Review of Barnaby Rudge; Read again (2nd time) Jan 2012

It’s been 10 years since I read this last. Either I have become a more discerning reader in that time, or the book got better. Which is more likely? Nevertheless, as usual, I’m nearly wordless with wonder…but of course only nearly, else this review would stop here.

If you know me (or my other Dickens reviews), you may already have an idea of my unabashed affection for Mr. Charles Dickens. I have never found him to disappoint, fail to entertain, fail to move me; he always transforms me in some profound way.

A few years ago I heard a man whom I greatly admire and trust in terms of learning/reading compare two books and propose that the one that was all marked up and full of 3M sticky flags must be the more powerful and important book than the other that obviously wasn’t as well used. It happened that it was true with those two particular books, and at the time I thought that was a true and plausible statement. As I have been revisiting some of the lesser-read/acclaimed Dickens’ books lately I have found that I now disagree with that statement in a general sense—I find it just doesn’t always hold.

There are, of course, instances when that statement is quite true. I have many, many books that are marked from front cover to back, something on nearly every page, bindings expanded by my own myriad sticky tabs. Those books are undeniably great.

But Dickens is a different great. And I am going to speak of him now as if he is still among us, because he is and he deserves to be thought of in present tense. A few of the Dickens books in my collection are all sorts of marked up, in the rare instance that he “tells.” But in the great majority, I think his genius is his ability to “show.” He creates an atmosphere so pungent for me that I am completely encompassed and submerged into his world and his stories. I feel like I live there, know the people, love them, hate them, fear them, fall in love with them—all of it. I wonder, does he know he can do that? Does he know he is a master hypnotist?

I may or may not ever visit London in the flesh, but I’ve been there! Many times has my friend & guide Mr. Dickens taken me there and introduced me to his remarkable friends and relations. He & they have changed my life and expanded my heart.

Barnaby Rudge is one of Dickens’ earliest novels. In my edition I am told that he had the idea for it just after completing Sketches by Boz, but the idea was shelved and he didn’t complete it until after finishing up Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby & The Old Curiosity Shop. He finished Barnaby in his 29th year. May I borrow a word from him? Prodigious!

It may be true that in this book there are no characters quite to compare with some like Mr. Peggotty, Captain Cuttle, Jerry Cruncher, Joe, or Mr. George or, or, or…perhaps he hadn’t quite reached his zenith in character creation at this point (although I’ll have to think hard about that statement and perhaps read Curiosity again before I’ll quantify it). Nonetheless, the general feel & tone of the book is pure Dickens, pure genius, pure light. Dickens has a way of showing hard things without damaging my soul, but rather, motivates me to change the world in positive ways after glimpsing injustice & cruelty & despair. I literally feel my heart change when I read his books despite Sir John Chester’s views on that organ.

It’s true, at least for me, that Barnaby doesn’t stand side by side with Bleak House, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, or Little Dorrit, but it is surely the forerunner and they stand on Barnaby’s shoulders. All in all, it’s a phenomenon in its own right and a truly gorgeous book.

One more interesting thing about this book is that it is Dickens' only other historical fiction book. This historical incident, the Gordon Riots, seemed enacted just to be written about by him.

There are a couple of passages I want to share.
-“To surround anything, however monstrous or ridiculous, with an air of mystery. Is to invest it with secret charm, and power of attraction which to the crowd is irresistible. False priests, false prophets, false doctors, false patriots, false prodigies of every kind, veiling their proceedings in mystery, have always addressed themselves at an immense advantage to the popular credulity, and have been, perhaps, more indebted to that resource in gaining and keeping for a time the upper hand of Truth & Common Sense, than to any half-dozen items in the whole catalogue of imposture. Curiosity is, and has been from the creation of the world, a master-passion. To awaken in, to gratify it by slight degrees, and yet leave something always in suspense, is to establish the surest hold that can be had, in wrong, on the unthinking portion of mankind.” (Chapter XXXVII, p. 286)

Tell me if that is not still completely true & credible (and used)!

-“Let no man turn aside, ever so slightly, from the broad path of honour, on the plausible pretence that he is justified by the goodness of his end. All good ends can be worked out by good means. Those that cannot, are bad; and may be counted so at once, and left alone.” (Mr. Haredale; Chapter LXXIX, p. 610)

--
I have one question and two more observations: What was the origination of the animosity between Haredale & Chester the Elder? Did I miss that somewhere?

1-I began this book via Audible Audio, narrator Sean Barrett, a NAXOS production. I just have to say he was brilliant, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to go that route. I just couldn’t wait to finish it that way, it’s slower for me than reading, plus I don’t like to walk around with something plugged into me all the time.

2-This edition, circa 1941 by Heritage Press, is GORGEOUS!! The pictures are magnificent!

