wine-shop in the poorest part of Paris, near The Bastille.] Headnote vignette is 17.4 cm high by 11.5 cm wide (6 ⅞ by 4 ⅝ inches). McLenan's initial illustrations for the new weekly serial appeared in Harper's Weekly on Saturday, 21 May (p. 325); this third instalment of the novel appeared in UK on Saturday, 14 May 1859, in All the Year Round. Contrast these violent opening companion woodblock illustrations with Phiz's steel-engraving The Shoemaker in monthly serial instalment No. 1 (June 1859). [Click on the illustration to enlarge it.]

Passage Illustrated: The St. Antoine mob scoops up the contents of a broken wine cask

A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. The accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.

All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants' mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence.

A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices — voices of men, women, and children — resounded in the street while this wine game lasted.There was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. There was a special companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part of every one to join some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. When the wine was gone, and the places where it had been most abundant were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. The man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting, set it in motion again; the women who had left on a door-step the little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved away, to descend again; and a gloom gathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than sunshine.

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees — BLOOD. [Book the First, "Recalled to Life," Chapter V, "The Wine-shop," 325]

Commentary: Gaspard, "one tall joker," prophesies the annihilation of the aristocracy.

The image of the broken wine-cask and the mob's visceral reaction anticipates the later scenes in which the impoverished proletariate take vengeance upon their aristocratic oppressors. Their animalistic response to the broken cask prepares us for the general blood-letting in the closing weekly numbers. The desperation depicted so graphically here underscores the poverty and privation of St. Antoine.

Dickens particularizes how these desperate urbanites will respond when circumstances give them the opportunity to eradicate the oppressive aristocracy. The wine from the broken cask running in the streets foreshadows the widespread carnage of the violent mob scenes and public executions of the opening stages of the French Revolution. In these scenes of carnage and retribution the Defarges will play no small part.

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 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: 25 September 2004 [EBook #98].

Created 5 August 2007

Last modified 14 November 2025