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Barnaby Rudge
Charles Dickens’s first historical novel–set during the anti-Catholic riots of 1780–is an unparalleled portrayal of the terror of a rampaging mob, seen through the eyes of the individuals swept up in the chaos.
Those individuals include Emma, a Catholic, and Edward, a Protestant, whose forbidden love weaves through the heart of the story; and the simpleminded Barnaby, one of the riot leaders, whose fate is tied to a mysterious murder and whose beloved pet raven, Grip, embodies the mystical power of innocence. The story encompasses both the rarified aristocratic world and the volatile streets and nightmarish underbelly of London, which Dickens characteristically portrays in vivid, pulsating detail. But the real focus of the book is on the riots themselves, depicted with an extraordinary energy and redolent of the dangers, the mindlessness, and the possibilities–both beneficial and brutal–of the mob.
One of the lesser-known novels, Barnaby Rudge is nonetheless among the most brilliant–and most terrifying–in Dickens’s oeuvre.
Those individuals include Emma, a Catholic, and Edward, a Protestant, whose forbidden love weaves through the heart of the story; and the simpleminded Barnaby, one of the riot leaders, whose fate is tied to a mysterious murder and whose beloved pet raven, Grip, embodies the mystical power of innocence. The story encompasses both the rarified aristocratic world and the volatile streets and nightmarish underbelly of London, which Dickens characteristically portrays in vivid, pulsating detail. But the real focus of the book is on the riots themselves, depicted with an extraordinary energy and redolent of the dangers, the mindlessness, and the possibilities–both beneficial and brutal–of the mob.
One of the lesser-known novels, Barnaby Rudge is nonetheless among the most brilliant–and most terrifying–in Dickens’s oeuvre.
744 pages, Paperback
First published July 21, 1841
About the author
Charles Dickens
14.3k books29.5k followersCharles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) was a writer and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.
Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.
Dickens was regarded as the literary colossus of his age. His 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, remains popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted, and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities, set in London and Paris, is his best-known work of historical fiction. Dickens's creative genius has been praised by fellow writers—from Leo Tolstoy to George Orwell and G. K. Chesterton—for its realism, comedy, prose style, unique characterisations, and social criticism. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf complained of a lack of psychological depth, loose writing, and a vein of saccharine sentimentalism. The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social conditions or comically repulsive characters.
On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness, and the next day he died at Gad's Hill Place. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner," he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads: "To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world." His last words were: "On the ground", in response to his sister-in-law Georgina's request that he lie down.
(from Wikipedia)
Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.
Dickens was regarded as the literary colossus of his age. His 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, remains popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted, and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities, set in London and Paris, is his best-known work of historical fiction. Dickens's creative genius has been praised by fellow writers—from Leo Tolstoy to George Orwell and G. K. Chesterton—for its realism, comedy, prose style, unique characterisations, and social criticism. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf complained of a lack of psychological depth, loose writing, and a vein of saccharine sentimentalism. The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social conditions or comically repulsive characters.
On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness, and the next day he died at Gad's Hill Place. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner," he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads: "To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world." His last words were: "On the ground", in response to his sister-in-law Georgina's request that he lie down.
(from Wikipedia)
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December 28, 2021
Barnaby Rudge, Charles Dickens
Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty (commonly known as Barnaby Rudge) is a historical novel by British novelist Charles Dickens. It was Dickens' first historical novel. His only other is the much later A Tale of Two Cities, also set in revolutionary times. It is one of his less popular novels and has rarely been adapted for film or television.
Gathered around the fire at the Maypole Inn, in the village of Chigwell, on an evening of foul weather in the year 1775, are John Willet, proprietor of the Maypole, and his three cronies.
One of the three, Solomon Daisy, tells an ill-kempt stranger at the inn a well-known local tale of the murder of Reuben Haredale which had occurred 22 years earlier on that very day. Reuben had been the owner of the Warren, a local estate which is now the residence of Geoffrey, the deceased Reuben's brother, and Geoffrey's niece, Reuben's daughter Emma Haredale.
After the murder, Reuben's gardener and steward went missing and were suspects in the crime. A body was later found and identified as that of the steward, so the gardener was assumed to be the murderer. ...
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز دوازدهم ماه نوامبر ��ال1997میلادی
عنوان: بارنابی روج در دو جلد؛ نویسنده: چارلز دیکنز؛ مترجم: محمد مجلسی؛ تهران، نشر دنیای نو، سال1374، در دوجلد، و در1115ص؛ شابک جلد یک9646564844؛ شابک جلد دو9646564852؛ چاپ دوم دنیای نو، اسماعیل رستم زاده؛ سال1378؛ در دوجلد؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده19م
آقای «هاردال» ملکداری بزرگ است، که برادرش، و پیشکار او، سالها پیش به قتل رسیده اند، و راز قتل آنها هنوز آشکار نشده است، دختر زیبای برادرش «اما» نیز با او زندگی میکند؛ دختر عاشق «ادوارد» است، ولی پدر «ادوارد» و عموی «اما»، دشمن یکدیگرند، و ...؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 21/10/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 06/10/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty (commonly known as Barnaby Rudge) is a historical novel by British novelist Charles Dickens. It was Dickens' first historical novel. His only other is the much later A Tale of Two Cities, also set in revolutionary times. It is one of his less popular novels and has rarely been adapted for film or television.
Gathered around the fire at the Maypole Inn, in the village of Chigwell, on an evening of foul weather in the year 1775, are John Willet, proprietor of the Maypole, and his three cronies.
One of the three, Solomon Daisy, tells an ill-kempt stranger at the inn a well-known local tale of the murder of Reuben Haredale which had occurred 22 years earlier on that very day. Reuben had been the owner of the Warren, a local estate which is now the residence of Geoffrey, the deceased Reuben's brother, and Geoffrey's niece, Reuben's daughter Emma Haredale.
After the murder, Reuben's gardener and steward went missing and were suspects in the crime. A body was later found and identified as that of the steward, so the gardener was assumed to be the murderer. ...
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز دوازدهم ماه نوامبر ��ال1997میلادی
عنوان: بارنابی روج در دو جلد؛ نویسنده: چارلز دیکنز؛ مترجم: محمد مجلسی؛ تهران، نشر دنیای نو، سال1374، در دوجلد، و در1115ص؛ شابک جلد یک9646564844؛ شابک جلد دو9646564852؛ چاپ دوم دنیای نو، اسماعیل رستم زاده؛ سال1378؛ در دوجلد؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده19م
آقای «هاردال» ملکداری بزرگ است، که برادرش، و پیشکار او، سالها پیش به قتل رسیده اند، و راز قتل آنها هنوز آشکار نشده است، دختر زیبای برادرش «اما» نیز با او زندگی میکند؛ دختر عاشق «ادوارد» است، ولی پدر «ادوارد» و عموی «اما»، دشمن یکدیگرند، و ...؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 21/10/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 06/10/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
September 28, 2024
The last book from Dickens I have read there are no more, a sad situation for us who love his works . He only wrote 14 complete novels and this the author's least liked one and most obscure. A fictional historical novel about the 1780 religious riots (of course other factors contributed), against Catholics during the the height of the war in America. Some of those horrendous, outrageous occurrences did in fact happen, believe it . HOWEVER MOST OF THE CHARACTERS ARE NOT... THAT IS REAL. Still Mr. Rudge's pet raven Grip a talking bird is quite fun , his amusing utterances a welcome break to the bleak narrative indeed, other people are colorful too, the writer was noted for characters of this type more alive than the real .Such as the mentally challenged erstwhile main person the titled Barnaby Rudge the pleasant helper of his poor mother, destitute since the husband vanished into who knows , still alive? Not an honest man a fact that the son can't believe or more likely fathom, his brain is clouded a professor he isn't...
and the mysterious father is where ? Dead or alive never to know until the end of plot. Did you actually expect anything else. The best part to me is the atmosphere the setting mostly in a London suburb of Chagwell and Maypole an inn presided by old John Willet where the lazy neighbors drink and react to the turmoil, the world upside down the poor in control for a time as the rich try to survive this will not last. To give more appeal two couples with romantic eyes look but will not try, this the 18th century they must behave or society collapses. Lord George Gordon the leader of the mobs was a nut maybe not a surprise still the timid authorities were slow to react as the city burns especially the Lord Mayor, they lacked courage to stop it which flamed more fires, prisons attacked, inmates freed the smoke spreads as did the destruction. Well the soldiers were finally given bullets. A good narrative to read but is never enjoyable, you didn't expect that either, nevertheless informative and a warning about emotions unchecked. If you are not troubled by conflagrations of buildings , hate, hangings, blood in the streets, angry crowds full of greed as well , the passion flows until the inevitable end. By the way rereads look promising for my future .
and the mysterious father is where ? Dead or alive never to know until the end of plot. Did you actually expect anything else. The best part to me is the atmosphere the setting mostly in a London suburb of Chagwell and Maypole an inn presided by old John Willet where the lazy neighbors drink and react to the turmoil, the world upside down the poor in control for a time as the rich try to survive this will not last. To give more appeal two couples with romantic eyes look but will not try, this the 18th century they must behave or society collapses. Lord George Gordon the leader of the mobs was a nut maybe not a surprise still the timid authorities were slow to react as the city burns especially the Lord Mayor, they lacked courage to stop it which flamed more fires, prisons attacked, inmates freed the smoke spreads as did the destruction. Well the soldiers were finally given bullets. A good narrative to read but is never enjoyable, you didn't expect that either, nevertheless informative and a warning about emotions unchecked. If you are not troubled by conflagrations of buildings , hate, hangings, blood in the streets, angry crowds full of greed as well , the passion flows until the inevitable end. By the way rereads look promising for my future .
July 20, 2024
In most surveys Barnaby Rudge comes out as the least read of all Dickens's novels. Yet his only other historical novel, "A Tale of Two Cities", is one of his most popular. His penultimate novel, it was written 18 years later, and has a very different tone with little humour. But Dickens's classic wit, his irony and eye for the absurd are what many people love about his writing. And Barnaby Rudge has these in abundance. So it is all the more puzzling that it is read so infrequently.
The scenes where Gabriel Varden's hypocritical and supposedly long-suffering martyr of a wife is aided and abetted by their sly, vituperous servant Miggs against the exasperated locksmith, are some of the funniest anywhere in Dickens, who says her moodiness could be the result of being spoiled by wealth,
"Mrs Varden expressed her belief that never was any woman so beset as she; that her life was a continued scene of trial; that whenever she was disposed to be well and cheerful, so sure were the people around her to throw, by some means or other, a damp upon her spirits; and that, as she had enjoyed herself that day, and Heaven knew it was very seldom she did enjoy herself so she was now to pay the penalty."
Their preening peacock of an apprentice Sim Tappertit, complete with his powerful eye and his beautiful legs, (though very short) comes a very close second. He is the "noble captain" and leader of a risible secret society of 'Prentice Knights. Yet everyone knows what a prize idiot he really is, as the blind man Stagg remarks as an aside,
"Good luck go with you for a - conceited, bragging, empty-headed, duck-legged idiot"
The ponderous publican Joe Willett, with his slow-witted homespun philosophies is an easy third, ruminating,
"According to the constitution of mermaids, so much of a mermaid as is not a woman must be a fish"
So many characters in this novel make us smile with their eccentricities; easily as many as in any of his novels to date. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty was intended to be his first serious work of literature, inspired by Sir Walter Scott's historical novels, such as The Waverley Novels, and "Ivanhoe". Yet Dickens just could not resist creating these absurd characters whom his readers chuckle over and love so much. The most unusual "character" is Grip - and he is certainly a character, although he also happens to be Barnaby Rudge's pet raven! He is self-willed, displays eccentric behaviour, and has learned a whole catalogue of phrases, his favourite being a variety of ways of saying, "Polly Put the Kettle On". He is a gift of a character to an absurdist like Dickens. The reader may well find themselves laughing out loud at the inappropriate contributions Grip makes.
It is not surprising that Dickens shows a keen eye for observing the raven's behaviour. He explains in his preface that Grip is based on a pet raven he himself had had, called Grip. It wasn't his first, but it was the one he loved most. His own raven died in March 1841 - ironically and sadly in the middle of Dickens writing this novel - from eating lead chips. Dickens had it stuffed, copying George IV who had had his pet giraffe stuffed. It is still on public view, incidentally, in a museum in Philadelphia. Grip was also the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poem, "The Raven". Poe admired Dickens, and paid tribute to Grip in a review of Barnaby Rudge which he wrote for a magazine, saying that the raven should have served "a more symbolic prophetic purpose".
This is Dickens's fifth novel, written when he was 29 years of age, and published in weekly instalments between February and November 1841. By now he had become everybody's darling, with a public dinner being held in his honour in Edinburgh. He had originally signed a contract in 1836 to write a book entitled "Gabriel Varden - The Locksmith of London", for "Bentley's Miscellany" but after becoming more successful, and falling out with Bentley, he bought back the contract and the novel was subsequently published by Chapman and Hall in "Master Humphrey's Clock", and illustrated by two of his regular favourites, Phiz and George Cattermole. Many of his letters to these two artists survive, and it is remarkable how extraordinarily detailed and specific the descriptions are, for the engravings Dickens wished the artists to make. He evidently had a mental picture of a scene as it might be enacted on stage, and made sure he stayed in charge of the creative process for every single step of the way - including each illustration. A hard task-master indeed.
The first half of the novel is set in the time leading up to the Gordon Riots in London in 1780. 1778 saw the Catholic Relief Act, allowing Roman Catholics to own property, inherit land, and join the army, all of which had been formerly forbidden to them. They also became able to vote if they owned land. This is the underlying scenario to the novel; the times were wrought with tensions and uncertainty.
The novel starts in the "Maypole Inn" in Chigwell, in an area of Essex notorious for its highwaymen,
"The Maypole was an old building, with more gable ends than a man would care to count on a sunny day. ... It was a hale and hearty age though, still: and in the summer or autumn evenings, when the glow of the setting sun fell upon the oak and chestnut trees of the adjacent forest, the old house, partaking of its lustre, seemed their fit companion, and to have many good years of life in him yet."
Interestingly this pub, of the first illustration, still stands today. Built in 1547, it is one of the oldest public houses in England, just a few miles down the road from this reviewer.