Barnaby Rudge is the first historical novel Dickens wrote. The other is A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens wrote only two historical novels and Barnaby Rudge is the first and the gloomier of the two. It is his fifth published novel. The story is set during the Gordon Riots and a significant proportion of the book details the riots. In that dark and dismal setting, Dickens tells us a story of love and loyalty and a story of unresolved mystery.

The story of Barnaby Rudge is grim. One may say it is because the story is set against the backdrop of the Gordon riots. But I feel that that is not the case. It is a deliberate act by Dickens. In choosing the setting, in choosing more villains than one can stomach, and in allocating a considerable portion to violence, Dickens has taken upon himself the task of creating a dark ambiance. The reading journey through such a bleak environment is neither easy nor pleasant. And it was a struggle for me to push past certain segments.

The story has three separate threads: the riots, two love stories, and a mystery. Each thread generates an interest of its own in the reader. However, the merging of these separate stories into one storyline was not quite up to the mark. At some points, the knots that tied these separate threads were loosened and the story felt disjointed. It was something surprisingly new to me. Dickens always managed to tie one coherent knot of all his separate threads. It is sheer negligence on the part of Dickens. Instead of caring for the combined effect of the different storylines, Dickens happily enjoyed weaving his separate stories. Still, Dickens is a good storyteller and he engages enough reader attention to his tale. The fact that the story is fast-moving also helps secure the reader's interest.

Dickens has employed more villains in Barnaby Rudge than in any other novel of his that I've read. I wasn't ready to meet so many villains in one novel. It wasn't very pleasant. There were good characters. But except for the characters Gabriel Varden and George Haredale, the other good guys were of feeble temperament to drown the villainy of the bad guys. Though the good guys win at the end, the evil vibes of the bad ones dominate the story, effecting an uncomfortable reading atmosphere.

Despite these imperfections, Dickens's writing style is unaffected. His customary devotion to description ensures that he brings to life the ins and outs of the characters, the setting, and the intensity of the actions with precision. Dickens didn't disappoint me there. It is this precise description of characters, incidents, and events that made the story so intense and real which at times was unbearable and revolting. However, there were some loose ends that Dickens had missed to tie up, some questions unanswered. That surprised me since Dickens always ended things neatly.

Barnaby Rudge is the darkest Dickens novel I've read. It's filled with violent events, has more villains, and offers less content to cheer the reader. It wasn't a pleasant read but I enjoyed some parts of it. In my opinion,Barnaby Rudge doesn't show Dickens at his best. It's one of his weakest novels. But if anyone is interested in its historical settings, please don't let my review stop you from proceeding.

More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/

"To surround anything, however monstrous or ridiculous, with an air of mystery, is to invest it with a secret charm and power of attraction which to the crowd is irresistible ... Curiosity is ... a master-passion. To awaken it, to gratify it by slight degrees, and yet leave something always in suspense, is to establish the surest hold that can be had ... on mankind."

Charles Dickens, in Barnaby Rudge, was referring to the methods of the No Popery anti-Catholic faction who planted seeds of mystery and anger toward the Catholic church. But he could well have been talking about the technique of writing for the masses, especially in serial form.

Barnaby Rudge was written in 1841 but harkens back to 1780 when the Lord Gordon (No Popery) Riots occurred in London. Since the violence occurred when citizens became angered by a lack of action by the government, reading about them now is timely, in light of the January 6th capitol attack. In London, 40,000 men acted under the ultimate leadership of Lord Gordon. The riots are described as part of the plot of the second half of the novel. In reality, 300 to 1,000 people were killed during the riots, and many homes and businesses were destroyed, often by fire.

There are a few major themes that I recognized, including older generation members trying to hinder "untoward" love relationships in the younger generation, the general mistreatment of youth by adults, and the delight taken by people in taking advantage of mentally handicapped persons. Of course Dickens counters that last sentiment with the great tenderness he engenders toward them in the reader. In this way Barnaby Rudge is a precursor to novels like Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

I've read Dickens on and off, and I don't remember scenes of a sexual nature, as here when Mr. Dennis, and perhaps other men, seemingly head with lustful thoughts toward the house where the three primary female characters are imprisoned:

"Dolly was the great object of attraction, and that so soon as they should have leisure to indulge in the softer passion, Hugh and Mr. Tappertit (sound it out ... pretty suggestive in this setting) would certainly fall to blows for her sake: in which case it was not very difficult to forsee whose prize she would become. With all her old horror of that man revived ... Dolly ... sweet, blooming, buxom Dolly."

My favorite character here has to be John Willet, the owner of the pub house, with his impervious superiority and clever language - he cracks me up ! Overall, despite the ominous subject matter of Barnaby Rudge, humor abounds.

