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"Farewell!"
Harry Furniss
1910
14 cm high x 9.5 cm wide, vignetted
Thirtieth illustration for A Tale of Two Cities in A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Pictures from Italy, Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing XIII, 320.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The Judges having to take part in a public demonstration out of doors, the Tribunal adjourned. The quick noise and movement of the court's emptying itself by many passages had not ceased, when Lucie stood stretching out her arms towards her husband, with nothing in her face but love and consolation.
"If I might touch him! If I might embrace him once! O, good citizens, if you would have so much compassion for us!"
There was but a gaoler left, along with two of the four men who had taken him last night, and Barsad. The people had all poured out to the show in the streets. Barsad proposed to the rest, "Let her embrace him then; it is but a moment." It was silently acquiesced in, and they passed her over the seats in the hall to a raised place, where he, by leaning over the dock, could fold her in his arms.
"Farewell, dear darling of my soul. My parting blessing on my love. We shall meet again, where the weary are at rest!"
They were her husband's words, as he held her to his bosom. [Book Three, "The Track of a Storm," Chapter Eleven, "Dusk," 317-18: the picture's original caption has been emphasized]
Whereas Dickens's original illustrator, Hablot Knight Browne, perhaps in conjunction with the author, elected to realise the moment when Lucie faints and must be supported by Carton (signalling the importance of his reintroduction into the narrative), Harry Furniss has decided to focus, as Fred Barnard had done in the Household Edition, on the moment of parting between the condemned prisoner and his desperate wife. In this pictorial climax, Lucie clasps Charles about the neck after the court's dread sentence confirmed unanimously by the jurors amidst the roaring approval of the onlookers. Shortly, as the court has decreed (and as, indeed, happened to almost three thousand prisoners during the Reign of Terror), Charles must return to the Conciergerie and face execution upon the public scaffold "within four-and-twenty hours" (last line of Chapter Ten, "The Substance of the Shadow" (317).
With a program of thirty-two illustrations to complete and apparently no concern about repeating Phiz's illustrations, Furniss again reinterprets one of the original 1859 monthly illustrations, After the Sentence. What distiguishes this reworking of the fifty-year-old steel engraving is Furniss's audacity in shifting the focus from Lucie and the central male figure (Sydney Carton in the 1859 engraving), and their flanking supporters (Jarvis Lorry to the left; Doctor Manette to the right) towards the minor group of John Barsad, the gaoler, and one of the arresting officers (he of the Phrygian cap in Phiz's plate). In the original, Lorry and Carton assume prominence as possible actors in Darnay's release whereas Doctor Manette seems impotent as he is overwhelmed by frustration and descends into despair. Having already parted from her doomed husband, Lucie is now supported by the other male guardians of the Darnay family as Mr. Lorry sympathetically takes her hand, and her father tears his hair to express his sense of his own powerlessness to influence the outcome of events that his secret document, written in his own blood twenty-five years earlier in his Bastille cell.
Whereas in the scene of his son-in-law's rearrest, A Knock at the Door, Furniss's Doctor Manette with his lamp is central although barely visible in the background, as if powerless to avert his son-in-law's fate, here Doctor Manette, with his streaming hair and bulging eyes, is positioned in the extreme upper-right, behind Lucie. The oaffish, coarse-featured, uniformed gaoler in the Phrygian cap, distinguished by his ring of keys (centre), dominates the scene by his size and central location, as well as by his casual pose, substantial girth, and gigantic sabre — a leering figure who with his weapon and his keys to the condemned cells in the Conciergerie exemplifies the Revolution at its worst, utterly unmoved by the fate of those consigned to his charge before their public execution.
