"A great dog sat on his tail and stared into the fire. A few children mingled in this orgy. The stolen child wept and wailed; another, a bouncing boy of four, was seated with dangling legs on too high a bench, the table reaching just to his chin, and said not a word; a third was engaged in spreading over the table with his fingers the tallow from a GUTTERING candle.

Guttering here means the candle has too much melted wax, not hot enough to burn readily, so that flame repeatedly goes out, lights again, smokes a lot. I wonder what the etymology is.

This is an interesting one. The word is the same as the gutter at the edge of a street for carrying off excess water. The primary definition of the intrasitive verb is to flow in channels or rivulets. The first sense as applied to candles is that of breaking through the edge of the cup that can form in a candle that is a little too wide for its wick. The derived meaning of alternately burning brightly and dimly would be from the fact that the wick would burn less brightly as it became more deeply immersed in liquid wax and more brightly as the wax level decreased when the edge was breached.

The word came into Middle English through Old French from the Latin gutta, drop.

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