Barnaby Rudge

Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty (commonly known as Barnaby Rudge) is an historical novel by Charles Dickens. Barnaby Rudge (along with The Old Curiosity Shop) was one of two novels that Dickens published in his short-lived weekly serial Master Humphrey's Clock, which lasted from 1840 to 1841. It was Dickens' first attempt at an historical novel, his only other being A Tale of Two Cities. It is one of his less esteemed novels and has rarely been adapted for film or television (the last attempt was a 1960 BBC production; prior to that, a silent film was made in 1915).

The plot is based on the "no-popery" or Gordon riots of 1780 seen through the eyes of the good-hearted title character, the idiot Barnaby Rudge. The fanatical Lord George Gordon is treated with some sympathy in the novel; Dickens describes his character as follows:

"This lord was sincere in his violence and in his wavering. A nature prone to false enthusiasm, and the vanity of being a leader, were the worst qualities apparent in his composition. All the rest was weakness—sheer weakness; and it is the unhappy lot of thoroughly weak men, that their very sympathies, affections, confidences—all the qualities which in better constituted minds are virtues—dwindle into foibles, or turn into downright vices."

The first part of the story details the life of the residents of a small village in Epping Forest, just outside London, in the year 1775, the setting for the action being the Maypole Inn, the Warren (the Haredales' stately home) and the surrounding countryside. The tale opens on the nineteenth of March with a sinister recounting of a violent murder that took place exactly twenty-two years before the story begins. During this first part, the book examines life in this village, including interpersonal relationships, in a traditionally Dickensian style. Some of the most important elements in this first section are:

The animosity between Mr Haredale and Sir John Chester

Edward Chester's love for Emma Haredale

Joe Willet's love for Dolly Varden; also Hugh's lecherous desire for her

The tense relationship between Joe and his father

Barnaby's simpleness and need for his mother's protection

In chapter 35, with the arrival at the Maypole (on the nineteenth of March, five years after the story begins) of Lord George Gordon and his followers, the stability of village life is interrupted, echoing the destruction that the riots in Gordon's name will cause in London itself, and the themes and characters that Dickens has built up become essential to the reader's understanding of the effects of the riots on society. Another tactic for subtly drawing attention to the way the story is unfolding is Grip the raven and his seemingly nonsensical comments, which often reveal greater truths to the reader than to the characters.

The novel concludes with a panoramic description of the riots, which lasted several days.

Grip the raven inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write his most successful poem, "The Raven." Poe had written a review of Barnaby Rudge for Graham's Magazine saying, among other things, that the raven should have served a more symbolic prophetic purpose. At the end of the fifth chapter, Grip makes a noise and someone says, "What was that – him tapping at the door?" The response is, "'Tis someone knocking softly at the shutter."

The early monthly numbers were not as successful as Dickens' previous work and only sold about twenty thousand copies each (compared to forty to fifty thousand for the monthly numbers of the Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby and sixty to seventy thousand for the weekly issues of Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop) causing a break between Dickens and his publishers Chapman and Hall when they invoked a penalty clause in his contract requiring him to pay back money they had lent him to cover their costs. Also, Dickens' scathing satire of American modes and manners in the novel won him no friends on the other side of the Atlantic where the instalments containing the offending chapters were greeted with a 'frenzy of wrath' and the receipt by Dickens of much abusive mail and newspaper clippings from the States (Pearson 1949: 132-33).

The novel was (and is still) seen by some to contain attacks on America, although Dickens himself saw it as satire, similar in spirit to his "attacks" on the people and institutions of England in novels such as Oliver Twist. Americans are satirically portrayed as snobs, windbags, hypocrites, liars, bores, humbugs, braggarts, bullies, hogs, savages, blackguards, murderers and idiots; and the Republic is described as "so maimed and lame, so full of sores and ulcers, foul to the eye and almost hopeless to the sense, that her best friends turn from the loathsome creature with disgust". Dickens also attacks the institution of slavery in America in the following words: "Thus the stars wink upon the bloody stripes; and Liberty pulls down her cap upon her eyes, and owns oppression in its vilest aspect for her sister" (Pearson 1949: 129-29).

In order to clarify his intent and purpose as satire and show his respect for the United States, Dickens in 1868 added an appendix in which he expressed his "high and grateful sense of my second reception in America, and to bear my honest testimony to the national generosity and magnanimity." He acknowledged the country had improved in the years since his first visit, and he expressed the hope that these words of clarification would always be printed with future editions of the book.

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