As unpleasant and crude as Defarge, producing the letter he found and exhibiting in court, in John MacLenan's serial illustration in Harper's Weekly, 29 October 1859, This is that written paper!", the identity of this functionary is undoubted, as are those of the much smaller figures of Charles and Lucie above him in the prisoner's docket. However, the identities of the other four figures remain problematic. From the letterpress we know that Barsad is one the three others present, and, indeed, that it is he rather than the gaoler who assumes control of the situation by permitting the tearful farewell. Since the recognition of his authority by the guards and turnkey will be instrumental in Carton's substituting himself for Darnay, Barsad's presence here is significant, so that the illustrator should somehow acknowledge his influence here. However, Furniss has (or appears to have) included a despondent Lorry in the lower left, but to have left Barsad (readily identifiable by his distinctive nose from Furniss's earlier study, "John Barsad," the Spy) out of the frame altogether.
Accordingly, considering that Furniss has selected for realisation an earlier moment than that in Phiz's illustration, perhaps a more useful point of reference for Furniss's composition is not Phiz's (which in fact relates to developments after Charles's exit), but that of Fred Barnard in the Household Edition, As he was drawn away, his wife released him, and stood looking after him with her hands touching one another in the attitude of prayer since it realises precisely the same scene, albeit in the markedly realistic and theatrical style of the Sixties. Although he is well to the right of the composition, Darnay remains the focal character because he is framed by the open door, the light beyond haloing his head. His supporting figures, the Jacobin guard and the dour gaoler, upstage, are balanced by the three downstage figures of Doctor Manette (left, giving way to despair), Mr. Lorry, and Lucie (centre), each distinguished by varying responses to the condemned prisoner's departure.
Barnard captures the moment of dignified stillness that immediately follows the general clearing of the courtroom when, having embraced her husband for the last time (she thinks), Lucie releases Charles — in other words, Barnard's moment illustrated occurs immediately after that which Furniss has selected. The Household Edition illustrator, capturing the expression of inevitability on the faces of Darnay and his lean, well-dressed gaoler (in form and feature utterly different from Furniss's lout), disposes his figures across the space as if it were a narrow stage, directing the gazes of the characters upstage, to the departing Darnay in the doorway, organising the characters into two groups of three; downstage right (i. e., the viewer's left), the psychologically shattered Dr. Manette, "draw[ing] his hands through his white hair, and wring[ing] them with with a shriek of anguish" (Household Edition, 155; Charles Dickens Library Edition, 318), Mr. Lorry, and Lucie; upstage left, a guard, Darnay, and the turnkey or gaoler, identified by his keys — presumably, then, the shadowy profile just outside the door is Barsad's. Thus, Barnard has maintained Barsad as a mysterious, shadowy figure, even while realising all the particulars provided in the text.
Organizing his figures on a staircase rather than on a stage, Furniss seems to have felt free to experiment with the postures of all of the figures except those of Charles and Lucie Darnay, even going so far as omitting the ambivalent Barsad, in order to contrast the stoicism of the noble Darnay and the tenderness of Luciewith the surly callousness of the inappropriately jocular gaoler, again a less human and more animalistic figure than the victim of Revolutionary justice and his family and friends. Furniss therefore undercuts sentimentality of the moment somewhat by his more satirical treatment of the turnkey as Furniss thrusts husband and wife into the background, and sets the scene in a space characterized by depth of field, as opposed to the more "stagey" strategy of Barnard and Phiz, who have placed figures of approximately the same size in a horizontally rather than vertically organised plate.
Above: Phiz's After the Sentence in the seventh monthly number (December 1859).
Left: McLenan's 12 November 1859 Headnote vignette for Book III, Chapter 11, Dusk. Right: Dixon's version of Darnay's re-arrest following the Defarges' denunciation, "I know you, Evrémonde!" (1905).
Above: Barnard's Household Edition illustration depicting Darnay's being led away after being found guilty at his second trial in Book Three, Chapter Nine, "As he was drawn away, his wife released him, and stood looking after him with her hands touching one another in the attitude of prayer (1874).
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Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974. IX (1859-61).
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. All the Year Round. 30 April through 26 November 1859.
__________. 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 Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). London: Chapman and Hall, 1859.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by A. A. Dixon. London: Collins, 1905.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 13.
Sanders, Andrew. A Companion to "A Tale of Two Cities." London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
Created 3 January 2014
Last modified 12 January 2020