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"So you put him in his coffin!"
8.3 cm high by 8.5 cm wide (3 ¼ by 3 ⅜ inches)
John McLenan
Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Book III, Chapter 8 ("A Hand at Cards")
The twenty-fifth installment of the novel appeared in Harper's Weekly (22 October 1859): 685; it had originally appeared in the UK on Saturday, 15 October in All the Year Round
Here, Mr. Lorry perceived the reflection on the wall to elongate, and Mr. Cruncher rose and stepped forward. His hair could not have been more violently on end, if it had been that moment dressed by the Cow with the crumpled horn in the house that Jack built.
Unseen by the spy, Mr. Cruncher stood at his side, and touched him on the shoulder like a ghostly bailiff.
"That there Roger Cly, master," said Mr. Cruncher, with a taciturn and iron-bound visage. "So you put him in his coffin?"
"I did."
"Who took him out of it?"
Barsad leaned back in his chair, and stammered, "What do you mean?"
"I mean," said Mr. Cruncher, "that he warn't never in it. No! Not he! I'll have my head took off, if he was ever in it."
The spy looked round at the two gentlemen; they both looked in unspeakable astonishment at Jerry.
"I tell you," said Jerry, "that you buried paving-stones and earth in that there coffin. Don't go and tell me that you buried Cly. It was a take in. Me and two more knows it." [Book the Third — "The Track of a Storm," Chapter VIII, "A Hand at Cards," 685]
Here McLenan depicts the point in the narrative at which Sydney Carton's interrogation reveals the secret behind Solomon Barsad's supposed burial as Roger Cly — and Jerry's finding his coffin empty. Cly and his fellow police spy, John Barsad (in fact, Miss Pross's brother, Solomon), had found equivalent positions with the French government in Paris. Jerry and Sydney Carton threaten to unmask Solomon and to denounce him to the Revolutionary Tribunal unless he assists them.
Scanned image by Philip V. Allingham; text by PVA and George P. Landow. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Allingham, Philip V. "Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Illustrated: A Critical Reassessment of Hablot Knight Browne's Accompanying Plates." Dickens Studies. 33 (2003): 109-158.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by John McLenan. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, 7 May through 3 December 1859.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities: A story of the French Revolution. Project Gutenberg e-text by Judith Boss, Omaha, Nebraska. Release Date: September 25, 2004 [EBook #98].
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. With illustrations by John McLenan and Rowland Wheelwright. Orinda, Cal.: Sea Wolf Press, 2021.
Guiliano, Edward, and Philip Collins. The Annotated Dickens. 2 vols. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1986.
Created 25 November 2007
Last modified 26 November 2025