Barnaby Rudge or A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty (1841)
Charles Dickens
Oxford University Press, 634pp
Barnaby Rudge, the second serial from Master Humphrey’s Clock (the first being The Old Curiosity Shop), was Dickens’s first idea for a novel, but was published as his fifth. He conceived of it alongside The Pickwick Papers, and though he sold Pickwick first, his mind was obsessed with the Gordon riots of 1780. He secured a publisher for his tale, but Pickwick’s popularity delayed Barnaby. Further renegotiations of his contract for this novel kept stalling, and he instead wrote the three other novels that precede Barnaby. Finally, in late 1840, he secured a deal with the Clock, and in February 1841, the first instalment of Barnaby appeared.
The title of the work is Barnaby Rudge, but this is somewhat misleading: Barnaby is but a small player in this work, and disappears for over three hundred pages. One of his earlier working titles was ‘Gabriel Vardon, the Locksmith of London’, which at least would concern a more major player. Though Barnaby is absent from much of his narrative, it is treatment and his actions that form the moral and critical centre of this novel.
The Gordon Riots of 1780 were an anti-catholic uprising, led by Lord George Gordon who created a Protestant Association to fight the recently introduced law that absolved Catholics the requirement to take religious oath when joined the armed forces. Lord Gordon felt that this action would allow Catholics to join with those in Europe and form a coalition that could attack or destabilise the British government, bring about absolute monarchical rule and a return to Papal control of the country. On the second of June, 1780, a crowd – some say 60,000 strong – marched on the Houses of Parliament and demanded a repeal of this law. They attacked Newgate Prison, taking the locksmith hostage and demanding he open the gates of the prison to allow captured protestors freedom. At the end of a week of rioting, 285 people had been shot dead; thirty were arrested and later hung. Lord Gordon was also arrested and tried for High Treason; he was found not guilty and allowed to walk free. It is a dark passage in British history, and one that fascinated the historian in Dickens. He was always going to write about it.
Barnaby Rudge sees the interaction of the real and the imagined. This dualism gives the work a frisson not found in Dickens’s earlier works. Lord Gordon appears, as do other key figures in the Gordon Riots, but for the necessity of the story, the majority of the cast are imagined. These are the people that are centred around The Maypole, a local public house, just south of London, near Epping Forest. A large cast of characters is introduced, and this section of the novel (the first half of the work) is highly Dickensian – there are family secrets, tales of murder, romantic entanglements, criminals, wanderers, and a talking raven named Grip (and yes, this is the influence on Poe’s famous poem). By allowing the novel time to luxuriate in the intricacies of village life, Dickens gives us time to know these people, their interests and their fears so that when the Gordon Riots begin in force, all our players are entangled and forced to act.
I admit to feeling rather underwhelmed during the first half of this novel: the opening, which describes a murder, I thought well done, but then it seemed to meander, cutting between these various characters with often little advancement (Dickens is, of course, waiting to get to the riots); but when the riots begin, his novel takes on a whole new level. The prose is electrifying, and the action tense, rapid – highly unusual thus far in Dickens career. He described the riots with precision, and the events hurry along at a great pace. The finest writing – at least for me – is in the final quarter, after the riots have ended and the key players are facing death for their roles. The descriptions and emotions evoked by Newgate Prison are formidable, and may just contain Dickens’s best writing yet. I read longer into the night than I normally do – finally finishing the book at gone three in the morning, as snow flurried down outside, and the window seemed to crackle with cold. An atmospheric mood in which to read such things.
There is a criticism of this novel from Poe in which he states that the raven should have been more symbolic. In the first few chapters it seems Dickens is lining the raven up to be so – but realising he needs us to know more about the rioters, he spends the next two hundred and fifty or so pages exploring them that when he finally returns to Barnaby and Grip the nuances he was setting up have been forgotten. This creates the same problem that some of his earlier novels have had: they end poorly, with a simple summing up of where each character has gone. What I think this needed, and which would have worked more powerfully, is if Grip’s symbolic purpose had been realised.
Barnaby Rudge, then. In the end an entertaining and exciting read. I just think it meanders a bit too much near the middle and never quite fulfils the promise it shows at the start. It is uneven – perhaps, I think, we needed to know less, not more, about the people involved.