The knitting-shop tiff in Tiverton did not gather wool long before an image rose to mind from Charles Dickens’s novel of 1859, A Tale of Two Cities.

Rosemary Eva, a neighbor and customer of Sakonnet Purls, in Tiverton Four Corners, has accused its owner, Louise Silverman, of having an illegal sign. Ms. Eva is also a former chairwoman of the town planning board, known to knit away as meetings droned on.

In Dickens’s tale of the French Revolution, the character Madame Defarge would sit before the guillotine knitting the names of the soon-to-be-headless. She was Dickens’s symbol of the chaos unleashed by the 1789 uprising.

Even as Ms. Silverman’s lawyer argued that Tiverton’s sign code was chaotic, her supporters turned tables on the Tiverton Defarge by knitting furiously in the crowd attending the meeting.

Maybe the two women looked knitting needles at each other.

In the novel, readers are aware of Madame Defarge’s hidden revenge agenda. In real life, agendas are even harder to decipher than zoning codes, which often seem chaotic, not to say costly, to those tangled in their coils. We hope Ms. Silverman will not act on her threat to pick up her knitting and leave Tiverton in a huff.