It is this first half which is so entertaining in true Dickensian fashion. But the description above belies the dark, brooding atmosphere conjured up. Right at the start we have an unresolved mystery. It is a grisly and ghostly tale; a long involved story of murder and intrigue, told by by Dickens's mouthpiece, old Solomon Daisy. This character is well-named to give the reader a clear indication of the foreboding in this novel, describing as he does the "Solemn Day" of the double murder. Enticingly he says,
"I have heard it said that as we keep our birthdays when we are alive, so the ghosts of dead people, who are not easy in their graves, keep the day they died upon"
Solomon Daisy is one of a group of eccentric old-timers clustered round the Maypole's pub fire in the depths of Winter. These scenes are steeped in atmosphere; a cold, dark winter's evening, a group of locals enjoying a glass of punch, listening to tall stories accompanied by the crackle of the fire, and watching the smoke curling upwards from their long-stemmed pipes. Dickens conjures up a feeling of sitting right there with the characters. Among this group's cosy spot amidst the mists and unknown terrors outside, a mysterious traveller arrives, followed by another more threatening stranger, who is also shrouded in mystery.
This is followed by invigorating horsechases in the pitch black across the treacherous highwayman-infested wilds of Essex. There is an attack, a young gentleman set upon in the dark by unknown foes. Throughout permeates a feeling of unease and change, a brewing of disturbance, brimming just under the surface.
There are also various tensions between fathers and sons, employers and workers. One concerns two feuding families, the Chesters and the Haredales, who are reminiscent of Shakespeare's Montagues and Capulets. The suave, charming snake, Sir Edward Chester, is a Protestant. Despite his dissimulation he is ruthlessly manipulative; both his physical appearance, expressive language and behaviour all providing a contrast to the the bluff impatient Haredale, who is a Catholic. Friction sparks. But is the deep enmity really a result of religious differences? Or is there also an underlying sinister element? Their enmity dates from childhood. We are beginning to see that many events from the past may haunt this novel.
Interestingly, Edward Chester is based on Philip Dormer Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, whose complimenting manners, urbanity, and witticisms were highly regarded. But he made an enemy of Samuel Johnson (of the dictionary) who described Lord Chesterfield's published letters to his son as,
"selfish, calculating and contemptuous; he was not naturally generous, and he practised dissimulation until it became part of his nature ... they teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing-master"
Dickens's character Edward Chester himself quotes from Lord Chesterfield's letters. Dickens describes him as,
"of the world most worldly, who never compromised himself by an ungentlemanly action and was never guilty of a manly one"
As well as the tension between families, we have many episodes of comic domestic disharmony, and budding romances. There is Dolly Varden, a vain coquette of a minx, with whom Dickens was clearly besotted! When ostensibly comforting her friend Emma Haredale,
"Dolly's eyes, by one of those strange accidents for which there is no accounting, wandered to the glass again" ...
"To make one's sweetheart miserable is well enough and quite right, but to be made miserable one's self is a little too much!"
Dickens shows us he has a keen eye for the folly and the vanity of youth. Yet the reader now fully expects that love will not run smoothly. In Dickens there is never any moral ambiguity. Characters either develop and learn from their mistakes, or they do not. And those who do not will usually meet a sorry end, or their just desserts, in one way or another.
By the middle of the novel the reader may well be puzzled as to its name. There is a multilayered medley of themes, yet the title's subheading, "A Tale of the Riots of Eighty" seems to be inexplicable. And the character of Barnaby Rudge pops in and out of the story seemingly on a whim. This is not a bildungsroman in any sense, neither is it picaresque. It does not even proceed in a similar vein to that of the history of Oliver Twist or Nicholas Nickleby. Barnaby Rudge is a simple soul, often referred to by himself as "silly" and by his neighbours, though kindly, as an idiot. He loves Nature, has a close relationship with his raven, and has dreams of making his fortune to help his mother. We suspect a back history with Barnaby, and we are not disappointed.
There is a change of direction in the second half, and Barnaby becomes involved with a new set of characters. There is Lord George Gordon, who is presented here as a well-meaning but deluded fool, goaded by his dubious henchmen into increasingly bold measures leading the Protestant Association, and openly opposing the Catholic Relief Act, demanding its withdrawal. The villain of the piece is his secretary, the cold, calculating and conniving Gashford, whom Dickens unequivocally describes as,
"singularly repulsive and malicious"
He is based on Robert Watson, a real life friend of Gordon, who wrote a history of the Riots in 1795. Later Robert Watson committed suicide and about nineteen scars were found on his body. This is believed to be the reason why Dickens called his character "Gashford".
In the novel, Gashford muses,
"More seed, more seed ... When will the harvest come?"
as he plots and casts his net to entrap more supporters to the Protestant Cause, and hence more victims. He deliberately incites rioting and rebel-rousing, and his advice to Lord George Gordon is always intended to cause as much chaos, brutality and disturbance as possible. Another evil character who does not have the ability to employ such machinations is the self-seeking hangman Dennis. The solid John Grueby seems to be Gordon's only true friend. He is loyal to his master, and basically a good-hearted man, but he abhors the violence he can see resulting from the situation Gordon has allowed himself to be duped into. The reader too, knows from the start that events are going to escalate terrifyingly. There is betrayal, duplicity and changing of sides; an increase in the tension and a definite switch in the writing of this second half, much of which is very savage.
References are made to "Bloody Mary", the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, who had briefly reigned as Mary I from 1553-1558. During this time she had tried to re-establish the the Catholic faith of her mother, often by barbaric means, hence her name. The atrocities committed against Protestants during her reign became a rallying cry of the Protestant mob during the Gordon Riots. On June 2, 1780 the Protestant Association marched to the House of Commons and were joined by a riotous mob of 50,000. Dickens described them as,
"sprinkled doubtless here and there with honest zealots, but composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London"
He describes in great detail how the crowd were whipped up into a frenzy. His descriptions are incredibly powerful and visual, some parts having the graphic and explicit detail to make the reader's hair stand on end, being more usually found in a horror novel than a classic by Dickens. The tension and horror build relentlessly.
In real life for the next few days the mob terrorized London, burning Catholic churches, and the businesses and homes of Catholic families. Dickens describes all the events; how they burned down Newgate Prison, The Fleet, and King's Bench Prisons. He describes the terror of the prisoners, the deaths of innocent bystanders, how everyone was inadvertently caught up in the deathly smoke, the fire and the rabble, and how the prisoners - some incarcerated for negligible crimes - were set free, running amok without hope, bewildered, confused, damaged and burnt, with nowhere to run to,
"There were some broken men among these debtors who had been in jail so long, and were so miserable and destitute of friends, so dead to the world, and utterly forgotten and uncared for, that they implored their jailers not to set them free"
The Lord Mayor, whom Dickens based on Brackley Kennett, Lord Mayor of London from 1779-1780, did nothing when appealed to by characters in the novel. In real life Kennett was later convicted of criminal negligence for his conduct during the Riots. They then appeal to the magistrate Sir John Fielding, who was the younger half-brother of the novelist Henry Fielding. Both brothers worked towards criminal reform and John Fielding, who was blind and earned the nickname of "The Blind Beak" was the founder of the "Bow Street Runners" first police force.
Nevertheless, Dickens had a clear grasp of mob mentality,
"The crowd was the law and never was the law held in greater dread, or more implicitly obeyed."
Eventually George III ordered his troops to quell the riots. The mob was read the Riot Act; an Act of Parliament from 1714, which forced riotous crowds to disperse within one hour after the reading of the Act, or risk being shot. In actuality nearly 300 rioters were killed, and 450 were taken prisoner. 25 were hanged. Lord George Gordon, held in the Tower of London, was tried and found not guilty of treason.
The reader follows the progress of Barnaby Rudge, who has been caught up in the riots, and Hugh the Hostler from the Maypole Inn. Hugh was based on the real life James Jackson, who was a watch-wheel cutter and according to reports of the time, a "very desperate fellow" whose voice "boomed like the crack of doom". In the novel he is angling for any trouble, in one scene not even getting the anti-Catholic slogan "No Popery!" right, shouting "No Property!"
We read with horror as some of the pleasant pastoral scenes in the beginning of the novel are wrecked, and amiable characters savagely treated, never to return to their old trusting ways. In the end Dickens makes sure that those who have perpetrated evil acts get their comeuppance, and their punishment is largely commensurate with the enormity of their crime. Some are hanged. Others, whose crime was lesser, are given a lesser punishment, such as
Towards the end of Barnaby Rudge Dickens describes the public executions of characters in the book, which were performed at Newgate prison. Dickens hated such public displays, intended to be an extra deterrent to crime, but often taking on a circus atmosphere. He had reported his reaction to an execution in 1849 in a letter to "The Times". Writing these parts, Dickens had been in Broadstairs for two months, but by October he was having painful surgery for a fistula, and having to convalesce for a month. Nevertheless his biographer John Forster notes that Dickens was determined to complete the novel in the expected time.
So why the change of name from "Gabriel Varden - The Locksmith of London"? Gabriel Varden is without doubt a stalwart character, worthy of being the novel's hero in preference to the whimsical portrait of Barnaby Rudge. He is more in evidence throughout the novel, rather than disappearing for long stretches. But by retitling the novel, rather than including any more scenes about him Dickens has made his readers focus more on Barnaby Rudge. And the choice of a simple-minded man for his focus character is inspired.
It points up the ridiculousness of the situation itself. Not only has Lord George Gordon, the deranged leader of the rioters, been sadly misinformed by his henchmen, but make the reader want to weep for the deliberate manipulation and contrived destruction of such innocent joy in life. The descriptions of the riots are so powerful and intense. Yet his quirky humour is present too, in the detail; all the eccentric characters and environments. There is possibly no other author who can combine such opposing themes quite so well.
The Gordon Riots do not have a "hook" such as the infamy and grisly romance of the French Revolution, which could explain why this novel is so neglected. Dickens had not yet reached the pinnacle of his writing, and was yet to write his truly great novels. But this one has none of the hyperbole of the earlier ones. It is still exuberant and comic in places, but the posturing and sarcasm which sometimes seem almost overwhelming in early novels such as "Oliver Twist" are far less in evidence. It is altogether more controlled, better planned and consequently a more powerful piece.
And it is well worth reading!
The scenes where Gabriel Varden's hypocritical and supposedly long-suffering martyr of a wife is aided and abetted by their sly, vituperous servant Miggs against the exasperated locksmith, are some of the funniest anywhere in Dickens, who says her moodiness could be the result of being spoiled by wealth,
"Mrs Varden expressed her belief that never was any woman so beset as she; that her life was a continued scene of trial; that whenever she was disposed to be well and cheerful, so sure were the people around her to throw, by some means or other, a damp upon her spirits; and that, as she had enjoyed herself that day, and Heaven knew it was very seldom she did enjoy herself so she was now to pay the penalty."
Their preening peacock of an apprentice Sim Tappertit, complete with his powerful eye and his beautiful legs, (though very short) comes a very close second. He is the "noble captain" and leader of a risible secret society of 'Prentice Knights. Yet everyone knows what a prize idiot he really is, as the blind man Stagg remarks as an aside,
"Good luck go with you for a - conceited, bragging, empty-headed, duck-legged idiot"
The ponderous publican Joe Willett, with his slow-witted homespun philosophies is an easy third, ruminating,
"According to the constitution of mermaids, so much of a mermaid as is not a woman must be a fish"
So many characters in this novel make us smile with their eccentricities; easily as many as in any of his novels to date. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty was intended to be his first serious work of literature, inspired by Sir Walter Scott's historical novels, such as The Waverley Novels, and "Ivanhoe". Yet Dickens just could not resist creating these absurd characters whom his readers chuckle over and love so much. The most unusual "character" is Grip - and he is certainly a character, although he also happens to be Barnaby Rudge's pet raven! He is self-willed, displays eccentric behaviour, and has learned a whole catalogue of phrases, his favourite being a variety of ways of saying, "Polly Put the Kettle On". He is a gift of a character to an absurdist like Dickens. The reader may well find themselves laughing out loud at the inappropriate contributions Grip makes.
It is not surprising that Dickens shows a keen eye for observing the raven's behaviour. He explains in his preface that Grip is based on a pet raven he himself had had, called Grip. It wasn't his first, but it was the one he loved most. His own raven died in March 1841 - ironically and sadly in the middle of Dickens writing this novel - from eating lead chips. Dickens had it stuffed, copying George IV who had had his pet giraffe stuffed. It is still on public view, incidentally, in a museum in Philadelphia. Grip was also the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poem, "The Raven". Poe admired Dickens, and paid tribute to Grip in a review of Barnaby Rudge which he wrote for a magazine, saying that the raven should have served "a more symbolic prophetic purpose".
This is Dickens's fifth novel, written when he was 29 years of age, and published in weekly instalments between February and November 1841. By now he had become everybody's darling, with a public dinner being held in his honour in Edinburgh. He had originally signed a contract in 1836 to write a book entitled "Gabriel Varden - The Locksmith of London", for "Bentley's Miscellany" but after becoming more successful, and falling out with Bentley, he bought back the contract and the novel was subsequently published by Chapman and Hall in "Master Humphrey's Clock", and illustrated by two of his regular favourites, Phiz and George Cattermole. Many of his letters to these two artists survive, and it is remarkable how extraordinarily detailed and specific the descriptions are, for the engravings Dickens wished the artists to make. He evidently had a mental picture of a scene as it might be enacted on stage, and made sure he stayed in charge of the creative process for every single step of the way - including each illustration. A hard task-master indeed.
The first half of the novel is set in the time leading up to the Gordon Riots in London in 1780. 1778 saw the Catholic Relief Act, allowing Roman Catholics to own property, inherit land, and join the army, all of which had been formerly forbidden to them. They also became able to vote if they owned land. This is the underlying scenario to the novel; the times were wrought with tensions and uncertainty.
The novel starts in the "Maypole Inn" in Chigwell, in an area of Essex notorious for its highwaymen,
"The Maypole was an old building, with more gable ends than a man would care to count on a sunny day. ... It was a hale and hearty age though, still: and in the summer or autumn evenings, when the glow of the setting sun fell upon the oak and chestnut trees of the adjacent forest, the old house, partaking of its lustre, seemed their fit companion, and to have many good years of life in him yet."
Interestingly this pub, of the first illustration, still stands today. Built in 1547, it is one of the oldest public houses in England, just a few miles down the road from this reviewer.
