Messrs. Cruncher and Son — sixth illustration for "A Tale of Two Cities"

Messrs. Cruncher and Son

Fred Barnard

1870s

13.8 x 10.5 cm

Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham

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Jerry, messenger and part-time medical supplier (read "grave-robber") is seated next to his son, young Jerry, the relationship made immediately manifest be similarities in the clothing, posture, and physiognomy. Jerry is every inch the eighteenth-century "bully boy" straight out of such Hogarth compositions as Chairing of the Candidate, complete with rough-hewn cane suitable for street fighting. [Continued below]

Waiting to be called to deliver a letter for one of the bank's employees, the pair are leaning against the wall outside Tellson's in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book the Second, "The Golden Thread," ch. 1, "Five Years Later." (The picture is positioned on p. 28, but references a passage in an earlier chapter.)The passage Illustrated is likely this:

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. [24]

Jerry is of a much burlier, robust, and physically intimidating species of private messenger (the Victorian penny-post being many years in the offing as A Tale of Two Cities opens during the Seven Years War) than the gentle Trotty Veck, the humble ticket-porter of The Chimes (1844).

References

Dickens, Charles. The Dickens Souvenir Book. London: Chapman & Hall, 1912. P. 208.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman & Hall, 1870s. P. 28.

Last modified 14 February 2011