What the Dickens was Madame Defarge really knitting?

Madame Defarge

 Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counter as he came in. Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his own age, with a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of manner. There was a character about Madame Defarge, from which one might have predicated that she did not often make mistakes against herself in any of the reckonings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being sensitive to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright shawl twined about her head, though not to the concealment of her large ear-rings. Her knitting was before her, but she had laid it down to pick her teeth with a toothpick. Thus engaged, with her right elbow supported by her left hand, Madame Defarge said nothing when her lord came in, but coughed just one grain of cough. This, in combination with the lifting of her darkly defined eyebrows over her toothpick by the breadth of a line, suggested to her husband that he would do well to look round the shop among the customers, for any new customer who had dropped in while he stepped over the way.

Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities

It’s Bastille Day today which has reminded me of the time I took last year to read the Charles Dickens classic, A Tale of Two Cities, having been prompted to do so when I came across a great, 2005, online article “Top 10 men in knitting” by Anne Richards in Knitty .com http://knitty.com/ISSUEsummer05/FEATtopten.html

I wondered if there was any significance in the fact that the two most quoted lines from the book are actually the first sentence, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..” and the last, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done...” But to find out what Dickens actually did have to say about Madame Defarge and the knitting meant going cover to cover squinting along all 58 lines per page of my Victorian copy. Sadly not a first edition but printed just about in his lifetime.

I soon discovered that Madame Defarge was nothing like the little slip of a woman depicted in the line drawing in this early edition, she was a big strapping woman, well fed and well clothed, unlike her customers and wretched neighbours who were close to starving.

Dickens was a wonderful observer but I’m not sure he totally understood the business of knitting. I could be very wrong; but his suggestion that the women knitted useless things merely to take their mind off how hungry they were does not really add up.
"They knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the jaws and the digestive apparatus; if the bony fingers had been still, the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched."
 If you were next to starving you would not be buying wool to knit to pass the time. More likely, as happened elsewhere, you would be knitting a merchants wool into hose for a pittance. Knitting none stop, day and night, while you walked, and while you talked. Polite knitting in the drawing room did not really happen until Victorian times.

Madame Defarge, however, took great care of her rather better income from the wine shop and room lettings. At one point she claimed to be knitting as a pastime, and later, more pointedly, to be knitting a shroud.  In fact it was always her deadly knitted register of names marked for retribution - come the revolution. But at the end of the day the list “knitted in her own stitches and her own symbols” to be “always as plain to her as the sun” was of limited value once she “the tigress”, had met her comeuppance at the hands of poor little Miss Pross. No one else would be able to interpret it.

A pretty pattern, it was said – I guess it was multicoloured. but knitted in the round or just two pins?

Well it was all a bit more complicated, and metaphorical - but never the less a cracking good yarn!