“Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomies in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil” (38).
Dickens uses the technique of repetition to describe Hunger’s prevalence and by choosing to convey this point in this manner, he provides the reader with visual realizations, which make the passage much more personal and memorable. We see everyone in France (except perhaps the aristocracy) suffering from Hunger, which is exactly what Dickens was trying to accomplish – he wanted us to see their situation and understand it.
This incredibly visual scene introduces the horrible depths of hunger and despair that the poor, pathetic souls of the lower classes in France suffered throughout this time period. Dickens accomplishes this quite effectively through his detailed descriptions of the setting, the people, and the events. In France, we see the hungry lower class citizens in the streets of Saint Antoine engage in wild, mob-like excitement over spilled red wine, and see some of them even give it to their starving infants, “…men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths,” (36). In this passage, Dickens stresses the extreme hunger of these people, and just what lengths they would go to get their share of the spilled wine. Dickens’s choice of words here, particularly when describing the peoples’ “little mugs of mutilated earthenware,” create a visual image in the mind of the reader, and we are allowed to see these people as incredibly poor, dirty, and hungry peasants. Later, when Dickens describes the impoverished French populace in general, he metaphorically compares their harsh and tiresome lives to a mill that grinds away youth, and shows us just how prevalent this sad degree of poverty really is:
“Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and re-grinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a garment that the wind shook … the children had ancient faces and grave voices” (38).
In this passage, we are shown young children look old and sound tired; we see them in worn and tattered clothing, shivering in the wind. Furthering this idea, Dickens comments on the hunger of these people, and how prevalent their hunger was, “… upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere” (38). This is the reason why the cask breaking in the streets was such an important event for these starving people.
Dickens describes the peoples’ eagerness to get to the wine as being almost playful, which is quite uncharacteristic of the people of that time and place, hinting that there is a great deal of energy and drive hidden somewhere within these seemingly despairing and hopeless masses. As soon as the wine was gone, everyone went back to what they were doing, “and a gloom gathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it that sunshine,” which suggests that there is a level of built up tension just under the surface of the palpable despair omnipresent (37). And when this surface is “punctured” – triggered by an exciting event such as this – we see an explosion of bottle-up energy being released. In this case, the excitement was merely over spilled wine, but these events foreshadow the peoples’ spontaneity and their explosiveness in the French Revolution, the ultimate rupture in the oppressive layer that seems to conceal a bottled-up source of tension and wild rage.
Their actions in coming together as a group in response to the spilled wine foreshadows the coming together of all of the French people as a much larger group later, when the bloody revolution finally begins. These people were dogged in their efforts to get every last drop of wine, ending only when their supply of wine ran out, which is typical of mobs. The following passage illustrates how quickly the people join in the mob-like excitement in the streets:
“All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough irregular stones … dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers” (36).
This passage illustrates these peoples’ proclivity to stop acting as individuals and come together to act as a single entity in the presence of an exciting event such as the spilled wine, foreshadowing the same mob-like conduct when the revolution – a much greater source of excitement – begins. And, in their mob-like behavior, this event foreshadows their relentlessness in pursuing all of the “spill-able” blood. The only reason the people in the streets of Saint Antoine stop in their reveling is because they run out wine. But during the bloody French Revolution there was nothing to stop this angry mob, now encompassing all of France (instead of just Saint Antoine), because there was no end to the fresh blood to be spilled, which we see occur over and over again in the countless convictions and executions of the innocent people, chiefly among the aristocracy.
Finally, the spilling of the red wine is a critical literary device, in the larger story, because it introduces the symbolism between wine and blood, and of its foreshadowing of the French Revolution. This scene embodies the motif of wine and blood in its most vivid depiction of the entire book. This is one of Dickens’s central ideas as he reiterated it several times, most memorably when he tells us of, “…one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees – BLOOD,” which explicitly informs the reader that wine symbolizes blood. In this particular case, the wine that was spilled into the streets symbolizes the blood that will soon be spilled in the streets, foreshadowing the coming of the bloody French Revolution (37-38). Dickens makes this same exact point by saying, “The time was to come, when that wine [“blood”] too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there” (38).
The cask of wine breaking in the streets is the first pivotal scene in the story, and is one that incorporates several ingenious literary devices to convey many different key points and ideas to readers. One of the most prevalent and significant motifs in the book, wine symbolizing blood, is introduced dramatically in this chapter and is used in several ways to foreshadow the bloody French Revolution. The scene’s change in setting introduces us to France, particularly the Saint Antoine district in Paris, and gives us an emotionally and visually clear impression of the period, including the condition of the common people – poor, hungry, and maltreated. Dickens choice of words to describe their actions indicates that there is more to these people than a despairing demeanor and an emaciated appearance. They have an unusual tendency to gather in mobs when excited, and it seems as though there is a potentially explosive energy bottled up inside them, which may be triggered by the slightest occurrence, such as a cask of wine breaking in the street. Both of these foreshadow different aspects of the French Revolution, and add to the reader’s overall understanding of A Tale of Two Cities.