As well as Dickens writes love matches and scenes of young men and women falling in love, it's interesting to me that he makes these such a small part of his stories. I realize that he wasn't writing romance novels, but it seems to me his novels would be of even greater general interest - then and now - with more time spent on couples in love.

As I've written into many of my reviews of Victorian novels, which in general I love, there are some features of them which can be frustrating. To me the worst feature, and it applies to Barnaby Rudge, is that these tales almost always come to a positive and pretty end. This redirects the readers interest away from "what will happen?", to the lowly "who will make it happen and how?"

Additionally, I become irritated with the overdone work to convince the reader that a particular character really is bad. While modern books make relatively quick work of establishing hero vs. baddies, Victorian writers felt compelled to reiterate the faults and evil of characters ad nauseam.

As we know, Dickens often writes child heroes, such as Oliver Twist, Pip and the young people in The Old Curiosity Shop. Here, an adult who is child-like with his limitations due to his intellectual disability takes that very moving role - Barnaby Rudge. There is a great scene with Barnaby in the prison cell crying when he believes his beloved raven Grip is to be killed by one of the prison guards. And later, again with Barnaby in prison, Dickens is at his best. He has Barnaby considering his doomed fate, but finally there is some solace:

"But the moon came up slowly in all her gentle glory, and the stars looked out ... and through the small grated window ... the face of heaven shone bright and merciful ... the quiet sky ... seemed to smile upon the earth in sadness, as if the night, more thoughtful than the day, looked down in sorrow on the sufferings ... of men. (Barnaby) let its peace soak deep into his heart."

This is a marmite book - you either love it or hate it. Unfortunately I fell into the hate it category. It took me four tries to get into this book, and the longer I read, the more irritated I became. I went in with a bit of excitement because the premise of this book sounds fantastic: a murder and the Gordon Riots. However, the riots themselves were so boring, and all the plotting was exhausting. The villains get most of the page time, and I had no one to root for. One of the things I love about Dickens's writing is his character development, and in this book it was sorely lacking. We meet them for a bit and then go back to the villains. Then the good guys pop back up for a bit and then get tossed aside again. For as much page time as the villains get, they are also not developed well. There is no character growth, and for a character reader like myself, it was incredibly frustrating. I gave up caring around the halfway mark. After over 700 pages, I was so glad to see the back of this book. Barnaby Rudge was a major trudge.

TL;DR: Who cares? I want these hours of my life back.

Hard to understand why this is the least read of Dickens's novels...it's certainly one of his most thrilling. Mysterious murders, devious plots and several love stories intermingle here with a graphic and chilling account of the 1780 anti-Catholic Gordon riots in London and thereabouts. This is the author's only period piece other than his much better-known "A Tale of Two Cities", and it is every bit as thrilling to read -- with the added advantage that this history is far less well known and therefore holds more surprises. While I'd heard of the Gordon riots, I'd had no idea how awesomely terrible they were. For four whole days, robbery, arson, murder and complete anarchy swept England's capital, as mobs numbering in the tens of thousands took to the streets, meeting little resistance. The uprising's ostensible basis in demagoguery and religious intolerance also makes it particularly relevant to our own times.

The ringleader of the uprisings, Lord George Gordon, is a hapless and perhaps mad character who is manipulated by unscrupulous advisers to their own ends; he makes an interesting parallel to the simple minded, good-hearted Barnaby Rudge of the title, who similarly becomes haplessly embroiled in the riot's destructive course, to his great peril.

Though the overall tone draws upon the tradition of the gothic novel -- and quite successfully -- the typical comic relief appears in several memorable characters like the Maypole Inn's obstinate and slow-witted proprietor John Willet, the smoothly satanic Sir John Chester, and most memorably, the hysterically shrill and melodramatic lady's maid Miggs.

By and large though, the novel's tone is dark and suspenseful, and particularly during the course of the rioting it makes for a chilling page-turner. Its gothic bona fides are further demonstrated by its apparent influence on the works of Edgar Allan Poe: at various points of "Barnaby Rudge" one can discern the seeds of such works as "The Bells", "The Tell Tale Heart", "Fall of The House Of Usher", and particularly "The Raven" whose titular bird was apparently suggested by Barnaby's beloved pet raven Grip, who's quite a memorable character in himself. Indeed, Poe himself reviewed the novel, and his thoughts can be found at this link (but be aware -- the Poe review is full of spoilers in pursuit of his critique):

http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/g...

For fans for both the gothic genre and of Dickens's writings, this is a must read. Its drama and action sequences suggest it would make a hell of a mini-series as well, one I'll hope to see in the future. BBC, please take note! Unlike most Dickens novels, this apparently has only been adapted to a TV film once quite some time ago, and that little known: it certainly deserves a lavish revisiting.