It is this first half which is so entertaining in true Dickensian fashion. But the description above belies the dark, brooding atmosphere conjured up. Right at the start we have an unresolved mystery. It is a grisly and ghostly tale; a long involved story of murder and intrigue, told by by Dickens's mouthpiece, old Solomon Daisy. This character is well-named to give the reader a clear indication of the foreboding in this novel, describing as he does the "Solemn Day" of the double murder. Enticingly he says,
"I have heard it said that as we keep our birthdays when we are alive, so the ghosts of dead people, who are not easy in their graves, keep the day they died upon"
Solomon Daisy is one of a group of eccentric old-timers clustered round the Maypole's pub fire in the depths of Winter. These scenes are steeped in atmosphere; a cold, dark winter's evening, a group of locals enjoying a glass of punch, listening to tall stories accompanied by the crackle of the fire, and watching the smoke curling upwards from their long-stemmed pipes. Dickens conjures up a feeling of sitting right there with the characters. Among this group's cosy spot amidst the mists and unknown terrors outside, a mysterious traveller arrives, followed by another more threatening stranger, who is also shrouded in mystery.
This is followed by invigorating horsechases in the pitch black across the treacherous highwayman-infested wilds of Essex. There is an attack, a young gentleman set upon in the dark by unknown foes. Throughout permeates a feeling of unease and change, a brewing of disturbance, brimming just under the surface.
There are also various tensions between fathers and sons, employers and workers. One concerns two feuding families, the Chesters and the Haredales, who are reminiscent of Shakespeare's Montagues and Capulets. The suave, charming snake, Sir Edward Chester, is a Protestant. Despite his dissimulation he is ruthlessly manipulative; both his physical appearance, expressive language and behaviour all providing a contrast to the the bluff impatient Haredale, who is a Catholic. Friction sparks. But is the deep enmity really a result of religious differences? Or is there also an underlying sinister element? Their enmity dates from childhood. We are beginning to see that many events from the past may haunt this novel.
Interestingly, Edward Chester is based on Philip Dormer Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, whose complimenting manners, urbanity, and witticisms were highly regarded. But he made an enemy of Samuel Johnson (of the dictionary) who described Lord Chesterfield's published letters to his son as,
"selfish, calculating and contemptuous; he was not naturally generous, and he practised dissimulation until it became part of his nature ... they teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing-master"
Dickens's character Edward Chester himself quotes from Lord Chesterfield's letters. Dickens describes him as,
"of the world most worldly, who never compromised himself by an ungentlemanly action and was never guilty of a manly one"
As well as the tension between families, we have many episodes of comic domestic disharmony, and budding romances. There is Dolly Varden, a vain coquette of a minx, with whom Dickens was clearly besotted! When ostensibly comforting her friend Emma Haredale,
"Dolly's eyes, by one of those strange accidents for which there is no accounting, wandered to the glass again" ...
"To make one's sweetheart miserable is well enough and quite right, but to be made miserable one's self is a little too much!"
Dickens shows us he has a keen eye for the folly and the vanity of youth. Yet the reader now fully expects that love will not run smoothly. In Dickens there is never any moral ambiguity. Characters either develop and learn from their mistakes, or they do not. And those who do not will usually meet a sorry end, or their just desserts, in one way or another.
By the middle of the novel the reader may well be puzzled as to its name. There is a multilayered medley of themes, yet the title's subheading, "A Tale of the Riots of Eighty" seems to be inexplicable. And the character of Barnaby Rudge pops in and out of the story seemingly on a whim. This is not a bildungsroman in any sense, neither is it picaresque. It does not even proceed in a similar vein to that of the history of Oliver Twist or Nicholas Nickleby. Barnaby Rudge is a simple soul, often referred to by himself as "silly" and by his neighbours, though kindly, as an idiot. He loves Nature, has a close relationship with his raven, and has dreams of making his fortune to help his mother. We suspect a back history with Barnaby, and we are not disappointed.
There is a change of direction in the second half, and Barnaby becomes involved with a new set of characters. There is Lord George Gordon, who is presented here as a well-meaning but deluded fool, goaded by his dubious henchmen into increasingly bold measures leading the Protestant Association, and openly opposing the Catholic Relief Act, demanding its withdrawal. The villain of the piece is his secretary, the cold, calculating and conniving Gashford, whom Dickens unequivocally describes as,
"singularly repulsive and malicious"
He is based on Robert Watson, a real life friend of Gordon, who wrote a history of the Riots in 1795. Later Robert Watson committed suicide and about nineteen scars were found on his body. This is believed to be the reason why Dickens called his character "Gashford".
In the novel, Gashford muses,
"More seed, more seed ... When will the harvest come?"
as he plots and casts his net to entrap more supporters to the Protestant Cause, and hence more victims. He deliberately incites rioting and rebel-rousing, and his advice to Lord George Gordon is always intended to cause as much chaos, brutality and disturbance as possible. Another evil character who does not have the ability to employ such machinations is the self-seeking hangman Dennis. The solid John Grueby seems to be Gordon's only true friend. He is loyal to his master, and basically a good-hearted man, but he abhors the violence he can see resulting from the situation Gordon has allowed himself to be duped into. The reader too, knows from the start that events are going to escalate terrifyingly. There is betrayal, duplicity and changing of sides; an increase in the tension and a definite switch in the writing of this second half, much of which is very savage.
References are made to "Bloody Mary", the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, who had briefly reigned as Mary I from 1553-1558. During this time she had tried to re-establish the the Catholic faith of her mother, often by barbaric means, hence her name. The atrocities committed against Protestants during her reign became a rallying cry of the Protestant mob during the Gordon Riots. On June 2, 1780 the Protestant Association marched to the House of Commons and were joined by a riotous mob of 50,000. Dickens described them as,
"sprinkled doubtless here and there with honest zealots, but composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London"
He describes in great detail how the crowd were whipped up into a frenzy. His descriptions are incredibly powerful and visual, some parts having the graphic and explicit detail to make the reader's hair stand on end, being more usually found in a horror novel than a classic by Dickens. The tension and horror build relentlessly.
In real life for the next few days the mob terrorized London, burning Catholic churches, and the businesses and homes of Catholic families. Dickens describes all the events; how they burned down Newgate Prison, The Fleet, and King's Bench Prisons. He describes the terror of the prisoners, the deaths of innocent bystanders, how everyone was inadvertently caught up in the deathly smoke, the fire and the rabble, and how the prisoners - some incarcerated for negligible crimes - were set free, running amok without hope, bewildered, confused, damaged and burnt, with nowhere to run to,
"There were some broken men among these debtors who had been in jail so long, and were so miserable and destitute of friends, so dead to the world, and utterly forgotten and uncared for, that they implored their jailers not to set them free"
The Lord Mayor, whom Dickens based on Brackley Kennett, Lord Mayor of London from 1779-1780, did nothing when appealed to by characters in the novel. In real life Kennett was later convicted of criminal negligence for his conduct during the Riots. They then appeal to the magistrate Sir John Fielding, who was the younger half-brother of the novelist Henry Fielding. Both brothers worked towards criminal reform and John Fielding, who was blind and earned the nickname of "The Blind Beak" was the founder of the "Bow Street Runners" first police force.
Nevertheless, Dickens had a clear grasp of mob mentality,
"The crowd was the law and never was the law held in greater dread, or more implicitly obeyed."
Eventually George III ordered his troops to quell the riots. The mob was read the Riot Act; an Act of Parliament from 1714, which forced riotous crowds to disperse within one hour after the reading of the Act, or risk being shot. In actuality nearly 300 rioters were killed, and 450 were taken prisoner. 25 were hanged. Lord George Gordon, held in the Tower of London, was tried and found not guilty of treason.
The reader follows the progress of Barnaby Rudge, who has been caught up in the riots, and Hugh the Hostler from the Maypole Inn. Hugh was based on the real life James Jackson, who was a watch-wheel cutter and according to reports of the time, a "very desperate fellow" whose voice "boomed like the crack of doom". In the novel he is angling for any trouble, in one scene not even getting the anti-Catholic slogan "No Popery!" right, shouting "No Property!"
We read with horror as some of the pleasant pastoral scenes in the beginning of the novel are wrecked, and amiable characters savagely treated, never to return to their old trusting ways. In the end Dickens makes sure that those who have perpetrated evil acts get their comeuppance, and their punishment is largely commensurate with the enormity of their crime. Some are hanged. Others, whose crime was lesser, are given a lesser punishment, such as
Towards the end of Barnaby Rudge Dickens describes the public executions of characters in the book, which were performed at Newgate prison. Dickens hated such public displays, intended to be an extra deterrent to crime, but often taking on a circus atmosphere. He had reported his reaction to an execution in 1849 in a letter to "The Times". Writing these parts, Dickens had been in Broadstairs for two months, but by October he was having painful surgery for a fistula, and having to convalesce for a month. Nevertheless his biographer John Forster notes that Dickens was determined to complete the novel in the expected time.
So why the change of name from "Gabriel Varden - The Locksmith of London"? Gabriel Varden is without doubt a stalwart character, worthy of being the novel's hero in preference to the whimsical portrait of Barnaby Rudge. He is more in evidence throughout the novel, rather than disappearing for long stretches. But by retitling the novel, rather than including any more scenes about him Dickens has made his readers focus more on Barnaby Rudge. And the choice of a simple-minded man for his focus character is inspired.
It points up the ridiculousness of the situation itself. Not only has Lord George Gordon, the deranged leader of the rioters, been sadly misinformed by his henchmen, but make the reader want to weep for the deliberate manipulation and contrived destruction of such innocent joy in life. The descriptions of the riots are so powerful and intense. Yet his quirky humour is present too, in the detail; all the eccentric characters and environments. There is possibly no other author who can combine such opposing themes quite so well.
The Gordon Riots do not have a "hook" such as the infamy and grisly romance of the French Revolution, which could explain why this novel is so neglected. Dickens had not yet reached the pinnacle of his writing, and was yet to write his truly great novels. But this one has none of the hyperbole of the earlier ones. It is still exuberant and comic in places, but the posturing and sarcasm which sometimes seem almost overwhelming in early novels such as "Oliver Twist" are far less in evidence. It is altogether more controlled, better planned and consequently a more powerful piece.
And it is well worth reading!
July 21, 2022
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
2009 read
June 24, 2012
Is this the least-read Dickens novel? According to Goodreads, yes. Only 121 reviews on this one, with Martin Chuzzlewit a close second at 141. The reason? Lack of cinematic exposure hasn’t helped. Disney can’t turn an historical narrative about the Gordon Riots of 1780 into a feel-good schmaltz-fest, especially when the protagonist has the sinister talking raven that inspired Poe’s poem about a raven (I forget what it was called) as a best mate. A silent adaptation was made in 1915 (Crikey! Our prison is burning down!) followed by a BBC production in 1960 which isn’t a hot topic on those I-Love-the-60s clips shows. But I digress. It is what I do well. I am not here to write fluent, entertaining reviews with educational content. Or to take paragraph breaks. Barnaby Rudge was Dickens’s attempt to branch out as a “serious” novelist after the picaresque modes he’d written in prior (although his previous books contained hard-hitting content)—to do this, he chose to imitate Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian. So what we have here is an awkward mash-up of the romantic Scott plots, detailed historical re-enactments, and the usual irrepressible Dickens comic mischief. This mix makes for an uncertain novel—the characters don’t impose themselves on your cerebrum as in his prior books (except perhaps Barnaby or Lord Gordon) and the three central plots—the romance, the riot and the ghost story—don’t sit comfortably. So this would seem to be for the most patient Dickens devotees. When it works it soars: the riot scenes (esp. the prison break) are riveting and Lord George’s hopeless cronies fall victim to a satirical evisceration. Barnaby almost succeeds as the moral or emotional crux of the novel but as an “idiot” he isn’t that vividly rendered. The raven steals the show with its chant: “I’m a devil I’m a devil I’m devil! No popery no popery!”
January 12, 2023
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
- Howard 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.
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
- Howard 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.
April 27, 2023
Very powerful - a fantastic read. I'd forgotten so much from my last reading that it was like reading it for the first time again.
December 14, 2022
I designated 2015 as a Year of Dickens with a challenge to read six works by the master of the 19th century English novel. I chose Barnaby Rudge as the fifth book of the year for two reasons – one, as many Goodreads reviewers have pointed out, it is considered the least read of Dickens' novels; and two, it is one of only two historical novels in his body of work (along with A Tale of Two Cities).
The plot revolves around an unsolved murder involving the people of the small hamlet of Chigwell and the local manor house “the Warren.” The first two-thirds of the novel take place in 1775 and develop the aftermath of the murder and its impact on the characters, as well as the story of the stifled love affair between Edward Chester and Emma Haredale – a Protestant and a Catholic – whose fathers are longtime enemies. The story then moves forward to 1780. The same characters then become players -- some willing, others not -- in the drama of London's Gordon Riots. The Gordon Riots were incited in opposition to the government's efforts to reduce discrimination against the Catholic subjects of King George III. The Papists Act of 1778 eased Catholic liabilities, but unscrupulous Protestant politicians used the act to arouse credulous elements of the population in order to advance their own political ambitions. The riots were destructive and bloody. Dickens' portrayal of the Protestant Association leaders and their supporters reveals plainly his disdain for them. He described the riots as a “moral plague” on London. His appealing characters in Barnaby Rudge are straightforward and honorable Catholics and Protestants alike.
Barnaby Rudge grew on me. One of Dickens' strengths as a novelist is his skill in quickly capturing the reader with his characters. He didn't do so with Barnaby Rudge. The plot builds over the first hundred pages before the reader becomes pleasantly entwined with Emma, Joe Willet, the widow, the stalwart Gabriel Varden, steadfast Geoffrey Haredale, the adorable Dolly Varden, Barnaby himself and Grip, his roguish raven. Likewise the villainous characters – John Chester, Hugh, the unknown robber, and Simon Tappertit -- take a while to show their true colors. The comic figures -- the cowardly Solomon Daisy, the witless Miss Miggs, and the foolish but manipulative Mrs. Varden -- are not in a comic class with those of Dickens' other works. Barnaby Rudge lacks the deep and abiding humor of The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield. While it is often amusing, it's rarely funny. Instead, Dickens created a cocktail of history mixed with drama, a love story, a dash of the supernatural, and a splash of Gothic horror.
