Poison and Wine

Charles Dickens in the chapter “The Wine Shop” describes a scene where a wine casket has broken and the wine it was carrying has been spilt on the floor. It is a remarkable scene, especially as he uses it to describe the situation of the French proletariat at that point in time, and furthermore, foreshadows what their situation will become during the French Revolution. Their thirst for the blood of the aristocracy is symbolized by the frenzy with which they try to consume the spilt red wine;

 “Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped....handkerchiefs from women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths; others made small mud embankments, to stem the wine as it ran….”

What lengths they are willing to go to in order to get what they want is reflected in their attempts to get the most of the spilt wine;

“…others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee- dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine rotted fragments with eager relish.”

“When the wine was gone, and the places where it had been most abundant were raked into a gridiron pattern by fingers…”

However, the limits the French peasants are willing to cross is not seen in a positive light by Dickens for it is precisely by such attempts that the peasants stain themselves with the wine, foreshadowing that their bloodlust in the revolution would go so far that it would consume even themselves. Dickens uses such words as eager relish and tigerish smear to describe and allude to such hysteric consumption. Hence this red wine can be seen as a kind of poison for the peasants, because their consumption of it is the cause of their own destruction.

The appearance of the guillotine during the French Revolution is foretold in the appearance of the wood sawyer, whose hands stain the billets red and the fact that Madame Defarge will become the malignant revolutionary who desires blood and violence is reflected in the use of words such as  patched, fragment, shred and knitted.

“Hunger was patched into them…Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood…Hunger was shred into atomies… foreheads knitted into the likeness of the gallows-rope…”

This makes sense, keeping in mind that it is Madame Defarge who is always shown as knitting.