Background.
- ‘The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine ostrich‘ is a quotation from A Tale of Two Cities (Book 1, Chapter 4).
- A Tale of Two Cities was the second of Charles Dickens’s two historical novels (the other being Barnaby Rudge). It first appeared as a weekly serial published in All the Year Round from April to November 1859. The plot centres on the years leading up to the French Revolution and culminates in the Jacobean Reign of Terror.
Context.
This quotation is a humourous description of the seaside town of Dover in the south-east of England.
Mr. Jarvis Lorry, a clerk from Tellson’s Bank, has arrived in Dover after taking an overnight mail-coach from London. He has breakfast in the coffee room of the Royal George Hotel before heading out for a walk along the seafront.
Source.
Taken from the following passage in Book 1, Chapter 4 of A Tale of Two Cities:
When Mr. Lorry had finished his breakfast, he went out for a stroll on the beach. The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be dipped in the sea. A little fishing was done in the port, and a quantity of strolling about by night, and looking seaward: particularly at those times when the tide made, and was near flood. Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever, sometimes unaccountably realised large fortunes, and it was remarkable that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter.
As the day declined into the afternoon, and the air, which had been at intervals clear enough to allow the French coast to be seen, became again charged with mist and vapour, Mr. Lorry’s thoughts seemed to cloud too. When it was dark, and he sat before the coffee-room fire, awaiting his dinner as he had awaited his breakfast, his mind was busily digging, digging, digging, in the live red coals.
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