Missed post: Mrs. Pross and liberty

        Over the course of the novel we have come to identify Mrs. Pross as a “wild-looking” working class woman, at once “brawny” and masculine yet capable of a certain maternal instinct for her “Ladybird”. This maternal instinct allows us to think of her as more human than mere comic relief. As alienated at Mrs. Pross may be from English gentility due to her crass nature and her profession, she falls very much within the British domain, referring to herself as an “Englishwoman” and a “Briton” on numerous occasions. As such she represents the mindset of the British working class at the time of the revolution in France, a working class that was more concerned with its ability to earn a respectable living than in foreign notions of Liberty. Mrs. Pross calls the revolutionaries nothing more than purveyors of “Midnight Murder, and Mischief”.  She is particularly condescending about the notion of liberty saying to Dr. Manette, “For gracious sake, don’t talk about Liberty; we have quite enough of that”. As a working class witness to the revolution, when dogmas of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity were at height of their popularity, Mrs. Pross emerges as a voice of dissent. She belongs to the same working class background as most of the revolutionaries, and thus could have easily been swayed by the very same doctrines; however, she sees the revolution as it really is. With ideas instilled in her by British sensibility, she sees the anarchy and the death and destruction brought on by the revolutionaries. She calls Madame Defarge “the wife of Lucifer” and “wicked foreign woman” indicating that the revolution had strayed so far from its course, and turned so bloody that even working class people would not sympathize with the cause.  When such a revolution is the alternative to subjugation under a monarchy, a representative of the English working class shuns the doctrines of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Mrs. Pross is proud to be a subject King George III, stating that her maxim is “Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks, On him our hopes we fix, God save the King”.