File:T2C Tellson's Bank with Jerry Cruncher hanging outside (John McLenan).jpeg

English: A Tale of Two Cities, illustration by John McLenan, Tellson's Bank, with Cruncher hanging outside.

Headnote vignette

John McLenan

1859

Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book II, Chapter 1, "Five Years Later"

Harper's Weekly (4 June 1859): 365. This text previously appeared in the UK in All the Year Round on 28 May 1859.

Passage illustrated: "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 Hounsditch, he had received the added appellation of Jerry." [See below for a description of Tellson's Bank, which provides the context for the introduction of Cruncher.]

Scanned image by Philip V. Allingham; text by PVA and George P. Landow.