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The Lion and the Jackal
8.3 cm high by 8.5 cm wide (3 ¼ by 3 ⅜ inches)
John McLenan
18 June 1859
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapter 5, "The Jackal," 398. It was reproduced in the T. B. Peterson (Philadephia) volume, facing page 65.
The illustrations are courtesy of the E. J. Pratt Fine Arts Library, University of Toronto, and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia.
Those were drinking days, and most men drank hard. So very great is the improvement Time has brought about in such habits, that a moderate statement of the quantity of wine and punch which one man would swallow in the course of a night, without any detriment to his reputation as a perfect gentleman, would seem, in these days, a ridiculous exaggeration. The learned profession of the law was certainly not behind any other learned profession in its Bacchanalian propensities; neither was Mr. Stryver, already fast shouldering his way to a large and lucrative practice, behind his compeers in this particular, any more than in the drier parts of the legal race.
A favourite at the Old Bailey, and eke at the Sessions, Mr. Stryver had begun cautiously to hew away the lower staves of the ladder on which he mounted. Sessions and Old Bailey had now to summon their favourite, specially, to their longing arms; and shouldering itself towards the visage of the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of King's Bench, the florid countenance of Mr. Stryver might be daily seen, bursting out of the bed of wigs, like a great sunflower pushing its way at the sun from among a rank garden-full of flaring companions.
It had once been noted at the Bar, that while Mr. Stryver was a glib man, and an unscrupulous, and a ready, and a bold, he had not that faculty of extracting the essence from a heap of statements, which is among the most striking and necessary of the advocate's accomplishments. But, a remarkable improvement came upon him as to this. The more business he got, the greater his power seemed to grow of getting at its pith and marrow; and however late at night he sat carousing with Sydney Carton, he always had his points at his fingers' ends in the morning.
Sydney Carton, idlest and most unpromising of men, was Stryver's great ally. What the two drank together, between Hilary Term and Michaelmas, might have floated a king's ship. Stryver never had a case in hand, anywhere, but Carton was there, with his hands in his pockets, staring at the ceiling of the court; they went the same Circuit, and even there they prolonged their usual orgies late into the night, and Carton was rumoured to be seen at broad day, going home stealthily and unsteadily to his lodgings, like a dissipated cat. At last, it began to get about, among such as were interested in the matter, that although Sydney Carton would never be a lion, he was an amazingly good jackal, and that he rendered suit and service to Stryver in that humble capacity. [Book the Second, "The Golden Thread," Chapter V, "The Jackal," 398]
Dickens goes to such pains to develop the listless, dissatisfied, and somewhat alcoholic Sydney Carton, a brilliant legal mind without any real purpose in life, that providing illustrations featuring the disaffected barrister at this point in the narrative must have seemed superfluous to successive illustrators of the novel. However, in the 1874 Household Edition Fred Barnard has provided a contrast between the exploitative senior partner, enjoying his punch, and the diligent Carton in a wood-engraving with the same title as McLenan's: The Lion and the Jackal (15 June 1859). John McLenan's headnote vignette for serial episode 7 (Book the Second, Chapter 5), focuses not merely on Carton's being debauched, but also on his essential social isolation and despondent nature. However, the British and American illustrations offer fundamentally the same view of Sydney Carton, barrister and partner of Mr. Stryver, rising young defence attorney. Carton's is the brilliant legal mind, and therefore it is he ("The Jackal") rather than his egotistical, exuberant partner ("The Lion") who assiduously applies himself to the paperwork that will support the cases they present on the following day. But he definitely drinks as he works, and is, as Phiz's second presentation of him suggests in the July 1859 instalment, reticent to participate in social gatherings.
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 in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
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: September 25, 2004 [EBook #98].
Created 5 August 2007
Last modified 26 November 2025