Thinking I had made a startling discovery, two elements of Dickens' novel jumped out as portents of the works of Edgar Allan Poe. A little research disclosed, that while a revelation to me, critics and literary scholars have long noted Poe's debt to Dickens. When Barnaby Rudge was serialized in 1840-41, Poe was working for Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia. He wrote a twelve column review of Dickens' novel in February of 1842 heaping praise upon the characterizations. He went on to note Dickens' failure to fully exploit the potential of Grip, the talking raven, going so far as to say Grip's “croakings might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama” (the italics are Poe's). Poe's own talking raven discloses a gift of prophecy in his most famous poem written three years after Barnaby Rudge. There seems to be little doubt Poe borrowed his raven from Barnaby's Grip. Another presentiment is the description of the criminal Rudge's reaction to the alarm bell pealing after the riot at the Maypole Inn. Dickens wrote of Rudge clasping his ears and wailing at the bell: “...speaking the language of the dead – the Bell – the Bell!” and then “...still the remorseless crying of that awful voice – the Bell – the Bell!” The robber's insanity presages the terror of Poe's own poem The Bells from six years after Barnaby Rudge.
My book was an older Penguin Classics (2003) edition with a fine introduction and descriptive notes by Dickens scholar John Bowen. This edition contains a glossary of terms, a map of London, and six appendices -- including a brief history of the Gordon Riots. Most interesting, however, are copies of the original illustrations which appear throughout the book. They were drawn by Dickens' colleague, Hablot Browne (better known as Phiz), and augment the text perfectly. Barnaby Rudge, while a shade behind David Copperfield, still earns Four Stars from me. If you want a novel of Dickens' earlier period, I recommend it.
Here's a link to Poe's review of Barnaby Rudge:
http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/g...
This is John Bowen's book, Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit, on the early novels of Dickens.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
The plot revolves around an unsolved murder involving the people of the small hamlet of Chigwell and the local manor house “the Warren.” The first two-thirds of the novel take place in 1775 and develop the aftermath of the murder and its impact on the characters, as well as the story of the stifled love affair between Edward Chester and Emma Haredale – a Protestant and a Catholic – whose fathers are longtime enemies. The story then moves forward to 1780. The same characters then become players -- some willing, others not -- in the drama of London's Gordon Riots. The Gordon Riots were incited in opposition to the government's efforts to reduce discrimination against the Catholic subjects of King George III. The Papists Act of 1778 eased Catholic liabilities, but unscrupulous Protestant politicians used the act to arouse credulous elements of the population in order to advance their own political ambitions. The riots were destructive and bloody. Dickens' portrayal of the Protestant Association leaders and their supporters reveals plainly his disdain for them. He described the riots as a “moral plague” on London. His appealing characters in Barnaby Rudge are straightforward and honorable Catholics and Protestants alike.
Barnaby Rudge grew on me. One of Dickens' strengths as a novelist is his skill in quickly capturing the reader with his characters. He didn't do so with Barnaby Rudge. The plot builds over the first hundred pages before the reader becomes pleasantly entwined with Emma, Joe Willet, the widow, the stalwart Gabriel Varden, steadfast Geoffrey Haredale, the adorable Dolly Varden, Barnaby himself and Grip, his roguish raven. Likewise the villainous characters – John Chester, Hugh, the unknown robber, and Simon Tappertit -- take a while to show their true colors. The comic figures -- the cowardly Solomon Daisy, the witless Miss Miggs, and the foolish but manipulative Mrs. Varden -- are not in a comic class with those of Dickens' other works. Barnaby Rudge lacks the deep and abiding humor of The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield. While it is often amusing, it's rarely funny. Instead, Dickens created a cocktail of history mixed with drama, a love story, a dash of the supernatural, and a splash of Gothic horror.
Thinking I had made a startling discovery, two elements of Dickens' novel jumped out as portents of the works of Edgar Allan Poe. A little research disclosed, that while a revelation to me, critics and literary scholars have long noted Poe's debt to Dickens. When Barnaby Rudge was serialized in 1840-41, Poe was working for Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia. He wrote a twelve column review of Dickens' novel in February of 1842 heaping praise upon the characterizations. He went on to note Dickens' failure to fully exploit the potential of Grip, the talking raven, going so far as to say Grip's “croakings might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama” (the italics are Poe's). Poe's own talking raven discloses a gift of prophecy in his most famous poem written three years after Barnaby Rudge. There seems to be little doubt Poe borrowed his raven from Barnaby's Grip. Another presentiment is the description of the criminal Rudge's reaction to the alarm bell pealing after the riot at the Maypole Inn. Dickens wrote of Rudge clasping his ears and wailing at the bell: “...speaking the language of the dead – the Bell – the Bell!” and then “...still the remorseless crying of that awful voice – the Bell – the Bell!” The robber's insanity presages the terror of Poe's own poem The Bells from six years after Barnaby Rudge.
My book was an older Penguin Classics (2003) edition with a fine introduction and descriptive notes by Dickens scholar John Bowen. This edition contains a glossary of terms, a map of London, and six appendices -- including a brief history of the Gordon Riots. Most interesting, however, are copies of the original illustrations which appear throughout the book. They were drawn by Dickens' colleague, Hablot Browne (better known as Phiz), and augment the text perfectly. Barnaby Rudge, while a shade behind David Copperfield, still earns Four Stars from me. If you want a novel of Dickens' earlier period, I recommend it.
Here's a link to Poe's review of Barnaby Rudge:
http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/g...
This is John Bowen's book, Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit, on the early novels of Dickens.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
April 14, 2022
If you’d asked me what I remembered from my first read of this likely least-read of Dickens’s works, I would’ve said Grip, young Barnaby’s pet raven (and the inspiration for Poe’s “Nevermore”-intoning bird), as well as amorphous impressions of the fantastic mob scenes. During my reread, at the first introduction of Hugh, a stablehand at the Maypole inn, my memory leaped to slot him with Barnaby and Grip. I was then surprised by Hugh’s subsequent action, knowing it had nothing to do with the innocent Barnaby. (Later chapters reassured me as to why my memory grouped the trio.)
For the penultimate meeting of the Dickens Fellowship of New Orleans this season, we were treated to a virtual guest lecture by Dr. Christian Lehmann on Greco-Roman mythology in Barnaby Rudge. In the novel Hugh is described a few times as a centaur and I figured that was due to his animalistic nature, but I hadn’t reasoned beyond that. Lehmann brought the centaur symbolism to a logical conclusion for us with something else that’s a spoiler. Reinforced by illustrations, that’s only one mythological layering Lehmann finds in the novel.
Set during the Gordon riots, Barnaby Rudge is usually described as historical fiction, though Lehmann sees it as mythological, as he does some of Dickens’s later novels. I look forward to reading more on the topic when Lehmann’s book is published one day. (And now I need to reread Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit with the myth of the Labyrinth in mind.)
I originally rated Barnaby Rudge 5 stars (based on my memory) and I’m sure that was due to the high I experienced from the prose, especially that of the riots. Though I now waver between four and five stars, my feelings about the prose haven't wavered. (An interesting tidbit from the Q&A with Lehmann is Dickens’s use of performative, and not grammatical, punctuation in the sections describing the movements of the mobs.) Whether instinctively or based on his research, Dickens knew the psychological and social reasons that lead to mobs getting violently out of hand. Some of the content is eerily similar to recent events in the U.S.
It was interesting to finish this the same day I finished The Books of Jacob, another novel of arguably historical-fiction about a group of people being led and manipulated.
For the penultimate meeting of the Dickens Fellowship of New Orleans this season, we were treated to a virtual guest lecture by Dr. Christian Lehmann on Greco-Roman mythology in Barnaby Rudge. In the novel Hugh is described a few times as a centaur and I figured that was due to his animalistic nature, but I hadn’t reasoned beyond that. Lehmann brought the centaur symbolism to a logical conclusion for us with something else that’s a spoiler. Reinforced by illustrations, that’s only one mythological layering Lehmann finds in the novel.
Set during the Gordon riots, Barnaby Rudge is usually described as historical fiction, though Lehmann sees it as mythological, as he does some of Dickens’s later novels. I look forward to reading more on the topic when Lehmann’s book is published one day. (And now I need to reread Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit with the myth of the Labyrinth in mind.)
I originally rated Barnaby Rudge 5 stars (based on my memory) and I’m sure that was due to the high I experienced from the prose, especially that of the riots. Though I now waver between four and five stars, my feelings about the prose haven't wavered. (An interesting tidbit from the Q&A with Lehmann is Dickens’s use of performative, and not grammatical, punctuation in the sections describing the movements of the mobs.) Whether instinctively or based on his research, Dickens knew the psychological and social reasons that lead to mobs getting violently out of hand. Some of the content is eerily similar to recent events in the U.S.
It was interesting to finish this the same day I finished The Books of Jacob, another novel of arguably historical-fiction about a group of people being led and manipulated.
March 31, 2023
Can you believe it?
Time again for December Dickens! As the years keep passing, things keep changing, but one thing stays: the cuddle-up with a Dickens in December.
Let the adventure begin...
Somehow breaking a tradition, I have to confess that finishing this Dickens did not make it my instant favourite. It has all the ingredients of the classic Dickens, and I liked it well enough, some characters more than others, but for me, the emotional spark was missing. It was a FINE novel, but I miss the superlatives that usually come to mind when recapping all the tosses and turns of a Dickensian narrative. I missed the outrageously awful villains and the funnier-than-funny sidekicks.
When I have read my last Dickens (Erwin Drood, up in December 2023), this one most certainly won't be my first pick for a re-read.
But I am glad I read it anyway, and it filled me with the joy only Dickens sentences can offer!
Time again for December Dickens! As the years keep passing, things keep changing, but one thing stays: the cuddle-up with a Dickens in December.
Let the adventure begin...
Somehow breaking a tradition, I have to confess that finishing this Dickens did not make it my instant favourite. It has all the ingredients of the classic Dickens, and I liked it well enough, some characters more than others, but for me, the emotional spark was missing. It was a FINE novel, but I miss the superlatives that usually come to mind when recapping all the tosses and turns of a Dickensian narrative. I missed the outrageously awful villains and the funnier-than-funny sidekicks.
When I have read my last Dickens (Erwin Drood, up in December 2023), this one most certainly won't be my first pick for a re-read.
But I am glad I read it anyway, and it filled me with the joy only Dickens sentences can offer!
August 13, 2019
**Warning: this text may contain spoilers** Fathers and Sons
Mr. Turgenev can count himself very lucky that Dickens, especially the younger Dickens, had a tendency to name his novels after characters that played major parts in them (or were supposed to be doing so) – Fielding and Smollett, and others, who exercised a certain influence on Dickens were not very creative when it came to finding titles for the novels – because otherwise the Russian writer would have had to recycle this title for one of his most celebrated novels. However, Dickens blandly gave preference to Barnaby Rudge, specifying this with A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty, and so “Fathers and Sons” was ready to be picked up by Turgenev.
All in all, though, “Fathers and Sons” would have been a very apt title for Barnaby Rudge – actually, at breakfast today I came up with another suggestion, something along the lines of “Raise Hugh and Cry!” but that was probably just because the coffee was very strong – as Barnaby Rudge does not play bigger role in the novel than many other characters from that book. Instead the novel is a lot about the relationships between fathers and their sons. We have four to five father-and-son-relationships in this novel, and in most cases they are, and remain, dysfunctional. Right from the beginning we can experience how the landlord of the country inn “The Maypole”, John Willet, a morose, self-righteous, pompous ass, tyrannizes and humiliates his adult son Joe, whom he still regards as a child. There is probably more thoughtlessness than malevolence in old Willet’s behaviour but still it proves disastrous as, in consequence, Joe is not taken seriously by any of the Maypole regulars. The paradigm of an egoistic and mean father is John Chester, who has two sons. His legitimate son, Edmund Chester, is regarded by his father as a kind of pawn he can marry off to a rich heiress in order to guarantee his own genteel living standard. In one of his conversations, Mr. Chester makes his attitude towards the bonds between fathers and sons rather clear:
'These family topics are so extremely dry […] It is for that reason, and because they have an appearance of business, that I dislike them so very much. Well! You know the rest. A son, Ned, unless he is old enough to be a companion—that is to say, unless he is some two or three and twenty—is not the kind of thing to have about one. He is a restraint upon his father, his father is a restraint upon him, and they make each other mutually uncomfortable. Therefore, until within the last four years or so—I have a poor memory for dates, and if I mistake, you will correct me in your own mind—you pursued your studies at a distance, and picked up a great variety of accomplishments. Occasionally we passed a week or two together here, and disconcerted each other as only such near relations can. At last you came home. I candidly tell you, my dear boy, that if you had been awkward and overgrown, I should have exported you to some distant part of the world.' (Chapter 15)
His son, to him, is just a means to an end, and there is no natural affection on his side at all. Therefore it will hardly come as a surprise that he has no feelings of responsibility either for his second, illegitimate, son, the ruffian Hugh, who works as an ostler at the Maypole. In the first place, he does not even know that Hugh is his son, but when he learns this, all he thinks is:
’ […]Extremely distressing to be the parent of such an uncouth creature! Still, I gave him very good advice. I told him he would certainly be hanged. I could have done no more if I had known of our relationship; and there are a great many fathers who have never done as much for their natural children. – The hairdresser may come in, Peak!' (Chapter 75)
Not any better than the shining example of this genteel, high-ranking father is that of Mr. Rudge, who is a murderer and a highway-man, and who has no disinterested feelings for his own son, the mentally retarded Barnaby. Only when he thinks that he can get some help from his son in finding his accomplice does he tolerate Barnaby’s presence although the son, at first horrified at the idea of having a criminal for a father by and by relents towards him and looks after his needs. In the case of Barnaby, his mother – and through her possibly the narrator – even goes so far as to put down the son’s mental illness to the crime committed by the father when the mother was pregnant:
’[…] The hand of Him who set His curse on murder, is heavy on us now. You cannot doubt it. Our son, our innocent boy, on whom His anger fell before his birth, is in this place in peril of his life—brought here by your guilt; yes, by that alone, as Heaven sees and knows, for he has been led astray in the darkness of his intellect, and that is the terrible consequence of your crime.' (Chapter 73)
A more benevolent, albeit at first side ineffectual father is Gabriel Varden, the locksmith, who spoils his daughter Dolly and who does not seem to have the guts to put his foot down against his quarrelsome wife. His apprentice Simon Tappertit, to whom he stands in loco parentis and whom he treats very well – even trying to prevent Simon from entangling himself irrevocably with the fate of the rioters –, has absolutely no respect at all for him and even plots against his master/father.
