”Such a staircase, with its accessories, in the older and more crowded parts of Paris, would be bad enough now; but, at that time, it was vile indeed to unaccustomed and unhardened senses. Every little habitation within the great foul nest of one high building–that is to say, the room or rooms within every door that opened on the general staircase–left its own heap of refuse on its own landing, besides flinging other refuse from its own windows. The uncontrollable and hopeless mass of decomposition so engendered, would have polluted the air, even if poverty and deprivation had not loaded it with their intangible impurities; the two bad sources combined made it almost insupportable. Through such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt and poison, the way lay. Yielding to his own disturbance of mind, and to his young companion’s agitation, which became greater every instant, Mr. Jarvis Lorry twice stopped to rest. Each of these stoppages was made at a doleful grating, by which any languishing good airs that were left uncorrupted, seemed to escape, and all spoilt and sickly vapours seemed to crawl in. Through the rusted bars, tastes, rather than glimpses, were caught of the jumbled neighbourhood; and nothing within range, nearer or lower than the summits of the two great towers of Notre-Dame, had any promise on it of healthy life or wholesome aspirations.” (Chapter 5, A Tale of Two Cities).
One of the joys of Private English Tuition is that it gives me a chance to read widely and to tutor widely in terms of texts. This in turn benefits students as they can enjoy new books, new ideas and new perspectives about their reading. These refreshing ideas are reflected in a transformed vocabulary, and thus empower students both in terms of academic understanding as well as personal confidence.
Remember that old NLP adage: ‘If you always do, what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get, what you’ve always got.’
English tutoring gives you the opportunity for very a positive and fruitful change. Even one session can make a very real difference. English tuition helps you recognise the power and importance of words and the value of eloquence.
Climbing the stairs to hell in A Tale of Two Cities:A terrible foreshadowing of the final steps to Mme Guillotine!
Staircases and landings are frequently encountered in fiction. Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment lurks on a stairwell to murder his landlady for an ‘idea’ madly concocted out of starvation and abject mental misery. Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Foreign’ also describes the acute loneliness and social anxiety suggested by the public landing in some high raise ‘dismal’ city apartment. It is as if in these in between public/private spaces, that identity is corroded irredeemably by fear, neglect and violence.
Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities in the above extract shows Monsieur Defarge taking his two English visitors to meet the lost man, Dr Manette. A man we will realise has been ‘recalled to life’ but to a life so far from anything we might regard as desirable or sustaining, that his aliveness seems spectre like and on the brink of extinction. This precariousness we will soon connect with the approaching collapse of the French Monarchy and so the famous plot will enfold. The guillotine beckons!
I am enjoying the pointed focus of the novel as there is much to enjoy in terms of the close sequencing and sheer speed of this novel. The writing is also profoundly evocative in a sensory way, as this description above reveals. Mental anxiety and physical abjection are radically and almost indissolubly entwined as the characters slowly climb the stairs, ironically upwards, through a living hell, to a living hell. Every breath is polluted. Every thought contaminated by a poverty that enslaves every aspect of humanity.
‘Mind forg’d manacles’ indeed( Blake, London)
Janet Lewison