How do the historical realities of this period affect this excerpt from the novel?

dickens foreshadows the coming bloody conflict by describing wine, which resembles blood, flowing in the streets.

the violence of the forthcoming revolution is shown in the warlike way the people treat each other while drinking the spilled wine.

the people's urgent desire to capture and drink the spilled wine shows the desperate conditions that lead to revolution.

the bizarre, dreamlike occurrence of the spilling of wine stands for the feeling of hope during a revolution.

read the passage.

dickens’s novel deals with the events surrounding the french revolution (1789–1794), including the period known as the reign of terror, during which horrific violence occurred in france.

excerpt from a tale of two cities by charles dickens

a large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. the accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.

all the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. the rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants' mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; 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. there was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence.

a shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices—voices of men, women, and children—resounded in the street while this wine game lasted. there was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. there was a special companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part of every one to join some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. when the wine was gone, and the places where it had been most abundant were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. the man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting, set it in motion again; the women who had left on a door-step the little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved away, to descend again; and a gloom gathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than sunshine.

the wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of saint antoine, in paris, where it was spilled. it had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. the hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees—blood.

the time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.