As the public life focus of this first of Dickens’s two historical novels are the Gordon Riots of 1780, the private life interest of Barnaby Rudge centres on sons’ rebellions against their (often unjust) fathers. Whereas Edward brings his father’s curse and renouncement upon himself for disobeying him in a matter of the heart, in which a tender and responsible father would never have exacted obedience, Simon and Joe Willet rebel openly and actively against their respective father figures. Simon even goes so far as to assault Varden and to kidnap his master’s daughter, but even Joe’s rebellion implies physical violence in that he gives a good thrashing to one of the Maypole cronies, who humiliates him once too often – of course, this is a vicarious attack on his father, Dickens probably knowing that Joe would not work as a good character for his readers any more if he had actually really raised a hand to old Willet himself. Although Joe, unlike Simon, does not join the rioters but the army and although later in the novel old Willet and his son are reconciled (interestingly, old Willet’s mind is addled in the course of events and he is rather like a child than like a father as a result), both Joe and Simon can only be accepted in society again after they have lost a limb or two: Joe loses his arm (!) when defending the King against the American rebels, and Simon has to forfeit his legs, formerly the source of his pride. So rebelling against your elders requires some form of atonement after all, even in the case of Joe.
In a way there is still a third example of filial rebellion, namely that of Hugh against society as a whole, which makes him a prominent leader in the Gordon Riots, whose religious direction of impact soon gave way to the rage of the poor and desperate against those who regarded themselves as their social betters. Dickens’s descriptions of the riots are outstanding for the graphic terrors with which they illustrate both the fierceness and the desperation of many rioters. Hugh is undoubtedly one of the most vicious and relentless leaders of the mob, and he does not shy at destroying lives along with property, but still Dickens gives his character a certain ambivalence that might suggest that it was not exclusively the rioters themselves that were to be blamed but also a society that drove them to the brink of despair:
’[…] I have been always called Hugh; nothing more. I never knew, nor saw, nor thought about a father; and I was a boy of six—that's not very old—when they hung my mother up at Tyburn for a couple of thousand men to stare at. They might have let her live. She was poor enough.'
'How very sad!' exclaimed his patron, with a condescending smile. 'I have no doubt she was an exceedingly fine woman.'
'You see that dog of mine?' said Hugh, abruptly. […] 'Such a dog as that, and one of the same breed, was the only living thing except me that howled that day,' said Hugh. 'Out of the two thousand odd—there was a larger crowd for its being a woman—the dog and I alone had any pity. If he'd have been a man, he'd have been glad to be quit of her, for she had been forced to keep him lean and half-starved; but being a dog, and not having a man's sense, he was sorry.' (Chapter 23)
Scenes like that imply that at least some of the crime and destruction that broke lose during the Gordon Riots – and Dickens was living at a time when the Chartist movement gave rise to similar misgivings about the durability of social peace – can be attributed to social ills and the irresponsibility of those who have the power to change things for the better. One of the grievances Dickens recurs to is the exaggerated use of the death penalty, which was even executed on children who stole for want of food. In the character of Ned Dennis, the hangman – who was partly modelled on a real life person – Dickens concentrates his most acerb criticism of this gruesome and inhumane punishment. Dennis may well be one of Dickens’s most grotesque characters, providing a sense of dark and morbid humour and a fair share of dramatic irony throughout the passages in which he makes his appearance but all in all he is a most hideous monster that is all wrapped up in the clothes of those he “worked off”, as he calls it, and that mocks the doomed in their prison cells. No wonder he rounds off his ill-deeds by betraying his former companions!
Dickens may have had a certain amount of understanding for the deprivation and the horrors that drove people to rebel against an unfair government – just remember the two sons participating in the destruction of Newgate in order to save their father, who is waiting for his execution – but in the end his Victorian mindset embraced a paternalistic view of politics. In other words, just as Barnaby was pardoned – through the untiring mediation of the benevolent father figure – by the Crown, he held it that social ills should be ameliorated by reform and through the organs of the state rather than by revolution and through grassroots movements. After all, it is the same apparently – as far as his own domestic circle is concerned – helpless Gabriel Varden who helped to forge the big Newgate lock and who did not give in an inch to the threatening crowd that wanted him to pick it. By the way, the outcome of the Riots also helps to put Mrs. Varden back into her place and to restore the Varden family peace as if by magic. So even if Lord Gordon himself, who was responsible for the outbreak of the riots, is not portrayed as a downright evil and malevolent person by Dickens, the author yet makes it clear that Gordon was not really in his senses – and he also makes him partly the victim of a sly and egoistic secretary, who uses his own influence over the labile and gullible master.
Barnaby Rudge does have its flaws as a novel – it being meandering at times and often clumsy in joining the public and the private levels – but it follows its major ideas with a vengeance and shows that the author knew what he was doing, which cannot be said for every single one of his previous novels – I am especially thinking of The Old Curiosity Shop here. Apart from that, with a character like Hugh, Dickens shows his skill at creating more complex characters; and neither should we forget truly Dickensian characters such as the grotesque Mr. Dennis, the overbearing Sim, the hypocritical servant Miggs and the likeable and genial Gabriel Varden. All in all, Barnaby Rudge has certainly not deserved to be in the shadow of many of Dickens’s other works.
Mr. Turgenev can count himself very lucky that Dickens, especially the younger Dickens, had a tendency to name his novels after characters that played major parts in them (or were supposed to be doing so) – Fielding and Smollett, and others, who exercised a certain influence on Dickens were not very creative when it came to finding titles for the novels – because otherwise the Russian writer would have had to recycle this title for one of his most celebrated novels. However, Dickens blandly gave preference to Barnaby Rudge, specifying this with A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty, and so “Fathers and Sons” was ready to be picked up by Turgenev.
All in all, though, “Fathers and Sons” would have been a very apt title for Barnaby Rudge – actually, at breakfast today I came up with another suggestion, something along the lines of “Raise Hugh and Cry!” but that was probably just because the coffee was very strong – as Barnaby Rudge does not play bigger role in the novel than many other characters from that book. Instead the novel is a lot about the relationships between fathers and their sons. We have four to five father-and-son-relationships in this novel, and in most cases they are, and remain, dysfunctional. Right from the beginning we can experience how the landlord of the country inn “The Maypole”, John Willet, a morose, self-righteous, pompous ass, tyrannizes and humiliates his adult son Joe, whom he still regards as a child. There is probably more thoughtlessness than malevolence in old Willet’s behaviour but still it proves disastrous as, in consequence, Joe is not taken seriously by any of the Maypole regulars. The paradigm of an egoistic and mean father is John Chester, who has two sons. His legitimate son, Edmund Chester, is regarded by his father as a kind of pawn he can marry off to a rich heiress in order to guarantee his own genteel living standard. In one of his conversations, Mr. Chester makes his attitude towards the bonds between fathers and sons rather clear:
'These family topics are so extremely dry […] It is for that reason, and because they have an appearance of business, that I dislike them so very much. Well! You know the rest. A son, Ned, unless he is old enough to be a companion—that is to say, unless he is some two or three and twenty—is not the kind of thing to have about one. He is a restraint upon his father, his father is a restraint upon him, and they make each other mutually uncomfortable. Therefore, until within the last four years or so—I have a poor memory for dates, and if I mistake, you will correct me in your own mind—you pursued your studies at a distance, and picked up a great variety of accomplishments. Occasionally we passed a week or two together here, and disconcerted each other as only such near relations can. At last you came home. I candidly tell you, my dear boy, that if you had been awkward and overgrown, I should have exported you to some distant part of the world.' (Chapter 15)
His son, to him, is just a means to an end, and there is no natural affection on his side at all. Therefore it will hardly come as a surprise that he has no feelings of responsibility either for his second, illegitimate, son, the ruffian Hugh, who works as an ostler at the Maypole. In the first place, he does not even know that Hugh is his son, but when he learns this, all he thinks is:
’ […]Extremely distressing to be the parent of such an uncouth creature! Still, I gave him very good advice. I told him he would certainly be hanged. I could have done no more if I had known of our relationship; and there are a great many fathers who have never done as much for their natural children. – The hairdresser may come in, Peak!' (Chapter 75)
Not any better than the shining example of this genteel, high-ranking father is that of Mr. Rudge, who is a murderer and a highway-man, and who has no disinterested feelings for his own son, the mentally retarded Barnaby. Only when he thinks that he can get some help from his son in finding his accomplice does he tolerate Barnaby’s presence although the son, at first horrified at the idea of having a criminal for a father by and by relents towards him and looks after his needs. In the case of Barnaby, his mother – and through her possibly the narrator – even goes so far as to put down the son’s mental illness to the crime committed by the father when the mother was pregnant:
’[…] The hand of Him who set His curse on murder, is heavy on us now. You cannot doubt it. Our son, our innocent boy, on whom His anger fell before his birth, is in this place in peril of his life—brought here by your guilt; yes, by that alone, as Heaven sees and knows, for he has been led astray in the darkness of his intellect, and that is the terrible consequence of your crime.' (Chapter 73)
A more benevolent, albeit at first side ineffectual father is Gabriel Varden, the locksmith, who spoils his daughter Dolly and who does not seem to have the guts to put his foot down against his quarrelsome wife. His apprentice Simon Tappertit, to whom he stands in loco parentis and whom he treats very well – even trying to prevent Simon from entangling himself irrevocably with the fate of the rioters –, has absolutely no respect at all for him and even plots against his master/father.
As the public life focus of this first of Dickens’s two historical novels are the Gordon Riots of 1780, the private life interest of Barnaby Rudge centres on sons’ rebellions against their (often unjust) fathers. Whereas Edward brings his father’s curse and renouncement upon himself for disobeying him in a matter of the heart, in which a tender and responsible father would never have exacted obedience, Simon and Joe Willet rebel openly and actively against their respective father figures. Simon even goes so far as to assault Varden and to kidnap his master’s daughter, but even Joe’s rebellion implies physical violence in that he gives a good thrashing to one of the Maypole cronies, who humiliates him once too often – of course, this is a vicarious attack on his father, Dickens probably knowing that Joe would not work as a good character for his readers any more if he had actually really raised a hand to old Willet himself. Although Joe, unlike Simon, does not join the rioters but the army and although later in the novel old Willet and his son are reconciled (interestingly, old Willet’s mind is addled in the course of events and he is rather like a child than like a father as a result), both Joe and Simon can only be accepted in society again after they have lost a limb or two: Joe loses his arm (!) when defending the King against the American rebels, and Simon has to forfeit his legs, formerly the source of his pride. So rebelling against your elders requires some form of atonement after all, even in the case of Joe.
In a way there is still a third example of filial rebellion, namely that of Hugh against society as a whole, which makes him a prominent leader in the Gordon Riots, whose religious direction of impact soon gave way to the rage of the poor and desperate against those who regarded themselves as their social betters. Dickens’s descriptions of the riots are outstanding for the graphic terrors with which they illustrate both the fierceness and the desperation of many rioters. Hugh is undoubtedly one of the most vicious and relentless leaders of the mob, and he does not shy at destroying lives along with property, but still Dickens gives his character a certain ambivalence that might suggest that it was not exclusively the rioters themselves that were to be blamed but also a society that drove them to the brink of despair:
’[…] I have been always called Hugh; nothing more. I never knew, nor saw, nor thought about a father; and I was a boy of six—that's not very old—when they hung my mother up at Tyburn for a couple of thousand men to stare at. They might have let her live. She was poor enough.'
'How very sad!' exclaimed his patron, with a condescending smile. 'I have no doubt she was an exceedingly fine woman.'
'You see that dog of mine?' said Hugh, abruptly. […] 'Such a dog as that, and one of the same breed, was the only living thing except me that howled that day,' said Hugh. 'Out of the two thousand odd—there was a larger crowd for its being a woman—the dog and I alone had any pity. If he'd have been a man, he'd have been glad to be quit of her, for she had been forced to keep him lean and half-starved; but being a dog, and not having a man's sense, he was sorry.' (Chapter 23)
Scenes like that imply that at least some of the crime and destruction that broke lose during the Gordon Riots – and Dickens was living at a time when the Chartist movement gave rise to similar misgivings about the durability of social peace – can be attributed to social ills and the irresponsibility of those who have the power to change things for the better. One of the grievances Dickens recurs to is the exaggerated use of the death penalty, which was even executed on children who stole for want of food. In the character of Ned Dennis, the hangman – who was partly modelled on a real life person – Dickens concentrates his most acerb criticism of this gruesome and inhumane punishment. Dennis may well be one of Dickens’s most grotesque characters, providing a sense of dark and morbid humour and a fair share of dramatic irony throughout the passages in which he makes his appearance but all in all he is a most hideous monster that is all wrapped up in the clothes of those he “worked off”, as he calls it, and that mocks the doomed in their prison cells. No wonder he rounds off his ill-deeds by betraying his former companions!
Dickens may have had a certain amount of understanding for the deprivation and the horrors that drove people to rebel against an unfair government – just remember the two sons participating in the destruction of Newgate in order to save their father, who is waiting for his execution – but in the end his Victorian mindset embraced a paternalistic view of politics. In other words, just as Barnaby was pardoned – through the untiring mediation of the benevolent father figure – by the Crown, he held it that social ills should be ameliorated by reform and through the organs of the state rather than by revolution and through grassroots movements. After all, it is the same apparently – as far as his own domestic circle is concerned – helpless Gabriel Varden who helped to forge the big Newgate lock and who did not give in an inch to the threatening crowd that wanted him to pick it. By the way, the outcome of the Riots also helps to put Mrs. Varden back into her place and to restore the Varden family peace as if by magic. So even if Lord Gordon himself, who was responsible for the outbreak of the riots, is not portrayed as a downright evil and malevolent person by Dickens, the author yet makes it clear that Gordon was not really in his senses – and he also makes him partly the victim of a sly and egoistic secretary, who uses his own influence over the labile and gullible master.
Barnaby Rudge does have its flaws as a novel – it being meandering at times and often clumsy in joining the public and the private levels – but it follows its major ideas with a vengeance and shows that the author knew what he was doing, which cannot be said for every single one of his previous novels – I am especially thinking of The Old Curiosity Shop here. Apart from that, with a character like Hugh, Dickens shows his skill at creating more complex characters; and neither should we forget truly Dickensian characters such as the grotesque Mr. Dennis, the overbearing Sim, the hypocritical servant Miggs and the likeable and genial Gabriel Varden. All in all, Barnaby Rudge has certainly not deserved to be in the shadow of many of Dickens’s other works.
March 6, 2014
Have fair roared with laughter at some of the character descriptions (notably Miggs and her mistress). George Gordon is perfect Punch cartoon and star of it all is the Raven.
Don't be put off by 'them' telling you that a story is 'lesser' when the 'lesser' of Charles Dickens is far superior than anything written by 'them'.
Don't be put off by 'them' telling you that a story is 'lesser' when the 'lesser' of Charles Dickens is far superior than anything written by 'them'.
