This word is used by Mr. Lorry to describe his work
situation to Miss Lucie Manette in Book I Chapter Four of this great novel. He is trying
to explain why he is not able to express feelings and can have no time for them,
describing Tellson's House and his employment as a job that crushes all such sentiment
from his body:
"Feelings! I have no time for them, no chance of
them. I pass my whole life, miss, in turning an immense pecuniary
Mangle."
Pecuniary in this
context means of or relating to money, focusing on the way in which Tellson's exists for
one purpose alone: to make money. Anybody working for Tellson's thus finds themselves
stripped of human emotions and decency, though of course Mr. Jarvis Lorry manages to
escape this fate and determines to leave Tellson's so as to cling on to his
humanity.
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