I’ve been going through a playlist of Charles Dickens novels in chronological order, or at least the order that Wikipedia lists them in. I’ve finished The Old Curiosity Shop, a novel famous for being popular when it was released but not so popular today. Now I’ve just finished Barnaby Rudge, a novel not famous for being popular ever. In fact, if you to ask a thousand people to name a Charles Dickens novel off the top of their heads and your life was forfeit if someone said Barnaby Rudge, I doubt you’d have much to fear.

I had a tough time getting into this one at the beginning but it grew on me. A typical Charles Dickens novel is generally pretty long and this one was long enough that it was bound to get a grip on the road sooner or later and I think it did.

I’m finding it hard to organize my thoughts after reading this one. It’s been brought to my attention, by a very wise reviewer, that much of Dickens’s writing depicts a realm of fantasy and despite its being a historical novel from the author’s point of view, I don’t think this one is an exception to that. We have all the eccentric, over-the-top characters with fanciful names that are often sly references to some characteristic or other. Also, Barnaby is clearly a changeling and if that isn’t a fairy tale reference I don’t know what is.

This book is definitely not what you would call tightly plotted. I don’t suppose when you publish in installments, on the fly, the way Dickens did, a carefully plotted novel is even possible. Like the other Dickens novels I’ve read, it’s filled with multiple characters and interweaving storylines all cobbled together in such a way that I’m left not really sure if the title character is actually the main character. I always figured the main character was the person who made the critical decisions and carried out the actions that decided the outcome of the story. Barnaby is a leaf on the wind being carried wherever it blows him. I’m honestly not sure who the main character is or even if there is a main character. So I’m uncertain if I should actually be saying I enjoyed this novel or I enjoyed this collection of interconnected stories that’s been spliced together into a whole.

I guess if there’s one central thing in the story it’s the Gordon Riots. I did read up on those before starting this book, though it took until the second half before we even got to them and the plot starts to percolate. The Gordon Riots were, on the surface, all about people being upset that the British government had decided to be a little less nasty to Catholics, which was certainly the reason Lord George Gordon (not Lord Byron) was upset. The actual reason that most of the rioters are out there was that they were poor and struggling and it wasn’t lost on them that a small percentage of the population was not poor and struggling and the entire system was set up to protect the privileges of those people. A very timeless complaint.

As for Barnaby, the simpleminded “idiot” with his pet raven, he wanders in and out of the story almost at random. He’s, of course, referred to as an idiot because the word was not a straight-up insult back then, as it is today, but was a technical term. It’s interesting that just about every word used to describe someone like Barnaby is eventually turned into a word that we should never use if we don’t want to be nasty. The terms fool, moron, imbecile… actually, a whole thesaurus full of words all started out life as descriptive words not intended to be insults at all. In any case, Barnaby surprised me later in the book. I had the impression, in the beginning, that his attention span was so short that you couldn’t trust him to stick to anything for five minutes without being distracted, yet he was put in charge of guard duty which he stuck to all day. He actually had a character arc, in the end, which made him a lot more likable. I think his pet raven, Grip, was supposed to capture my imagination more than it did. Maybe it would have if my name were Edgar Allen Poe.

Barnaby’s dad, the mysterious stranger who gets the plot rolling, is a hard character to actually put my finger on. I could go on and on about him but it would all come back to the fact that he’s completely, certifiably insane. Very little of anything he did made much of sense unless self-destruction had been his aim from the beginning. I get that he’s tormented by guilt and all that but his response to it is completely unhinged, unless, of course, the ghost of his ex-employer is really haunting him. The blind-man-who-isn’t-inspirational, Stagg, despite being morally challenged himself, was a breath of fresh air when he tried to reason with the elder Rudge about the choices he had made.

There are a lot of painful relationships between fathers and sons in this book. Tell me, Charles, did you love your dad?

Old John Willet was a bizarre one. I think much of the time he was intended to be comic relief, though I didn’t find him particularly funny myself. I found him kind of sad and pathetic. Even before the rape of the Maypole, he came across as a not terribly likable know-it-all with only a teaspoon or two between the ears more than Barnaby. I suppose I should try harder to get into the spirit of the thing and appreciate this fellow a little more than I do but, not to get personal here, if you've ever watched someone close to you fade away in the grip of dementia, you might find a character like this less funny. I'm not saying that Willet is actually a depiction of dementia, he just kind of feels like it.

Hugh ended up surprising me in the end. Rather than being a completely evil caricature, he kind of redeemed himself.

Ned Dennis, the hangman of Tyburn. Is an interesting villain. A total scumbag who seems to have a master plan which you know isn’t going to end well. By contrast, there is a wonderful book about a historical executioner named Frantz Schmidt of Nuremberg who is, many ways, the opposite of Dennis. It’s called The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century by Joel F. Harrington. It’s an absolutely fascinating character study, based on the man’s diaries.