October 19, 2023
In my project to read all of Charles Dickens' works in the order published, I just finished reading Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty, one of my least favorite books by Dickens so far. This was Dickens' first historical novel largely set during the Lord Gordon Riots of 1780, the anti-Catholic riots in London. If there could be a center of this tale, it would be the Maypole Inn in the village of Chigwell in 1775. It was here that the proprietor, John Willet and his cronies gathered together on a stormy night to discuss a well-known tale of a local murder of Reuben Haredale taking place twenty-two years ago. He had been the owner of an estate in the area, now the residence of Reuben's brother, Geoffrey and his niece Emma Haredale. And typical of Charles Dickens writing there are a lot of colorful characters that come in and out of the story. One of these characters is Barnaby Rudge and his widowed mother as well as his pet raven, Grip.
The story advances five years to a wintry evening early in the year 1780. On the twenty-seventh anniversary of the murder of Reuben Haredale, a ghost is seen in the churchyard, reminiscent of the murdered Reuben Harefield. It is felt by John Willet that Geoffrey Haredale should hear the story. Three men who have lost their way to London are put up at the Maypole. It is later discovered that they were in fact, Lord George Gordon as well as his secretary and a servant. The next day they depart for London, inciting anti-Catholic sentiment and recruiting protestant volunteers.
As I don't want to venture further into the plot, I will end it here. This is the period of history where in 1778 the Catholic Relief Act was enacted to help to ease the restrictions on Britain's Catholics. The Protestant Association, led by Lord George Gordon, opposed this act. It was then on June 22, 1780 that the Protestant Association marched to the House of Commons and were joined by a riotous mob
terrorizing London for the next few days. During this time many were killed along with public executions. It was Charles Dickens' first historical novel and a piece of history that I was not familiar with.
It is something to look upon enjoyment, so that it be free and wild and in the face of nature, though it is but the enjoyment of an idiot. It is something to know that Heaven has left the capacity of gladness in such a creature's breast; it is something to be assured that, however lightly men may crush that faculty in their fellows, the Great Creator of mankind imparts it even to his despised and slighted work. Who would rather not see a poor idiot happy in the sunlight, than a wise man pining in a darkened jail."
The story advances five years to a wintry evening early in the year 1780. On the twenty-seventh anniversary of the murder of Reuben Haredale, a ghost is seen in the churchyard, reminiscent of the murdered Reuben Harefield. It is felt by John Willet that Geoffrey Haredale should hear the story. Three men who have lost their way to London are put up at the Maypole. It is later discovered that they were in fact, Lord George Gordon as well as his secretary and a servant. The next day they depart for London, inciting anti-Catholic sentiment and recruiting protestant volunteers.
"Cheerily, though there were none abroad to see it, shone the Maypole light that evening. Blessings on the red--deep, ruby, glowing red--old curtain of the window; blending into one rich stream of brightness, fire and candle, meat, drink, and company, and gleaming like a jovial eye upon the bleak waste out of doors! Within, what carpet like its crunching sand, what music merry as its crackling logs, what perfume like its kitchen's dainty breath, what weather genial as its hearty warmth! Blessing on the old house, how sturdily it stood! How did the vexed wind chafe and roar about its stalwart roof; how did it pant and strive with its wide chimneys, which still poured forth from their hospitable throats, great clouds of smoke, and puffed defiance in its face; how, above all, did it drive and rattle at the casement, emulous to extinguish that cheerful glow, which would not be put down and seemed brighter for the conflict."
As I don't want to venture further into the plot, I will end it here. This is the period of history where in 1778 the Catholic Relief Act was enacted to help to ease the restrictions on Britain's Catholics. The Protestant Association, led by Lord George Gordon, opposed this act. It was then on June 22, 1780 that the Protestant Association marched to the House of Commons and were joined by a riotous mob
terrorizing London for the next few days. During this time many were killed along with public executions. It was Charles Dickens' first historical novel and a piece of history that I was not familiar with.
May 4, 2021
Barnaby Rudge, a book report by Jessica G.
Barnaby Rudge is a book by Charles Dickens, who is very famous for his many books. Even though Charles Dickens is very famous, and I have read a lot of his books, I had never heard of Barnaby Rudge until two months ago. Barnaby Rudge is about the Gordon Riots, which I had also never heard of. In short: Barnaby Rudge is a good book, and I am once again questioning my education.
Anyway. I can see why people in America don't learn about the Gordon Riots, which happened during the War of Independence for us. But, for those of you who don't know, they arose after Lord George Gordon (represented here as the most Punchable Lord in Literature) tried to make it illegal to be Catholic in England, to strip Catholic citizens of property, and to tear down their "false idols and false altars." In the wake of his bill not passing, his many followers (who were stirred up by propaganda about the crafty Catholics with all their wealth- sound familiar?) took to the streets of London. Homes and churches were looted and burn, people died, it sounds absolutely horrifying. And Dickens does a stellar job of bringing it all to life. With his signature flair for character and description, he brings us a cast of heroes and villains, star-crossed lovers, criminals, and saints, and sets them against this backdrop. The style of the book reminded me very much, not of Dickens' other works, but of Sir Walter Scott's, Waverly in particular. And so, from never having heard of this book to deciding, yep, I'm gonna try and read that, I now place it solidly in my Top Five Dickens Novels That I've Read So Far. Definitely above The Old Curiosity Shop. And possibly even- GASP- The Pickwick Papers!
Barnaby Rudge is a book by Charles Dickens, who is very famous for his many books. Even though Charles Dickens is very famous, and I have read a lot of his books, I had never heard of Barnaby Rudge until two months ago. Barnaby Rudge is about the Gordon Riots, which I had also never heard of. In short: Barnaby Rudge is a good book, and I am once again questioning my education.
Anyway. I can see why people in America don't learn about the Gordon Riots, which happened during the War of Independence for us. But, for those of you who don't know, they arose after Lord George Gordon (represented here as the most Punchable Lord in Literature) tried to make it illegal to be Catholic in England, to strip Catholic citizens of property, and to tear down their "false idols and false altars." In the wake of his bill not passing, his many followers (who were stirred up by propaganda about the crafty Catholics with all their wealth- sound familiar?) took to the streets of London. Homes and churches were looted and burn, people died, it sounds absolutely horrifying. And Dickens does a stellar job of bringing it all to life. With his signature flair for character and description, he brings us a cast of heroes and villains, star-crossed lovers, criminals, and saints, and sets them against this backdrop. The style of the book reminded me very much, not of Dickens' other works, but of Sir Walter Scott's, Waverly in particular. And so, from never having heard of this book to deciding, yep, I'm gonna try and read that, I now place it solidly in my Top Five Dickens Novels That I've Read So Far. Definitely above The Old Curiosity Shop. And possibly even- GASP- The Pickwick Papers!
April 27, 2024
Even in a lesser known work, Dickens is a master. I didn't know anything about this novel going into it and had to google things as I went along: who is Lord George Gordon? What are these riots about? etc. I think Dickens' two historical novels are so interesting because both are set in the late 1700s and both are about periods of profound civil unrest, mob violence, and questions of power, religion, and class. Dickens was clearly fascinated by these questions and I love that he explores them through these two novels that were written almost twenty years apart. Though I loved A Tale of Two Cities, in some ways I loved Barnaby Rudge even more. It's longer so Dickens has the leisure to set the stage in the first half of the novel which gives him room for more profound character development.
Spoilers below, beware.
In the introduction, the writer noted that Dickens' original title for the novel was Gabriel Varden instead of Barnaby Rudge, but several years later, the idea for the story had evolved and much for the better. I love Gabriel Varden as a character; he's a new favorite. But having the developmentally disabled, free-spirited, kindly, innocent Barnaby at the heart of the novel is a perfect vehicle for questioning the mob mentality. Barnaby gets swept up by circumstance and by one of the novel's villains, Hugh, into joining the Protestant mob. While Barnaby himself does not commit any violence or destruction of property, he is nevertheless taken up by the authorities and is nearly hanged for his "role" in the riots. His vulnerability is part of the major concern of the novel for Dickens. While a mob may have at its heart real concerns for justice, the correct use of power, etc., it inevitably eats up the vulnerable in its wake and becomes an instrument for destroying its own ends. I think it's Gabriel who has a comment towards the end of the novel that good ends must always be sought by good means. I think both Dickens' historical novels explore these questions profoundly and fit right in with some of the biggest questions of human life across the ages.
I am coming to think more and more that the way to be a good person, the way to be Christlike, the way to counteract the worst in human nature is to care for the vulnerable. And because being human is being vulnerable, it's also learning that even the villains are vulnerable and to mourn for their loss of innocence. Hugh is so fascinating in light of this. He's an undoubted villain and yet his complexity as a character speaks to the heart of the novel. In one sense, who is to blame him for his violence? Abandoned by his father who did not marry his mother and the son of a hanged mother for a crime committed from desperation, Hugh is left on his own as a child. Nature v. nurture: couldn't the vulnerable Hugh have become something so much more if he had been loved and cared for? Absolutely. Even in his final moments, there is a nobility about him. Dickens compares him to a prophet as he calls for vengenance against his father (which comes true in the end). Though his death is a just one, it is also a mourned one. He is contrasted in turn with the hangman, Ned Dennis, who lacks scruples of any kind and stabs Hugh in the back. Dennis joins Sir John Chester as the most villainous characters because of their thorough selfishness, cowardice, and complete lack of care for the wellbeing of others. Indeed, not only that, but their knowing actions that lead directly to the harm of others.
To balance out these characters are a host of others who are comic and lovable, comic and absurd (Miss Miggs and Simon Tappertit), and noble-hearted. I must put in a good word for John Willet. Dickens has such fun in his descriptions of his slow-moving mind and body; he's a great comic character and we feel so much for him too as the Maypole is coming down around his ears (so to speak). His relationship with his son, Joe, is irksome but I love that Joe does what he needs to do to be a man. At first, I thought Joe was going to be a mere comic character, but he actually has a compelling character arc that ends so satisfyingly. He's one of my favorite characters, and I love that we are re-introduced to him in the second half of the novel with some mystery. I am still surprised how small a role Edward Chester and Emma Haredale play. They are definitely secondary to Joe and Dolly's characters and yet their cross-religion romance and how their guardians, Sir John and Mr Haredale, treat it is at the heart of the novel's conflict. England is a Protestant country that sits uneasily surrounded by Catholic countries. England's own history as a Catholic-country-turned-Protestant haunts it.
I really enjoyed Mr. Haredale's character. In many ways, he's a tragic figure because of the murder of his brother and the years and years of bitterness that he has endured because of this. Since he is also Catholic, he loses so much in the riots. He finally vanquishes his long-time enemy but the many shadows of his life still linger. In contrast to Mr. Haredale is the lovable Gabriel Varden with his uber-Protestant wife and servant (Miss Miggs), his coquettish, beautiful daughter Dolly, and his rascally apprentice Simon Tappertit. Despite this rather uncomfortable domestic menage, Gabriel is consistently noble-hearted as the family patriarch. 'Patriarch' is such a pariah word today, but when there is a husband and father who looks out for the good of everyone connected to him, including Barnaby and Mrs. Rudge, I am happy to use 'patriarch' to imply all that is best. Gabriel and Dolly have a lovely father-daughter relationship, and Gabriel's refusal to open the lock of Newgate Prison even as he's carried there forcibly by the mob is nothing less than heroic. Similarly heroic are his efforts to secure a pardon for Barnaby so that the reunion of mother and son is one of the most joyful moments in the novel.
After the chaos of the riots (much of which I read through very quickly as it was a bit much for my highly sensitive soul), the return to domestic harmony for the core characters at the end is most welcome and a delightful way to end the novel. I'm so glad I read this and highly recommend it.
Spoilers below, beware.
In the introduction, the writer noted that Dickens' original title for the novel was Gabriel Varden instead of Barnaby Rudge, but several years later, the idea for the story had evolved and much for the better. I love Gabriel Varden as a character; he's a new favorite. But having the developmentally disabled, free-spirited, kindly, innocent Barnaby at the heart of the novel is a perfect vehicle for questioning the mob mentality. Barnaby gets swept up by circumstance and by one of the novel's villains, Hugh, into joining the Protestant mob. While Barnaby himself does not commit any violence or destruction of property, he is nevertheless taken up by the authorities and is nearly hanged for his "role" in the riots. His vulnerability is part of the major concern of the novel for Dickens. While a mob may have at its heart real concerns for justice, the correct use of power, etc., it inevitably eats up the vulnerable in its wake and becomes an instrument for destroying its own ends. I think it's Gabriel who has a comment towards the end of the novel that good ends must always be sought by good means. I think both Dickens' historical novels explore these questions profoundly and fit right in with some of the biggest questions of human life across the ages.
I am coming to think more and more that the way to be a good person, the way to be Christlike, the way to counteract the worst in human nature is to care for the vulnerable. And because being human is being vulnerable, it's also learning that even the villains are vulnerable and to mourn for their loss of innocence. Hugh is so fascinating in light of this. He's an undoubted villain and yet his complexity as a character speaks to the heart of the novel. In one sense, who is to blame him for his violence? Abandoned by his father who did not marry his mother and the son of a hanged mother for a crime committed from desperation, Hugh is left on his own as a child. Nature v. nurture: couldn't the vulnerable Hugh have become something so much more if he had been loved and cared for? Absolutely. Even in his final moments, there is a nobility about him. Dickens compares him to a prophet as he calls for vengenance against his father (which comes true in the end). Though his death is a just one, it is also a mourned one. He is contrasted in turn with the hangman, Ned Dennis, who lacks scruples of any kind and stabs Hugh in the back. Dennis joins Sir John Chester as the most villainous characters because of their thorough selfishness, cowardice, and complete lack of care for the wellbeing of others. Indeed, not only that, but their knowing actions that lead directly to the harm of others.
To balance out these characters are a host of others who are comic and lovable, comic and absurd (Miss Miggs and Simon Tappertit), and noble-hearted. I must put in a good word for John Willet. Dickens has such fun in his descriptions of his slow-moving mind and body; he's a great comic character and we feel so much for him too as the Maypole is coming down around his ears (so to speak). His relationship with his son, Joe, is irksome but I love that Joe does what he needs to do to be a man. At first, I thought Joe was going to be a mere comic character, but he actually has a compelling character arc that ends so satisfyingly. He's one of my favorite characters, and I love that we are re-introduced to him in the second half of the novel with some mystery. I am still surprised how small a role Edward Chester and Emma Haredale play. They are definitely secondary to Joe and Dolly's characters and yet their cross-religion romance and how their guardians, Sir John and Mr Haredale, treat it is at the heart of the novel's conflict. England is a Protestant country that sits uneasily surrounded by Catholic countries. England's own history as a Catholic-country-turned-Protestant haunts it.
