A Tale of Two Cities
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.
The scene was Mr. Cruncher’s private lodging in Hanging-
sword Alley, Whitefriars: the time, half-past seven of the clock and
a windy March morning, Anno Domini seventeen hundred and
eighty. (Mr. Cruncher himself always spoke of the year of our Lord
as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the
Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a
lady who had bestowed her name upon it.) Mr. Cruncher’s
apartments were not in a savoury neighbourhood, and were but
two in number, even if a closet with a single pane of glass in it
might be counted as one. But they were very decently kept. Early
as it was, on the windy March morning, the room in which he lay
a-bed was already scrubbed throughout; and between the cups
and saucers arranged for breakfast, and the lumbering deal table,
a very clean white cloth was spread.
Mr. Cruncher reposed under a patchwork counterpane, like a
Harlequin at home. At first, he slept heavily, but, by degrees,
began to roll and surge in bed, until he rose above the surface,
with his spiky hair looking as if it must tear the sheets to ribbons.
At which juncture, he exclaimed, in a voice of dire exasperation:
“Bust me, if she ain’t at it agin!”
A woman of orderly and industrious appearance rose from her
knees in a corner, with sufficient haste and trepidation to show
that she was the person referred to.
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“What!” said Mr. Cruncher, looking out of bed for a boot.
“You’re at it agin, are you?”
After hailing the morn with this second salutation, he threw a
boot at the woman as a third. It was a very muddy boot, and may
introduce the odd circumstance connected with Mr. Cruncher’s
domestic economy, that, whereas he often came home after
banking hours with clean boots, he often got up next morning to
find the same boots covered with clay.
“What,” said Mr. Cruncher, varying his apostrophe after
missing his mark—“what are you up to, Aggerawayter?”
“I was only saying my prayers.”
“Saying your prayers! You’re a nice woman! What do you mean
by flopping yourself down and praying agin me?”
“I was not praying against you; I was praying for you.”
“You weren’t. And if you were, I won’t be took the liberty with.
Here! your mother’s a nice woman, young Jerry, going a praying
agin your father’s prosperity. You’ve got a dutiful mother, you
have, my son. You’ve got a religious mother, you have, my boy:
going and flopping herself down, and praying that the bread-andbutter may be snatched out of the mouth of her only child.”
Master Cruncher (who was in his shirt) took this very ill, and,
turning to his mother, strongly deprecated any praying away of his
personal board.
“And what do you suppose, you conceited female,” said Mr.
Cruncher, with unconscious inconsistency, “that the worth of your
prayers may be? Name the price that you put your prayers at!”
“They only come from the heart, Jerry. They are worth no more
than that.”
“Worth no more than that,” repeated Mr. Cruncher. “They ain’t
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worth much, then. Whether or no, I won’t be prayed agin, I tell
you. I can’t afford it. I’m not a going to be made unlucky by your
sneaking. If you must go flopping yourself down, flop in favour of
your husband and child, and not in opposition to ’em. If I had had
any but a unnat’ral wife, and this poor boy had had any but a
unnat’ral mother, I might have made some money last week
instead of being counterprayed and countermined and religiously
circumwented into the worst of luck. B-u-u-ust me!” said Mr.
Cruncher, who all this time had been putting on his clothes, “if I
ain’t, what with piety and one blowed thing and another, been
choused this last week into as bad luck as ever a poor devil of a
honest tradesman met with! Young Jerry, dress yourself, my boy,
and while I clean my boots keep an eye upon your mother now
and then, and if you see any signs of more flopping, give me a call.
For, I tell you,” here he addressed his wife once more, “I won’t be
gone agin, in this matter. I am as rickety as a hackney-coach, I’m
as sleepy as laudanum, my lines is strained to that degree that I
shouldn’t know, if it wasn’t for the pain in ’em, which was me and
which somebody else, yet I’m none the better for it in pocket; and
it’s my suspicion that you’ve been at it from morning to night to
prevent me from being the better for it in pocket, and I won’t put
up with it, Aggerawayter, and what do you say now!”
Growling, in addition, such phrases as “Ah! yes! You’re
religious, too. You wouldn’t put yourself in opposition to the
interests of your husband and child, would you? Not you!” and
throwing off other sarcastic sparks from the whirling grindstone of
his indignation, Mr. Cruncher betook himself to his boot-cleaning
and his general preparation for business. In the meantime, his son,
whose head was garnished with tenderer spikes, and whose young
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eyes stood close by one another, as his father’s did, kept the
required watch upon his mother. He greatly disturbed the poor
woman at intervals, by darting out of his sleeping closet, where he
made his toilet, with a suppressed cry of “You are going to flop,
mother.—Halloa, father!” and, after raising this fictitious alarm,
darting in again with an undutiful grin.
Mr. Cruncher’s temper was not at all improved when he came
to his breakfast. He resented Mrs. Cruncher’s saying grace with
particular animosity.
“Now, Aggerawayter! What are you up to? At it agin?”
His wife explained that she had merely “asked a blessing.”
“Don’t do it!” said Mr. Cruncher, looking about, as if he rather
expected to see the loaf disappear under the efficacy of his wife’s
petitions. “I ain’t a going to be blest out of house and home. I won’t
have my wittles blest off my table. Keep still!”
Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at
a party which had taken anything but a convivial turn, Jerry
Cruncher worried his breakfast rather than ate it, growling over it
like any four-footed inmate of a menagerie. Towards nine o’clock
he smoothed his ruffled aspect, and, presenting as respectable and
business-like an exterior as he could overlay his natural self with,
issued forth to the occupation of the day.