Most of the female characters in the story, Barnaby’s self-sacrificing mother, the elderly Mrs. Varden, her beautiful daughter Dolly and Emma Haredale, came across to me as rather weak stock characters. I actually found Miggs to be kind of interesting. Sure she’s shrill, selfish, petty, sycophantic, not very bright, and conniving but actually kind of complex in her way. Nature didn’t favor her with the type of body that would’ve made her attractive at the time but we don’t really know that she was ugly otherwise. Thin is in these days. She comes across, in the beginning, is a bit of a man hater, and given the opportunities afforded to women, or lack thereof, back then, how could you really blame her? Later it becomes clear that she’s really just sad, frustrated and hopelessly, pathetically in love with a man that doesn’t deserve anybody’s love, the vain, delusional narcissist Simon Tappertit. It would be enough to turn anyone mean and nasty. I felt sorry for her in the end, which is not, I suspect, what Dickens intended.

There are some powerful moments in this book. It takes you into of the chaos of that time and gives you a sense of it like no history book ever could. At times you feel like you’re there watching the unspeakable, traumatic violence unfold and you understand how the people could have been so scarred by it. You’re reminded how so many lost everything during those riots. It all seems like a historical footnote now but it was huge, overwhelming, catastrophic and life-changing to the people who had to endure it.

All in all, I get why this book didn’t make the Dickens A list. It’s still an interesting read. It still took me on a strange, winding and memorable journey and some of the people and events I encountered along the way will definitely stay with me. My knowledge of eighteenth-century British history has been padded out a bit, though I don’t think the Gordon Riots are a subject I can easily work into a conversation.

Dickens's 'other' Historical novel centred round the 'no Popery' riots in the 18th century, including a romance and an unsolved murder from the past. I found this nowhere near remotely close to the genius of A Tale of Two Cities; my current (lack of) general knowledge around the 'no Popery' issues of the past didn't help. 5 out of 12.

2009 read

This is a graphic novel in the original short-lived 'A Classic in Pictures' series, of which there were only 10 or 12 issues. Although it is noted 'A Story in Pictures. Freely Adapted', unfortunately there is no author's name attributed to the adaptation, which is a great shame for 'Barnaby Rudge' could not have been the easiest of Dickens' works to turn into a graphic novel..

The story is set during the anti-Catholic riots, the so-called Gordon Riots, of 1780, and opens in The Maypole Inn, Chigwell where a number of characters from the story are assembled enjoying a drink and a chat. Their peaceful afternoon is interrupted by an ill-looking ruffian who pops in and then quickly departs when he realises he is not being well received.

And it is by this ruffian's actions that we encounter Barnaby Rudge, who lives with his mother in a cottage near Chigwell, when he is attending Edward Chester after he had been attacked and robbed by the ruffian. Gabriel Varden, whose daughter Dolly is a favourite of Barnaby, helps transport Chester to safety while Barnaby feels that he had seen the ruffian previously but he cannot remember where.

From then on the Gordon riots begin and portray an unparalleled reign of the terror of a rampaging mob, seen through the eyes of the individuals, including Barnaby, who are swept up in the chaos. With a love story embedded within the tale, Barnaby, with his companion his pet raven Grip, eventually finds himself imprisoned for his part in the riots. Fortunately his mother, who has a shock when she meets up with someone from her past, and Barnaby's friends win a pardon for him as the story weaves its way through the volatile streets and nightmarish underbelly of London, delightfully painted by Dickens, and carried through into this graphic version of the novel admirably. The riots and the mob behind it, for instance, are depicted with an extraordinary energy that comes forcibly across from the pages to make 'Barnaby Rudge' perhaps one of Dickens' most terrifying novels.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this brief review, it is a pity that the writer of the words for this edition has not been identified because he/she deserves credit for the work they have done in maintaining a close similarity to the original novel.

Sins of the fathers...

In 1775, a group of elderly men gather in the Maypole, an ancient inn owned by John Willett, and tell a stranger about a murder that was committed nearby years before. The owner of the large house in the neighbourhood, Mr Harefield, was killed, apparently during a robbery, and some time later another body was found, identified as his servant, also murdered. The servant’s son, Barnaby Rudge, was later born an idiot, assumed to be so because of the shock his widow had suffered during her pregnancy. Now Barnaby is a happy young man, earning a little money by running messages and spending the rest of his time running wild in the countryside, revelling in the natural world which he loves. But Barnaby is gullible and easily influenced, which will one day lead him into serious trouble.

