A Scene of Hunger in Saint Antoine

Chapter five is called "The Wine-shop" and begins with a cask of wine which has been dropped and "shattered like a walnut-shell" in the street. Local people are running to the spot to drink the wine. Once the jollities are complete, a symbolic cloud settles over Saint Antoine, it symbolises "cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance and want". The mill of life is grinding down the citizens of Saint Antoine, as Dickens narrates: "The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sign, Hunger".