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Headnote vignette
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 6, "The Shoemaker," 348.
Harper's Weekly (28 May 1859): 348. This text previously appeared in the UK in All the Year Round on 21 May 1859.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[You may use the image 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.
The headnote, which consists of an image of the door to Dr. Manette's cell in 105 North Tower of the Bastille, tells us interesting things about illustrating a text both on account of what it does and does not do. First of all, it does not actually depict a scene described in this chapter, which concerns Mr. Lorry's wakening the shattered former prisoner of the Bastille. Second, it provides a flashack of sorts, a movement back in the time of the narrative. Manette asks Lorry,
"Did you ask me for my name?"
"Assuredly I did."
"One Hundred and Five, North Tower."
"Is that all?"
"One Hundred and Five, North Tower."
With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor a groan, he bent to work again, until the silence was again broken.
"You are not a shoemaker by trade?" said Mr. Lorry, looking steadfastly at him.
His haggard eyes turned to Defarge as if he would have transferred the question to him: but as no help came from that quarter, they turned back on the questioner when they had sought the ground.
"I am not a shoemaker by trade? No, I was not a shoemaker by trade. I — I learnt it here. I taught myself. I asked leave to — "
He lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those measured changes on his hands the whole time. His eyes came slowly back, at last, to the face from which they had wandered; when they rested on it, he started, and resumed, in the manner of a sleeper that moment awake, reverting to a subject of last night. . . .
"Monsieur Manette"; Mr. Lorry laid his hand upon Defarge's arm; "do you remember nothing of this man? Look at him. Look at me. Is there no old banker, no old business, no old servant, no old time, rising in your mind, Monsieur Manette?"
As the captive of many years sat looking fixedly, by turns, at Mr. Lorry and at Defarge, some long obliterated marks of an actively intent intelligence in the middle of the forehead, gradually forced themselves through the black mist that had fallen on him. They were overclouded again, they were fainter, they were gone; but they had been there. And so exactly was the expression repeated on the fair young face of her who had crept along the wall to a point where she could see him, and where she now stood looking at him, with hand which at first had been only raised in frightened compassion, if not even to keep him off and shut out the sight of him, but which were now extending towards him, trembling with eagerness to lay the spectral face upon her warm young breast, and love it back to life and hope — so exactly was the expression repeated (though in stronger characters) on her fair young face, that it looked as though it had passed like a moving light, from him to her. [Book the First — "Recalled to Life," Chapter VI, "The Shoemaker," 348]
The image of the cell door for 105 North Tower at The Bastille suggests both the physical and psychological imprisonment that created the shattered man whom it enclosed and destroyed. But just as that iron-bound door opens, so the mental imprisonment begins to end as Manette the shoemaker slowly becomes once again Dr. Manette, the physician of Beauvais. The image thus connects the opening number's headnote vignette of the liberation of Dr. Manette with the content of this chapter; these Bastille vignettes will eventually connect Dr. Manette's unjust treatment at the hands of the Anciene Régime with that of his son-in-law, Charles Darney, at the hands of the Revolutionary tribunal in the 19 November 1859 headnote vignette [In Darnay's cell in La Force Prison, Paris].
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: 25 September 2004 [EBook #98].
Created 5 August 2007
Last modified 16 November 2025