218 / 248
218
THE FLOWING BOWL
Gordon's favourite brew appears to have been
hot mulled wine.
As for the rest of the rioters,
they drank, after the manner of rioters, anything
they could get.
The first mention of wine in A Tale of^ Two
Cities is the fall and breakage, pro hono publico^ of
a large cask of inferior claret in the district of
St. Antoine—emblematic of the blood to be spilt
in Paris later on—which called forth the delight
ful, philosophic remark of Defarge, the master
of the wine-shop to which the cask had been
consigned; " It is not my affair. The people
from the market did it. Let them bring another,"
But the chief imbibers in the book are Sydney
Carton and Serjeant Stryver, the pushing and
successful advocate for whom the other "devilled."
Stryver, we gather from Edmund Yates's Retnini-
scences^ was modelled by Dickens, from Mr.
Edwin James, Q.C., who at one time "stood
high in popular favour," and who " liked talking."
There is plenty of subsequent moderate drinking
—in Defarge's wine-shop principally—but with
the exception of these two advocates, Stryver and
Carton—" what the two drank together, between
Hilary Term and Michaelmas might have floated
a king's ship"—nobody appears to swallow an
undue amount of alcohol, in this the most power
ful, and the saddest, of all Dickens's books.
I could never wade through Our Mutual
Friend, and Little Dorrit is not one of my
favourite books. It was ruthlessly mauled by
the Saturday Review soon after its appearance,
and Thackeray's openly expressed opinion of the
work was " Little D. is Deed stupid." I have