[sovnwnt]

I wouldn't say it's "garbage prose" but I read A Tale of Two Cities in school and found it impossible to form a mental image from the text in some parts.

I'm still struggling to understand what "Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail." means.

[pasc1878]

Look at what happened in 2008 with banks collapsing - by having runs upon them. This is being done via postal withdrawals here.

This isn't obscure.

[vitus]

Or more recently, the run on SVB last year where everyone started panicking that the bank was no longer able to hold its deposits, just because it announced that it had taken action to generate something like $40 billion in liquidity. And then the next day alone, customers withdrew $42 billion.

All of this was much worse during the Great Depression, before we had FDIC insurance guaranteeing deposits up to a certain threshold. If you've ever seen It's a Wonderful Life, it depicts a bank run during that era as George Bailey is about to go off on his honeymoon. (I remember my 6th grade history teacher describing this as we watched that movie around the holiday season.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Ban...

[everforward]

This is incredibly obscure for normal people. FDIC covers up to $250k, I believe per bank but don’t hold me to that.

You have to have a metric shit ton of cash laying around before you can’t be fully covered by FDIC stripes across a few banks.

Bank runs haven’t been a “normal person problem” in nearly 100 years (FDIC started in 1933 after the Great Depression bank runs).

[pasc1878]

Not really the media were covering it a lot in 2008 - Front page headlines in newspapers and first story on TV news.

Ok people did not lose money directly. But they were withdrawing from some banks (e.g. Northern Rock) and it made massive economic and political issues.

[allturtles]

I wasn't familiar with the passage but having read it I think it means that the sounds and sights of the nighttime mail carriage ride made the bank messenger fantasize a run (i.e. an excess of customer withdrawals) upon his bank. The wider context is that the shadows of the night are cast as various phantoms in the minds of the people on the carriage, and even the horse pulling it:

> While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night watchman in his box at the door of Tellson’s Bank, by Temple Bar, who was to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shadows of the night took such shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such shapes to the mare as arose out of HER private topics of uneasiness. They seemed to be numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the road.

> What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon its tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom, likewise, the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms their dozing eyes and wandering thoughts suggested.

> Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank passenger—with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next passenger, and driving him into his corner, whenever the coach got a special jolt—nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, and the bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a great stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money, and more drafts were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson’s, with all its foreign and home connection, ever paid in thrice the time. Then the strong-rooms underground, at Tellson’s, with such of their valuable stores and secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a little that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among them with the great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last seen them.

I actually think it's a really neat passage, it invokes the surreal more than I would expect from 19th century prose. Also, this part just before is very vivid and quite funny:

> Except on the crown, which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was so like Smith’s work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to go over.

[sovnwnt]

Yeah I wasn't sure if the "run on the bank" had actually happened or not.

[throwaway2037]

I agree: A lot of Dickens is nearly impossible to understand as a child. The re-writes are terrific and solid storytelling!