Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses . . . Hunger
was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was
repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that
the man sawed off; Hunger stared down the smokeless chimneys . .
. Hunger was the inscription on the baker’s shelves . . . 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. . . . (Chapter 5)
With this repetition, Dickens demonstrates that hunger
dominates every aspect of these peasants’ lives—they cannot do anything without
being reminded of their hunger. The presence of the word hunger at the opening of each clause reflects the fact that hunger is the
peasants’ first thought and first word—they have no means to escape
it. Reading the passage aloud, we become paralleled with the poor.
We encounter “Hunger” at each breath.
In addition to setting the stage for revolution—both the
historical upheaval in France and the more private but no less momentous changes
in his characters’ lives—Dickens establishes the unabashedly sentimental
tone that characterizes many of the relationships in the novel,
especially that between Doctor Manette and Lucie. As she coaxes
her father into consciousness of his previous life and identity, Lucie
emerges as a caricature of an innocent, pure-hearted, and loving
woman. Most modern readers find her speech and gestures rather saccharine:
“And if . . . I have to kneel to my honoured father, and implore
his pardon for having never for his sake striven all day and lain
awake and wept all night . . . weep for it, weep for it!” Indeed,
as a realistically imagined woman grieving over a family tragedy,
Lucie proves unconvincing. Her emotions, her speech, and even her
physical beauty belong to the realm of hyperbole. But Dickens does
not aim for realism: he employs these sorts of exaggerations for
the sake of emphasis and dramatic effect.
The Parisian revolutionaries first began addressing each
of other as “Jacques” during the Jacquerie, a 1358 peasant
uprising against French nobility. The nobles contemptuously referred
to the peasants by the extremely common name of “Jacques” in order
to accentuate their inferiority and deny their individuality. The
peasants adopted the name as a war name. Just as the fourteenth-century
peasants rallied around their shared low birth, so too do Dickens’s
revolutionaries fight as a unified machine of war. For example,
at the storming of the Bastille in Book the Second, Chapter 21,
Defarge cries out, “Work, comrades all, work! Work, Jacques One,
Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand, Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques
Five-and-Twenty Thousand . . . work!”