Skip forward five years to 1780, and trouble is abroad in the streets of London. Lord George Gordon is leading protests against the passing of an act that will remove some of the legal restrictions under which Catholics have suffered since the time of the Reformation. A weak man himself, Gordon is surrounded by unscrupulous men using him for their own ends. Some of his followers are men of true religious beliefs, bigoted certainly, but honourable in their own way. But many, many others are the detritus of the London streets – the drunks and thieves, the violent, the cruel. Others are the desperate – those whose argument with the government is nothing to do with religious questions about which they know little and care less. These are the poor and marginalised, those with no hope. Together these men and women will become that great fear of the establishment – the mob, wild, destructive and terrifying. And among them and affected by them are the characters we met in the Maypole, including young Barnaby Rudge...

Structurally this one is a bit of a mess. The two halves are each excellent in their own way but the sudden time shift halfway through, complete with a total change of central characters and tone, breaks the flow and loses the emotional involvement that was built up in the first section. Barnaby Rudge is also an unsatisfactory hero in that, being an idiot with no hope of improvement, there’s no romance for him nor does he get to be heroic. However, even a weaker Dickens novel is always enjoyable and this is no exception. My four star rating is a comparison to other Dickens’ novels – in comparison to almost every book out there, this is still head and shoulders above them.
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If I’d been Dickens, I’d have called it Dolly Varden – she pulls the two strands together more than most of the other characters. Daughter of locksmith Gabriel, Dolly is the major love interest of the character who appears to be the hero in the first half, Joe Willett, son of the owner of the Maypole. Young, flirtatious and silly, Dolly plays hard to get at the wrong moment and Joe takes the King’s shilling and goes off to fight those pesky American colonists who were having some kind of little rebellion round about then. Five years on, Dolly is still single, secretly hoping that one day Joe will return. But her beauty has made her a target for other men, including two who will play major roles in the second half of the book. Dickens often showed how vulnerable women were to unscrupulous men, but with Dolly he takes it a stage further. There is one scene in particular where she is the victim of what can only be described as a sexual assault, and later, in the riots, Dickens doesn’t hold back from showing how rape is one aspect of what happens when there’s a breakdown in social order. While it’s all done by hints and suggestion, very mild to our jaded modern eyes, I imagine it must have been pretty shocking to the original readership. Dolly is an intriguing Dickens heroine – unlike many of his drooping damsels, she’s a lot of fun, revelling in her beauty and the effect it has on men while still being kind-hearted and true. He allows her to grow and mature in those five years, which is not always the case with his heroines, and she’s a great mix of vulnerability and strength of character.

The first half is the fairly typical Dickens fare of various eccentric characters and young lovers and a mystery in the past, of the style of Oliver Twist or Martin Chuzzlewit, say. The second half is much more reminiscent of the later, and much better, A Tale of Two Cities. The mob scenes in this are just as horrifying, but the characters aren’t as unforgettably drawn as Sidney Carton or Madame Defarge. More than that, it seems as if Dickens is less sure of where his sympathies lie. The Gordon rioters are fighting to ensure that anti-Catholic laws remain in place, and clearly Dickens thinks this is abhorrent. But that means that he almost comes over as pro-Establishment, since on this occasion the Establishment are the ones wanting to do away with those laws. So while in Two Cities he’s against the mob but understanding of the poverty and inequality that drives them, here he gets a bit muddly – he clearly wants to suggest that it’s all because they’re poor and uneducated but has to also show that they’re religious fanatics, fighting not to better themselves but to keep others down. However, I thoroughly enjoyed Dennis the hangman, who is not only a typically Dickensian villain but is also based on the real-life hangman of the time, and gives Dickens an opportunity to show the gruesome barbarity of this form of social control.

As always with Dickens there are far too many aspects to cover in a review without it becoming as long as one of his novels. Overall, this is one where the individual parts may not come together as well as in his greatest novels, but it’s well worth reading anyway, for the riots and for the interest of seeing Dickens experiment with the historical novel as a form. I read the Oxford World’s Classics version – my first experience of a Dickens novel in their edition – and thoroughly enjoyed having the informative introduction and particularly the notes, which I found extremely helpful since this is an episode of history I knew little about. The book is also generously full of the original illustrations. I say it every time but I’m so glad I live in a world that once had Dickens in it!

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Oxford World’s Classics.

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For two hundred pages this was not Barnaby Rudge, it was Barnaby Trudge and I was Barnaby Drudge but Barnaby would not budge. I had discovered why this one is The Most Unpopular Dickens Novel. He saddles himself with a gaggle of low-class comedy characters, a couple of tiresome feeble pairs of young thwarted lovers, a dastardly villain to hiss at and two lurid murders that happened 22 years before the story starts. If it was anyone but Dickens this book would have hit the wall, blammo! But I knew there would be some fun to be had because of the title : Barnaby Rudge : A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty. So there was gonna be some rioting.