It could scarcely be called a trade, in spite of his favourite
description of himself as “a honest tradesman.” His stock
consisted of a wooden stool, made out of a broken-backed chair
cut down, which stool, young Jerry, walking at his father’s side,
carried every morning to beneath the banking-house window that
was nearest Temple Bar: where, with the addition of the first
handful of straw that could be gleaned from any passing vehicle to
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keep the cold and wet from the odd-job-man’s feet, it formed the
encampment for the day. On this post of his, Mr. Cruncher was as
well known to Fleet Street and the Temple, as the Bar itself,—and
was almost as ill-looking.
Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to touch his
three-cornered hat to the oldest of the men as they passed in to
Tellson’s, Jerry took up his station on this windy March morning,
with young Jerry standing by him, when not engaged in making
forays through the Bar, to inflict bodily and mental injuries of an
acute description on passing boys who were small enough for his
amiable purpose. Father and son, extremely like each other,
looking silently on at the morning traffic in Fleet Street, with their
two heads as near to one another as the two eyes of each were,
bore a considerable resemblance to a pair of monkeys. The
resemblance was not lessened by the accidental circumstance,
that the mature Jerry bit and spat out straw, while the twinkling
eyes of the youthful Jerry were as restlessly watchful of him as of
everything else in Fleet Street. The head of one of the regular
indoor messengers attached to Tellson’s establishment was put
through the door, and the word was given:
“Porter wanted!”
“Hooray, father! Here’s an early job to begin with!”
Having thus given his parent God speed, young Jerry seated
himself on the stool, entered on his reversionary interest in the
straw his father had been chewing, and cogitated.
“Always rusty! His fingers is always rusty!” muttered young
Jerry. “Where does my father get all that iron rust from? He don’t
get no iron rust here!”
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Chapter VIII
A SIGHT
“Y ou know the Old Bailey well, no doubt?” said one of
the oldest of clerks to Jerry the messenger.
“Ye-es, sir,” returned Jerry, in something of a
dogged manner. “I do know the Bailey.”
“Just so. And you know Mr. Lorry.”
“I know Mr. Lorry, sir, much better than I know the Bailey.
Much better,” said Jerry, not unlike a reluctant witness at the
establishment in question, “than I, as a honest tradesman, wish to
know the Bailey.”
“Very well. Find the door where the witnesses go in, and show
the door-keeper this note for Mr. Lorry. He will then let you in.”
“Into the court, sir?”
“Into the court.”
Mr. Cruncher’s eyes seemed to get a little closer to one another,
and to interchange the inquiry, “What do you think of this?”
“Am I to wait in the court, sir?” he asked, as the result of that
conference.
“I am going to tell you. The door-keeper will pass the note to
Mr. Lorry, and do you make any gesture that will attract Mr.
Lorry’s attention, and show him where you stand. Then what you
have to do is, to remain there until he wants you.”
“Is that all, sir?”
“That is all. He wishes to have a messenger at hand. This is to
tell him you are there.”
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As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the
note, Mr. Cruncher, after surveying him in silence until he came to
the blotting-paper stage, remarked:
“I suppose they’ll be trying Forgeries this morning?”
“Treason!”
“That’s quartering,” said Jerry. “Barbarous!”
“It is the law,” remarked the ancient clerk, turning his
surprised spectacles upon him. “It is the law.”
“It’s hard in the law to spile a man, I think. It’s hard enough to
kill him, but it’s werry hard to spile him, sir.”
“Not at all,” returned the ancient clerk. “Speak well of the law.
Take care of your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the
law to take care of itself. I give you that advice.”
“It’s the damp, sir, what settles on my chest and voice,” said
Jerry. “I leave you to judge what a damp way of earning a living
mine is.”
“Well, well,” said the old clerk; “we all have our various ways of
gaining a livelihood. Some of us have damp ways, and some of us
have dry ways. Here is the letter. Go along.”
Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to himself with less
internal deference than he made an outward show of, “You are a
lean old one, too,” made his bow, informed his son, in passing, of
his destination, and went his way.
They hanged at Tyburn in those days, so the street outside
Newgate had not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since
attached to it. But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of
debauchery and villainy were practised, and where dire diseases
were bred, that came into court with the prisoners, and sometimes
rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself,
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and pulled him off the bench. It had more than once happened,
that the Judge in the black cap pronounced his own doom as
certainly as the prisoner’s, and even died before him. For the rest,
the Old Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly inn-yard, from
which pale travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches, on a
violent passage into the other world: traversing some two miles
and a half of public street and road, and shaming few good
citizens, if any. So powerful is use, and so desirable to be good use
in the beginning. It was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old
institution, that inflicted a punishment of which no one could
foresee the extent; also, for the whipping-post, another dear old
institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action;
also, for extensive transactions in blood-money, another fragment
of ancestral wisdom, systematically leading to the most frightful
mercenary crimes that could be committed under Heaven.
Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of
the precept that “Whatever is, is right”; an aphorism that would be
as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome
consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.
Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and
down this hideous scene of action, with the skill of a man
accustomed to make his way quietly, the messenger found out the
door he sought, and handed in his letter through a trap in it. For,
people then paid to see the play at the Old Bailey, just as they paid
to see the play in Bedlam—only the former entertainment was
much the dearer. Therefore, all the Old Bailey doors were well
guarded—except, indeed, the social doors by which the criminals
got there, and those were always left wide open.
After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly turned on its
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