Headnote Vignette
John McLenan
25 June 1859
7 cm high by 4.3 cm wide (3 inches by 1 ¾ inches)
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapter 6, "Hundreds of People."
Harper's Weekly, Vol. III, No. 130 (25 June 1859): 405; this text previously appeared in the UK in All the Year Round on 18 June 1859.
Earlier that evening, the Manettes and their guests had gathered outside the house at Soho, a garden idyll that Phiz made the basis for Under the Plane Tree (issued in November 1859 as the frontispiece for the British volume edition). This atmospheric vignette actually realizes at the close of the chapter and the curtain of the weekly instalment. After so quiet an evening Dickens injects a note of impending menace: "see the great crowd of people with its rush and roar, bearing down upon then, too."
The illustrations appearing here are courtesy of the E. J. Pratt Fine Arts Library, University of Toronto, and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia.
