illustration of a guillotine

A Tale of Two Cities

by Charles Dickens

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Student Question

What is the "movable framework with a sack and a knife" in A Tale of Two Cities?

Quick answer:

The "movable framework with a sack and a knife" in A Tale of Two Cities refers to the guillotine. The passage highlights the grim inevitability of revolutionary violence, describing how fate and death silently prepare for the upheaval. The guillotine is a symbol of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, where it was used for public executions, becoming a powerful emblem of the period's brutal justice.

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It is the guillotine.
"France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to comedown and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses old some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, be spattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, for as much as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous." From Book the First Recalled to Life

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