WORTH THE WAIT

Well, I’m so glad I did the Barnaby trudge, because suddenly this novel bursts into life, a horrendous fraught frightening life of death, maiming and destruction. It’s worth the wait. This part of the novel is fabulous.

NO POPERY!

The background for those not intimate with the politics of England in the late 18th century is easy to sketch : there was a despised minority – the Catholics. They were banned from inheriting property, from voting and from getting any job with the government. This was all because they took their orders from the Pope and he was the AntiChrist. As time rolled along some progressives thought now was the time to free the Catholics from these oppressions because it turned out that after all they weren’t bad people. So there was going to be a Catholic Emancipation Bill heard in the House of Commons, and that ignited a kind of mass hysteria that resulted in a week of mad rioting which was a pogrom against Catholics. Many people died, many houses were torched.

I wormed my way into the heart of the crowd
I was shocked to find what was allowed

-tHoward DeVoto

EERIE PARALLELS

The riots began with an assault on the House of Commons and as I read these chapters a cold chill ran down my spine because I realised I was reading a very close version of what happened at the Capitol Building in Washington on 6 January 2021. The sequence of events is almost identical. Whether in London in 1780 or Washington in 2021 the hysterical mob does the same thing.
Also, Lord George Gordon, the guy who sparked off the riots, is like a modern person who invents a conspiracy theory like Pizzagate then orchestrates its malevolent expression in the real world.

DICKENSIAN HUMOUR

When you least expect it he will come up with something like :

”This,” he added, putting his hand into his waistcoat-pocket, and taking out a large tooth, at the sight of which both Miggs and Mrs Varden screamed, “this was a bishop’s. Beware, G. Varden!”

or

I’d sooner kill a man than a dog any day. I’ve never been sorry for a man’s death in all my life, and I have for a dog’s.

SOME PROBLEMS WITH DICKENS : 1. THE LACHRYMOSE FEMALE

In Barnaby Rudge women, when not being battleaxes, are being overcome by strong emotion. They are turning on the waterworks.

‘Yes!’ cried Mrs Varden, bursting into tears

Miggs, whose tears were always ready, for large or small parties, on the shortest notice and the most reasonable terms, fell a crying violently

Dolly hesitated again, and not being able to decide upon any other course of action, burst into tears.

Emma’s heart, for the first time, sunk within her. She turned away and burst into tears.

‘You needn’t cry, Miggs,’ said Mrs Varden, herself in tears

Miss Miggs, from mere habit, and not because weeping was at all appropriate to the occasion, which was one of triumph, concluded by bursting into a flood of tears

Emma kissed her cheek a hundred times, and covered it with tears

This gets tiresome really fast. The reader is supposed to find all this vaporising vastly amusing.

2. THE CLOCKWORK CHARACTERS

The characters are fixed – the serious young lovers, the comic young lovers, the old prating fool, the conniving treacherous secretary, the haughty spoiled yet essentially good-hearted princess, the comical old maid, the hypocrite, the good old man. And the plot is therefore telegraphed – we know that the young lovers will be united at the end, the hissable villain will die with a curse on his lips, the good old man’s fortunes will be restored, the hypocrite will be exposed, the old maid will be found something ridiculous to do with her unmarried life. In this novel of twisting surprising plots there are absolutely no surprises.

3. THE INTERMINABLE WRAP-UP

After the brilliant lengthy riot section, alas, Dickens spends far too many pages dispensing justice to his cast. Everyone gets their turn, either married off or restored to their happy home or exiled to a distant monastery or dead. When Dickens tells us all about how his goodly-hearted characters end up it is more than somewhat nauseating :

the locksmith sat himself down at the tea-table in the little back-parlour: the rosiest, cosiest, merriest, heartiest, best-contented old buck, in Great Britain or out of it. There he sat, with his beaming eye on Mrs V., and his shining face suffused with gladness, and his capacious waistcoat smiling in every wrinkle, and his jovial humour peeping from under the table in the very plumpness of his legs; a sight to turn the vinegar of misanthropy into purest milk of human kindness.

Talk about piling it on with a trowel.

THREE STARS

The first part is 2.5, the middle section is a ferocious FIVE STARS, but the long wind-down is a frankly aggravating 2 stars, so three it is overall. Like the dinosaur that is thin at one end, thick in the middle, then thin again at the other end.

Well this is a very different one. Dickens has decided to do a historical novel, meaning that some of the events of this novel actually happened in real life. The only problem is that the events that are covered in "Barnaby Rudge" really aren't that well known anymore. The novel takes place during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 (I mean everyone's heard of them right? Right? *crickets chirp*). There's basically a series of riots because the Protestants aren't happy (as always). The plot is very dry and historical and really does feel like you're reading a history book at some points.