I really enjoyed Mr. Haredale's character. In many ways, he's a tragic figure because of the murder of his brother and the years and years of bitterness that he has endured because of this. Since he is also Catholic, he loses so much in the riots. He finally vanquishes his long-time enemy but the many shadows of his life still linger. In contrast to Mr. Haredale is the lovable Gabriel Varden with his uber-Protestant wife and servant (Miss Miggs), his coquettish, beautiful daughter Dolly, and his rascally apprentice Simon Tappertit. Despite this rather uncomfortable domestic menage, Gabriel is consistently noble-hearted as the family patriarch. 'Patriarch' is such a pariah word today, but when there is a husband and father who looks out for the good of everyone connected to him, including Barnaby and Mrs. Rudge, I am happy to use 'patriarch' to imply all that is best. Gabriel and Dolly have a lovely father-daughter relationship, and Gabriel's refusal to open the lock of Newgate Prison even as he's carried there forcibly by the mob is nothing less than heroic. Similarly heroic are his efforts to secure a pardon for Barnaby so that the reunion of mother and son is one of the most joyful moments in the novel.
After the chaos of the riots (much of which I read through very quickly as it was a bit much for my highly sensitive soul), the return to domestic harmony for the core characters at the end is most welcome and a delightful way to end the novel. I'm so glad I read this and highly recommend it.
July 19, 2007
This was Dickens first historical novel - so it came before Tale of Two Cities - and is a cracking good read. Dickens, of course, is a consumate story-teller, but this piece is very finely crafted, with many layers and plots tightly woven together. It starts slow, but when you look back you realise that is by fore of necessity: the groundwork is needed for the plot to come, he needs to introduce the characters, set them in their place, and lay the foundations for their interactions with each other as well as the historical events he will portray: the 'Gordon Riots' of London, 1780.
Dickens sense of character, of being able to clearly define a character in terms of attitude and even speech patterns, is legendary and it does not fail us here. Even though 'Barnaby Rudge' gives his name to the book he is not the lead, but merely one of several characters who are equally as important to the story, and all are fully drawn (except, perhaps, Elizabeth Haredale), though some more than others.
The story falls into two 'halves' or parts, that are interconnected, but at some times seperate: that of the star-crossed loves and their families, and that of the underclass of London, both genteel and common, who will all have their hands in fomenting the riots. Of those, Hugh and Sir Chester stand out as fantastically drawn characters - the detail, the clear vision he draws of them both is outstanding. So too with 'Dennis the Hangman' and Gashford - all distinct characters with their own vices and voices.
The riots in particular are fantastically well described, near horrifically so. For all he was writing for a nineteenth century audience, he does not pull his punches, and some of the details of the horrors the mob inflicted (usually on themselves in their frenzy, it has to be said) are really appalling, and do much to summon up the scene of horror he is trying to portray. To say we have two 'would-be rapists' clearly presented as such would tell you much, and there is a genuine fear on more than one occasion that he is going to come dangerously close to describing such a thing - certainly the threat is very real.
The heroes are heroic and dashing, the villains are drawn so well as to be believable, not caricature in the least (not like Fagin of 'Oliver Twist', for example, who is close to caricature) - Hugh is a truly terrible, charismatic beast.
A very good read that I can highly recommend.
Oh, and Grip, the raven, is just fantastic. Interesting that he was very possibly the inspiration for Poe's poem.
Dickens sense of character, of being able to clearly define a character in terms of attitude and even speech patterns, is legendary and it does not fail us here. Even though 'Barnaby Rudge' gives his name to the book he is not the lead, but merely one of several characters who are equally as important to the story, and all are fully drawn (except, perhaps, Elizabeth Haredale), though some more than others.
The story falls into two 'halves' or parts, that are interconnected, but at some times seperate: that of the star-crossed loves and their families, and that of the underclass of London, both genteel and common, who will all have their hands in fomenting the riots. Of those, Hugh and Sir Chester stand out as fantastically drawn characters - the detail, the clear vision he draws of them both is outstanding. So too with 'Dennis the Hangman' and Gashford - all distinct characters with their own vices and voices.
The riots in particular are fantastically well described, near horrifically so. For all he was writing for a nineteenth century audience, he does not pull his punches, and some of the details of the horrors the mob inflicted (usually on themselves in their frenzy, it has to be said) are really appalling, and do much to summon up the scene of horror he is trying to portray. To say we have two 'would-be rapists' clearly presented as such would tell you much, and there is a genuine fear on more than one occasion that he is going to come dangerously close to describing such a thing - certainly the threat is very real.
The heroes are heroic and dashing, the villains are drawn so well as to be believable, not caricature in the least (not like Fagin of 'Oliver Twist', for example, who is close to caricature) - Hugh is a truly terrible, charismatic beast.
A very good read that I can highly recommend.
Oh, and Grip, the raven, is just fantastic. Interesting that he was very possibly the inspiration for Poe's poem.
Read
November 3, 2018Reši tako čovek da pročita neke knjige koje je čuvao dugo u rezervi i razočara se.
Barnabi Radž za mene je bio poslednji nepročitani Dikensov roman i čuvala sam to čitanje ne znam ni ja koliko godina. I onda paf, ništa.
Dobro, deo razočaranja, manji, potiče od toga što sam nekad nekako prespojila neke podatke (koje li?) i decenijama bila ubeđena da je Barnabi iz romana čamdžija s Temze koji vadi leševe iz reke i ima lepu ćerku. Pojma nemam s čime sam to pobrkala ali, budimo realni, to nešto drugo sigurno je bilo bolje.
Pravi Dikensov Barnabi je blag i dobar momak s posebnim potrebama, pitomim gavranom koji govori i nežnom majkom koja čuva strašnu tajnu. I sporedni lik u knjizi. Glavni lik je zapravo londonska rulja koja je izazvala tzv. Gordonove nerede i divljala po Londonu krajem osamnaestog veka. Dikens to centralno zbivanje garnira nekim nažalost ne mnogo privlačnim ljubavnim pričama, dvema-trima spletkama i jednim kao misterioznim ubistvom iz prošlosti. I ništa od toga nije na nivou najboljeg Dikensa, pa ni njegove generalno najjače strane, socijalna kritika, komika i retorički uzleti. Ima nekih trenutaka pri kraju - poslednji sati osuđenika na smrt - ali sve je, zapravo, u njegovim drugim romanima mnogo bolje izvedeno i jadan Barnabi je s danas s pravom gurnut u zapećak.
Barnabi Radž za mene je bio poslednji nepročitani Dikensov roman i čuvala sam to čitanje ne znam ni ja koliko godina. I onda paf, ništa.
Dobro, deo razočaranja, manji, potiče od toga što sam nekad nekako prespojila neke podatke (koje li?) i decenijama bila ubeđena da je Barnabi iz romana čamdžija s Temze koji vadi leševe iz reke i ima lepu ćerku. Pojma nemam s čime sam to pobrkala ali, budimo realni, to nešto drugo sigurno je bilo bolje.
Pravi Dikensov Barnabi je blag i dobar momak s posebnim potrebama, pitomim gavranom koji govori i nežnom majkom koja čuva strašnu tajnu. I sporedni lik u knjizi. Glavni lik je zapravo londonska rulja koja je izazvala tzv. Gordonove nerede i divljala po Londonu krajem osamnaestog veka. Dikens to centralno zbivanje garnira nekim nažalost ne mnogo privlačnim ljubavnim pričama, dvema-trima spletkama i jednim kao misterioznim ubistvom iz prošlosti. I ništa od toga nije na nivou najboljeg Dikensa, pa ni njegove generalno najjače strane, socijalna kritika, komika i retorički uzleti. Ima nekih trenutaka pri kraju - poslednji sati osuđenika na smrt - ali sve je, zapravo, u njegovim drugim romanima mnogo bolje izvedeno i jadan Barnabi je s danas s pravom gurnut u zapećak.
July 12, 2023
Quite enjoyable, and much better than I was expecting, as well as/in spite of being one of the least "Dickensian" of his books that I have read (being a huge fan of that mode), with not nearly the standard or expected amount of hyperbolic characters, descriptions of city life, etc.—perhaps A Tale of Two Cities is its only real sibling in CD's ouevre? For this does come across more as a straight-realist historical novel in that veign, with only the occasional nods back to Pickwick & Co or anticipation of the much more complex majesties of Bleak House or Great Expectations to come. Recommended, though, for completeists and casual CD readers alike.
April 10, 2021
When a witless young man and his witty pet raven get swept into the furor of the Gordon "no-Popery" riots in the London of 1780, you can be sure you're reading Dickens. This is his first historical novel, and I can see how it leads the way to the other one, _A Tale of Two Cities_. Grip, the raven, caught the attention of Edgar Alan Poe and probably inspired his poem "The Raven." I suspect that _Barnaby Rudge_ also inspired Poe's "The Bells."
September 23, 2014
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.
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.
February 16, 2022
1 star
With each Dickens book I read, I question more and more whether I should keep reading him. It is possible that it is simply his older works that don’t suit my tastes - and I certainly hope this is true - but my experience so far hasn’t been positive.
One of the strongest reasons for my dislike of his writing is the manner in which he depicts women. Especially in this novel, most of the female characters fit into a demeaning stereotype. The wives are either presented as embittered by marriage, resentful, manipulative and vindictive, or young, naive and obliging. The latter, as embodied by Dolly and Emma, is also accompanied by constant emphasis on physical attractiveness. It was quite frustrating to read.
The novel was also way too long for me. I was really bored and felt like the premise of the plot (the anti-Catholic riots) wasn’t written as powerfully as it could have been. Perhaps this is due to my expectations, but I didn’t find the characters’ motivations were developed enough or the build up to the events to be effective. Despite Dickens providing some insight into the pervasiveness of violence, which can infect any individual, the plot mostly felt like a convenience so he could demonise some characters. I would have liked the motivations behind their participation in the riots to have been more explicitly explored.
Unfortunately I really didn’t enjoy this book. Perhaps I’m learning not to put much hope into Dickens’ older works.
With each Dickens book I read, I question more and more whether I should keep reading him. It is possible that it is simply his older works that don’t suit my tastes - and I certainly hope this is true - but my experience so far hasn’t been positive.
One of the strongest reasons for my dislike of his writing is the manner in which he depicts women. Especially in this novel, most of the female characters fit into a demeaning stereotype. The wives are either presented as embittered by marriage, resentful, manipulative and vindictive, or young, naive and obliging. The latter, as embodied by Dolly and Emma, is also accompanied by constant emphasis on physical attractiveness. It was quite frustrating to read.
The novel was also way too long for me. I was really bored and felt like the premise of the plot (the anti-Catholic riots) wasn’t written as powerfully as it could have been. Perhaps this is due to my expectations, but I didn’t find the characters’ motivations were developed enough or the build up to the events to be effective. Despite Dickens providing some insight into the pervasiveness of violence, which can infect any individual, the plot mostly felt like a convenience so he could demonise some characters. I would have liked the motivations behind their participation in the riots to have been more explicitly explored.
Unfortunately I really didn’t enjoy this book. Perhaps I’m learning not to put much hope into Dickens’ older works.
November 2, 2020
Barnaby Rudge reminded me of both Bleak House and Diane Setterfield's Once Upon A River, in fact I wonder if the latter was inspired by Barnaby Rudge. There is a good family mystery in the mould of Bleak House told with Dickens' typically gorgeous writing style. Combined with eternal political truths andthe usual memorable characters I am surprised this isn't as widely read. Like 'Once Upon A River', a local tavern and its frequenters set a scene of timelessness.
Our hero Barnaby is a young man both loved by his community, especially by his devoted mother but isolated by his neurodivergence and made vulnerable to the wider world. His innocence gives him an insight beyond the other characters who are caught up in the narrow prejudices of their world. Barnaby has the book's most poetic lines and is the only truly flawless character. Barnaby is beloved by the animal kingdom - the local dogs adore him and his loyal friend is a charming raven, Grip (naturalistically modelled on Dickens' own two ravens).
Disability is represented in great variety in this book contrasting with the two characters that feel themselves the most invulnerable - a narcissist and an authority figure.
The historical context of the anti-Catholic riots was fascinating read in today's culture of duality. The message is that bigotry is always born of ignorance - for example a child's doll is thrown by rioters from the window of a Catholic home in the mistaken apprehension that it is a sacred idol. Dickens characterises the anti-papist mob as drunkards who have rarely set foot in a church. They are a group of angry men unite by disenfranchisement and a need to vent. The quiet-living local Catholic families are simply convenient objects for their rage.
This is a wonderful novel. If you have enjoyed Dickens' other books this isn't so different despite being an historical novel. It's worth a read for Barnaby and his rascally raven alone.
Our hero Barnaby is a young man both loved by his community, especially by his devoted mother but isolated by his neurodivergence and made vulnerable to the wider world. His innocence gives him an insight beyond the other characters who are caught up in the narrow prejudices of their world. Barnaby has the book's most poetic lines and is the only truly flawless character. Barnaby is beloved by the animal kingdom - the local dogs adore him and his loyal friend is a charming raven, Grip (naturalistically modelled on Dickens' own two ravens).
Disability is represented in great variety in this book contrasting with the two characters that feel themselves the most invulnerable - a narcissist and an authority figure.
The historical context of the anti-Catholic riots was fascinating read in today's culture of duality. The message is that bigotry is always born of ignorance - for example a child's doll is thrown by rioters from the window of a Catholic home in the mistaken apprehension that it is a sacred idol. Dickens characterises the anti-papist mob as drunkards who have rarely set foot in a church. They are a group of angry men unite by disenfranchisement and a need to vent. The quiet-living local Catholic families are simply convenient objects for their rage.
This is a wonderful novel. If you have enjoyed Dickens' other books this isn't so different despite being an historical novel. It's worth a read for Barnaby and his rascally raven alone.
March 21, 2018
I am one few people who think this book is one of Charlie's best books It is not popular but My next book my other top one is Pickwick Papers his first book
August 18, 2012
This is Dickens fifth novel and it was his first attempt to write an historical novel and was inspired by the Walter Scott's novels.
In the first chapters, Dickens describes the Maypole and introduces the main characters: Gabriel Varden with his wife and his daughter, Simon Tappertit, John and Joe Willet, Solomon Daisy, the Haredales, the Rudges and a mysterious stranger.
