"The Third Tumbrel" — final illustration for "A Tale of Two Cities"

"The Third Tumbrel"

Fred Barnard

1870s

13.7 x 10.5 cm

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Sydney Carton's assuming the identity of Charles Darnay in order to save Lucie, her husband, and child requires that he allow himself to be transported to the Guillotine in one of the many tumbrels expropriated by the revolutionary leaders. By coincidence, he shares his final moments with another blameless victim of anti-aristocratic hysteria. [Continued below]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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In Book the Third, "The Track of the Storm," Ch. 15, "The Footsteps Die out Forever," Carton, disguised as the last representative of the infamous Evrémondes, calmly, tenderly takes the hand of the little seamstress whom he met in ch. 13 in order to give her courage, even as the blood-thirsty mob around the cart vilifies them, and The Vengeance scrutinises him. But Barnard does not include the terrible woman, the spy, the robed ministers of Sainte Guillotine, or legion of knitting-women. Barnard focuses on Carton's tranquil reassurance of his timid companion rather than on the machinations of the plot.

John McLenan, the American illustrator for the Harper's serialisation of the novel, also focuses on the courage and tenderness of Carton in his final moments in the final Harper's Weekly instalment's "The Two Stand in the Fast-thinning Throng of Victims, etc.", 26 November 1859. In the American illustration, Carton and the seamstress have already alighted from the cart, and stand on the ground, guarded by heavily armed Jacobins. The moment in both Barnard and McLenan is something of an anti-climax since Miss Pross has already thwarted Madame Defarge's plans in "Like the soul of the furious woman whose body lay lifeless on the ground" in the McLenan sequence, and in "You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer . . ." (169) in Barnard's.

References

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. il. Phiz. London: Chapman & Hall, 1859.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. il. Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman & Hall, 1870s. P. 173.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. il. John McLenan. Harper's Weekly. (26 Nov. 1859): 765.

Last modified 21 February 2011