The characters are classic Dickensian characters. Just like in "Oliver Twist", Barnaby Rudge is very much a secondary character despite his name being eponymous with the title. This is very odd but it happens in Dickens a lot because he likes to give practically equal time to each character, no matter if they're primary or secondary.

If you haven't read any Dickens before know then I really wouldn't suggest that you begin here. This novel is very different from the rest of his oeuvre. However this is a short one that you can speed through quite quickly (I read the majority of this novel in two big sittings). I found this to be good but I have a feeling that the common reader would find this quite boring so read this if you are a Dickens fan because that's the only way that you could really enjoy this novel.

Barnaby Rudge, the second serial from Master Humphrey’s Clock (the first being The Old Curiosity Shop), was Dickens’s first idea for a novel, but was published as his fifth. He conceived of it alongside The Pickwick Papers, and though he sold Pickwick first, his mind was obsessed with the Gordon riots of 1780. He secured a publisher for his tale, but Pickwick’s popularity delayed Barnaby. Further renegotiations of his contract for this novel kept stalling, and he instead wrote the three other novels that precede Barnaby. Finally, in late 1840, he secured a deal with the Clock, and in February 1841, the first instalment of Barnaby appeared.

The title of the work is Barnaby Rudge, but this is somewhat misleading: Barnaby is but a small player in this work, and disappears for over three hundred pages. One of his earlier working titles was ‘Gabriel Vardon, the Locksmith of London’, which at least would concern a more major player. Though Barnaby is absent from much of his narrative, it is treatment and his actions that form the moral and critical centre of this novel.

The Gordon Riots of 1780 were an anti-catholic uprising, led by Lord George Gordon who created a Protestant Association to fight the recently introduced law that absolved Catholics the requirement to take religious oath when joined the armed forces. Lord Gordon felt that this action would allow Catholics to join with those in Europe and form a coalition that could attack or destabilise the British government, bring about absolute monarchical rule and a return to Papal control of the country. On the second of June, 1780, a crowd – some say 60,000 strong – marched on the Houses of Parliament and demanded a repeal of this law. They attacked Newgate Prison, taking the locksmith hostage and demanding he open the gates of the prison to allow captured protestors freedom. At the end of a week of rioting, 285 people had been shot dead; thirty were arrested and later hung. Lord Gordon was also arrested and tried for High Treason; he was found not guilty and allowed to walk free. It is a dark passage in British history, and one that fascinated the historian in Dickens. He was always going to write about it.

Barnaby Rudge sees the interaction of the real and the imagined. This dualism gives the work a frisson not found in Dickens’s earlier works. Lord Gordon appears, as do other key figures in the Gordon Riots, but for the necessity of the story, the majority of the cast are imagined. These are the people that are centred around The Maypole, a local public house, just south of London, near Epping Forest. A large cast of characters is introduced, and this section of the novel (the first half of the work) is highly Dickensian – there are family secrets, tales of murder, romantic entanglements, criminals, wanderers, and a talking raven named Grip (and yes, this is the influence on Poe’s famous poem). By allowing the novel time to luxuriate in the intricacies of village life, Dickens gives us time to know these people, their interests and their fears so that when the Gordon Riots begin in force, all our players are entangled and forced to act.

I admit to feeling rather underwhelmed during the first half of this novel: the opening, which describes a murder, I thought well done, but then it seemed to meander, cutting between these various characters with often little advancement (Dickens is, of course, waiting to get to the riots); but when the riots begin, his novel takes on a whole new level. The prose is electrifying, and the action tense, rapid – highly unusual thus far in Dickens career. He described the riots with precision, and the events hurry along at a great pace. The finest writing – at least for me – is in the final quarter, after the riots have ended and the key players are facing death for their roles. The descriptions and emotions evoked by Newgate Prison are formidable, and may just contain Dickens’s best writing yet. I read longer into the night than I normally do – finally finishing the book at gone three in the morning, as snow flurried down outside, and the window seemed to crackle with cold. An atmospheric mood in which to read such things.

There is a criticism of this novel from Poe in which he states that the raven should have been more symbolic. In the first few chapters it seems Dickens is lining the raven up to be so – but realising he needs us to know more about the rioters, he spends the next two hundred and fifty or so pages exploring them that when he finally returns to Barnaby and Grip the nuances he was setting up have been forgotten. This creates the same problem that some of his earlier novels have had: they end poorly, with a simple summing up of where each character has gone. What I think this needed, and which would have worked more powerfully, is if Grip’s symbolic purpose had been realised.

Barnaby Rudge, then. In the end an entertaining and exciting read. I just think it meanders a bit too much near the middle and never quite fulfils the promise it shows at the start. It is uneven – perhaps, I think, we needed to know less, not more, about the people involved.