Maypole Inn in the village of Chigwell:
A hint of mystery is also inserted in these initial chapters through the Haredale murder. And a black raven gives a gothic touch into the narrative. Just to remind that a black raven has a special meaning in literature.
It seems that "Barbaby Rudge" was published first in Dickens's weekly journal Master Humphrey's Clock in 1841.
In some editions, the original tittle of this book was "Gabriel Vardon, the Locksmith of London."
One you start to read the description of the Gordon Riots, you won't be able to stop to read this book.
Page 116:
The despisers of mankind--apart from the mere fools and mimics, of that creed--are of two sorts. They who believe their merit neglected and unappreciated, make up one class; they who receive adulation and flattery, knowing their own worthlessness, compose the other. Be sure that the coldest-hearted misanthropes are ever of this last order.
Page 138:
So do the shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed.
Page 222:
In the exhaustless catalogue of Heaven's mercies to mankind, the power we have of finding some germs of comfort in the hardest trials must ever occupy the foremost place...
Page 244:
'All good friends to our cause, I hope will be particular, and do no injury to the property of any true Protestant. I am well assured that the proprietor of this house is a staunch and worthy friend to the cause. GEORGE GORDON.'
Page 251:
The great mass never reasoned or thought at all, but were stimulated by their own headlong passions, by poverty, by ignorance, by the love of mischief, and the hope of plunder.
The historical description of the Gordon Riots can be found at:
Victorian Web
Wikipedia
A Web of English History
Charles Dickens Page
A TV series was made based on this magnificent book:
TV Series (1960)
An interesting historical reference: The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain by Ian Haywood and John Seed.
In the first chapters, Dickens describes the Maypole and introduces the main characters: Gabriel Varden with his wife and his daughter, Simon Tappertit, John and Joe Willet, Solomon Daisy, the Haredales, the Rudges and a mysterious stranger.
Maypole Inn in the village of Chigwell:
A hint of mystery is also inserted in these initial chapters through the Haredale murder. And a black raven gives a gothic touch into the narrative. Just to remind that a black raven has a special meaning in literature.
It seems that "Barbaby Rudge" was published first in Dickens's weekly journal Master Humphrey's Clock in 1841.
In some editions, the original tittle of this book was "Gabriel Vardon, the Locksmith of London."
One you start to read the description of the Gordon Riots, you won't be able to stop to read this book.
Page 116:
The despisers of mankind--apart from the mere fools and mimics, of that creed--are of two sorts. They who believe their merit neglected and unappreciated, make up one class; they who receive adulation and flattery, knowing their own worthlessness, compose the other. Be sure that the coldest-hearted misanthropes are ever of this last order.
Page 138:
So do the shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed.
Page 222:
In the exhaustless catalogue of Heaven's mercies to mankind, the power we have of finding some germs of comfort in the hardest trials must ever occupy the foremost place...
Page 244:
'All good friends to our cause, I hope will be particular, and do no injury to the property of any true Protestant. I am well assured that the proprietor of this house is a staunch and worthy friend to the cause. GEORGE GORDON.'
Page 251:
The great mass never reasoned or thought at all, but were stimulated by their own headlong passions, by poverty, by ignorance, by the love of mischief, and the hope of plunder.
The historical description of the Gordon Riots can be found at:
Victorian Web
Wikipedia
A Web of English History
Charles Dickens Page
A TV series was made based on this magnificent book:
TV Series (1960)
An interesting historical reference: The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain by Ian Haywood and John Seed.
November 7, 2019
Not one of my favorite Dickens novels, but the depiction of anti-Catholic sentiment whipped up in 1780 England made it worthwhile. This novel also inspired Poe's "The Raven"
January 10, 2019
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
April 13, 2011
It's easy to see why Barnaby Rudge is one of Dickens's less popular novels. It's overlong and overplotted, and it's awkwardly structured, falling too neatly into two halves. The first half centers on the frustrated love of Joe Willet for Dolly Varden, and the equally but differently frustrated love of Edward Chester and Emma Haredale, and on the murder of Emma's father. The second half focuses on the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780. The two halves are knit together by the effects of the riots on the Willets, Vardens, Chesters and Haredales, and on the title character, the "idiot" Barnaby. But the characters -- especially Joe, Edward and Emma -- are such feeble stock figures, such conventionally drawn vessels of virtue, that it's hard to get emotionally involved with their fates. Moreover, even the "Dickensian" grotesques, such as Sim Tappertit (a name that elicits snickers from 12-year-old boys of all ages and sexes) and Miggs, are only fitfully amusing, and they quickly wear out their welcome.
The one almost successful character in the novel is Hugh, the mysterious thug who may be the closest thing Dickens ever came to a tragic figure. He enters the novel as an enigmatic and almost attractive figure -- a wild man of sorts -- and descends into villainy during the riots. But at the end, he attains a kind of tragic awareness, which he expresses in his speech before he goes to the gallows.
Dolly Varden, who became the novel's most popular character, even to the extent of causing a fashion craze later in the nineteenth century, is one of Dickens's better ingenues -- which is, to be sure, not saying much, since the Dickensian ingenue is typified by the saintly Agnes of David Copperfield. But by using Dolly's flighty mother and the jealous Miggs as foils, Dickens gives her some substance, allowing her to make foolish mistakes while enhancing her attractiveness.
The treatment of the riots shows Dickens's gift for the sensational, culminating in the orgiastic revel at the vintner's house, when the mob immolates itself in a fiery, drunken stupor, a fatal bacchanal of sorts. But the vividness of the riot scenes contrasts too sharply with the insipidity of the novel's lovers, who settle down at the book's end into a complacent rural fertility, producing hordes of cherubic little Joes and Dollys.
The chief flaw of the novel, however, is Barnaby himself, who resembles no mentally challenged person ever encountered in this world. He is a vehicle for pathos, a holy fool who goes astray, but he grows so annoying in this role that it's hard to care whether he's rescued from the gallows. And if you don't care about that, it's hard to care about anything that Dickens wants you to care about. Still, the novel is distinguished by Dickens's passion for justice and his contempt for hypocrisy. At its best moments, they give it a spine of conviction that keeps it from collapsing into a welter of melodrama.
For American readers, the oddest thing about the novel may be its time frame: The action takes place between 1775 and 1780, when the American War for Independence was taking place. Yet the only reference to this conflict, which surely must have preoccupied Britons even more than the Gordon riots, is in Joe's loss of an arm at the siege of Savannah, which takes place offstage from the novel's main action -- and in the chronicles of the Revolutionary War is for many people almost a footnote. Was Dickens, who was preparing for his trip to America while the novel was appearing, afraid of alienating American readers by bringing that conflict to the fore in his narrative?
The one almost successful character in the novel is Hugh, the mysterious thug who may be the closest thing Dickens ever came to a tragic figure. He enters the novel as an enigmatic and almost attractive figure -- a wild man of sorts -- and descends into villainy during the riots. But at the end, he attains a kind of tragic awareness, which he expresses in his speech before he goes to the gallows.
Dolly Varden, who became the novel's most popular character, even to the extent of causing a fashion craze later in the nineteenth century, is one of Dickens's better ingenues -- which is, to be sure, not saying much, since the Dickensian ingenue is typified by the saintly Agnes of David Copperfield. But by using Dolly's flighty mother and the jealous Miggs as foils, Dickens gives her some substance, allowing her to make foolish mistakes while enhancing her attractiveness.
The treatment of the riots shows Dickens's gift for the sensational, culminating in the orgiastic revel at the vintner's house, when the mob immolates itself in a fiery, drunken stupor, a fatal bacchanal of sorts. But the vividness of the riot scenes contrasts too sharply with the insipidity of the novel's lovers, who settle down at the book's end into a complacent rural fertility, producing hordes of cherubic little Joes and Dollys.
The chief flaw of the novel, however, is Barnaby himself, who resembles no mentally challenged person ever encountered in this world. He is a vehicle for pathos, a holy fool who goes astray, but he grows so annoying in this role that it's hard to care whether he's rescued from the gallows. And if you don't care about that, it's hard to care about anything that Dickens wants you to care about. Still, the novel is distinguished by Dickens's passion for justice and his contempt for hypocrisy. At its best moments, they give it a spine of conviction that keeps it from collapsing into a welter of melodrama.
For American readers, the oddest thing about the novel may be its time frame: The action takes place between 1775 and 1780, when the American War for Independence was taking place. Yet the only reference to this conflict, which surely must have preoccupied Britons even more than the Gordon riots, is in Joe's loss of an arm at the siege of Savannah, which takes place offstage from the novel's main action -- and in the chronicles of the Revolutionary War is for many people almost a footnote. Was Dickens, who was preparing for his trip to America while the novel was appearing, afraid of alienating American readers by bringing that conflict to the fore in his narrative?
March 9, 2024
Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty, pubblicato da febbraio a novembre 1841, su «Master Humphrey’s Clock», in contemporanea con i capitoli di The Old Curiosity Shop.
All’inizio tutto è tenuto sul misterioso, molto notturno, con somma di segreti e cose non dette. Sempre molto attivo l’elemento satirico, caricaturale; con una serie di tipici flat characters, estremizzati (ad esempio John Willet, «the sturdy landlord» con «a large pair of dull fish-like eyes»: il locandiere grasso, lento fino alla catatonia, conservatore, teso al guadagno e dispotico verso il figlio; oppure Mrs Varden, bigotta protestante, moralista, dispotica col marito in versione passivo-aggressiva, con continui mutamenti capricciosi).
E sempre rinnovato è il gusto della descrizione elaborata da un punto di vista che permette a chi legge di vedere i personaggi per la prima volta, rinnovando ogni volta la piccola (a volte non così piccola) sorpresa di sapere solo dopo di chi si tratta, di conoscere al momento giusto il nome della persona.
Per tutta la prima parte, fino al secondo inizio dopo ellissi di cinque anni (per la precisione fino al capitolo 35, su 82) sembra che la storia non abbia proprio nulla a che fare con i Riots annunciati nel titolo (sono quelli del 1780, scatenati contro una legislazione meno punitiva verso i cattolici in Inghilterra), che poi invece diventano centrali. Molto rimane caricaturale anche quando arriva la parte politica: non personaggi realistici ma grande insistenza su tic, difetti, bizzarrie; personaggi grotteschi come Dennis (forse il più memorabile: boia professionista, virtuoso del mestiere, che continuamente parla con tecnicismi, estetica e valori della sua arte, incomprensibili per i ‘profani’ di quel nobile campo; tra i protagonisti della rivolta contro i papisti perché «My work is sound, Protestant, constitutional, English work»; costante occasione per dispiegare l’ironia di Dickens nella sua versione più nera e accusatoria).
Quando finalmente arriva il momento dei Riots, la narrazione li deplora in modo molto netto. Ma probabilmente le pagine migliori sono proprio quelle, a volte raggelanti, dove è protagonista la folla. Dickens l’assurdista, piacione nel dipingere caratteri pittoreschi per i suoi lettori che attendevano le puntatine, riesce a far sentire tutta la forza, la crudeltà, l’irrazionalità, la potenza attrattiva e lo sfrenamento della sommossa.
E si dovrebbero ancora ricordare molte cose. Mettiamo due: 1) la presenza gracchiante, a volte un po' inquietante a volte solo comica, di quel «knowing imp» e «dreadful fellow» del corvo Grip, migliore amico dell' "idiota" Barnaby (ispiratore a quanto pare del Raven di Poe). 2) la breve premessa di un capitolo, perfetta nel descrivere i privilegi del "cronista" come narratore onnisciente: «Chroniclers are privileged to enter where they list, to come and go through keyholes, to ride upon the wind, to overcome, in their soarings up and down all obstacle of distance, time, and place.»
All’inizio tutto è tenuto sul misterioso, molto notturno, con somma di segreti e cose non dette. Sempre molto attivo l’elemento satirico, caricaturale; con una serie di tipici flat characters, estremizzati (ad esempio John Willet, «the sturdy landlord» con «a large pair of dull fish-like eyes»: il locandiere grasso, lento fino alla catatonia, conservatore, teso al guadagno e dispotico verso il figlio; oppure Mrs Varden, bigotta protestante, moralista, dispotica col marito in versione passivo-aggressiva, con continui mutamenti capricciosi).
E sempre rinnovato è il gusto della descrizione elaborata da un punto di vista che permette a chi legge di vedere i personaggi per la prima volta, rinnovando ogni volta la piccola (a volte non così piccola) sorpresa di sapere solo dopo di chi si tratta, di conoscere al momento giusto il nome della persona.
Per tutta la prima parte, fino al secondo inizio dopo ellissi di cinque anni (per la precisione fino al capitolo 35, su 82) sembra che la storia non abbia proprio nulla a che fare con i Riots annunciati nel titolo (sono quelli del 1780, scatenati contro una legislazione meno punitiva verso i cattolici in Inghilterra), che poi invece diventano centrali. Molto rimane caricaturale anche quando arriva la parte politica: non personaggi realistici ma grande insistenza su tic, difetti, bizzarrie; personaggi grotteschi come Dennis (forse il più memorabile: boia professionista, virtuoso del mestiere, che continuamente parla con tecnicismi, estetica e valori della sua arte, incomprensibili per i ‘profani’ di quel nobile campo; tra i protagonisti della rivolta contro i papisti perché «My work is sound, Protestant, constitutional, English work»; costante occasione per dispiegare l’ironia di Dickens nella sua versione più nera e accusatoria).
Quando finalmente arriva il momento dei Riots, la narrazione li deplora in modo molto netto. Ma probabilmente le pagine migliori sono proprio quelle, a volte raggelanti, dove è protagonista la folla. Dickens l’assurdista, piacione nel dipingere caratteri pittoreschi per i suoi lettori che attendevano le puntatine, riesce a far sentire tutta la forza, la crudeltà, l’irrazionalità, la potenza attrattiva e lo sfrenamento della sommossa.
E si dovrebbero ancora ricordare molte cose. Mettiamo due: 1) la presenza gracchiante, a volte un po' inquietante a volte solo comica, di quel «knowing imp» e «dreadful fellow» del corvo Grip, migliore amico dell' "idiota" Barnaby (ispiratore a quanto pare del Raven di Poe). 2) la breve premessa di un capitolo, perfetta nel descrivere i privilegi del "cronista" come narratore onnisciente: «Chroniclers are privileged to enter where they list, to come and go through keyholes, to ride upon the wind, to overcome, in their soarings up and down all obstacle of distance, time, and place.»
February 9, 2016
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.
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.
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