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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 II, Chapter 1, "Five Years Later."
Harper's Weekly (4 June 1859): 365. This text had previously appeared in the UK in All the Year Round on 28 May 1859.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The illustrations appear here courtesy of the E. J. Pratt Fine Arts Library, University of Toronto, and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia.
Above: The Household Edition's rendering of Jerry Cruncher and Young Jerry by Fred Barnard (1874), and Jerry Cruncher and Wife by Sol Eytinge, Jr. (1867).
Outside Tellson's — never by any means in it, unless called in — was an odd-job-man, an occasional porter and messenger, who served as the live sign of the house. He was never absent during business hours, unless upon an errand, and then he was represented by his son: a grisly urchin of twelve, who was his express image. People understood that Tellson's, in a stately way, tolerated the odd-job-man. The house had always tolerated some person in that capacity, and time and tide had drifted this person to the post. His surname was Cruncher, and on the youthful occasion of his renouncing by proxy the works of darkness, in the easterly parish church of Houndsditch, he had received the added appellation of Jerry." (See below for a description of Tellson's Bank, adjacent to Temple Bar in Houndsditch, a physical setting which provides the social context for the introduction of Cruncher.) [Book the Second — "The Golden Thread," Chapter I, "Five Years Later," 365.]
Tellson's Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place, moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness, proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was no passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more convenient places of business. Tellson's (they said) wanted no elbow-room, Tellson's wanted no light, Tellson's wanted no embellishment. Noakes and Co.'s might, or Snooks Brothers' might; but Tellson's, thank Heaven! —
Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the question of rebuilding Tellson's. In this respect the House was much on a par with the Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable. . . .
The notorious place for public executions in eighteenth-century London, Temple Bar, seems to be an unlikely location for so august a financial institution as Tellson's Bank. Disreputable Houndsditch, stretching from Aldgate High Street to Bishopsgate, built on the site of the ancient moat, hardly seems consonant with so respectable a commercial agent as Mr. Jervis Lorry, the bank's leading representative. But its dubious social context is well suited to the bank-messenger who doubles as a grave-robber. Until 1722 the heads of executed traitors were displayed on Temple Bar. Dickens apparently based Tellson's on Child & Co., a bank founded in the seventeenth century, opposite Temple Bar, which once separated Fleet Street from the Strand. Like the eighteenth-century English aristocracy, Tellson's prides itself on its reluctance to embrace modernity.
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.
_______. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, November 1859.
_______. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. XIII.
_______. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874. VIII.
_______. 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].
Sanders, Andrew. A Companion to "A Tale of Two Cities." London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
Vann, J. Don. "A Tale of Two Cities in All the Year Round, 30 April — 26 November 1859." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1985. Pp. 71-72.
Created 5 August 2007
Last modified 23 November 2025