Map resources for A Tale of two cities - London
Temple bar and the inns of court
Most of the London sequences in A Tale of Two Cities are located within the environs of the Inns of Court. These professional associations have serviced barristers in the UK since medieval times, and they sprawl in collegiate comfort in a narrow stretch of town between the Old Bailey, to the east, and the Strand to the west.
Tellson’s Bank is situated by Temple Bar, where the Royal Courts of Justice now stand. Stryver’s chambers are in the Middle Temple. Jerry Cruncher’s lodgings are in Hanging Sword Alley. Sidney Carton and Charles Darnay are introduced in a trial scene at the Old Bailey, and they celebrate Darnay’s acquittal at a tavern off Ludgate - almost certainly Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a public house on Fleet Street which dates from the days of the Great Fire of London.
This was a part of London Dickens knew well from his days as a clerk in chambers in Gray’s Inn, and scenes from many of his novels are set here - most famously, in Bleak House, where the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce drags on in Chancery.
SOHO SQUARE
The domestic scenes in A Tale of Two Cities focus on Soho Square. This is where the Manette family live after Doctor Manette’s ‘resurrection’ from the Bastille. Dickens describes Soho Square in those days (the early 1780s) as an almost rural environment, north of the bustle of the city -
There were few buildings then, north of the Oxford-road, and forest-trees flourished, and wild flowers grew, and the hawthorn blossomed, in the now vanished fields. As a consequence, country airs circulated in Soho with vigorous freedom, instead of languishing into the parish like stray paupers without a settlement; and there was many a good south wall, not far off, on which the peaches ripened in their season.
A street just south of Soho Square, once called Rose Street, is now called Manette Street in honour of the novel.
Map resources for A Tale of two cities - PAris
the Rue St Antoine
The Wineshop where we are introduced to the Defarges sits on the Rue St Antoine. It is described as being close to the fountain of St Catherine - where the Marquis' carriage runs over the child - and near La Force, the ancient medieval prison where Darnay is first imprisoned.
Nb the St Catherine can just be made out in the 1739 map below. (Be aware this 1739 map is looking east; the 1`778 is a more conventional map with north at the top).
the bastille
The Île de la Cité
After his second arrest, Darnay is brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal, which meets in the Palais de Justice. He is thereafter incarcerated in the Conciergerie, awaiting the execution of his sentence.
TUMBRILS
The death carts roll from the Conciergerie, down the Rue Saint Honoré to the Place de la Revolution - called the Place de Louis XV on the 1778 map. Here, the guillotine stands waiting.
St Germain-des-Prés
Across the river on the rive gauche stand what Dickens calls the ‘lighter streets’, the genteel streets of St-Germain-des-Prés, where the aristocrats have their mansions. This is where Lucie lives in the months of Darnay’s captivity.
This is where the Paris branch of Tellson’s Bank stands, in a corner of the Monseigneur’s mansion, now overrun with revolutionaries.
