Dickens' Barnaby Rudge

 When I was in high school, I set about pillaging our school library's collection of Charles Dickens. I recall reading Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities; David Copperfield, I recall my Grandmother Downes having in a Reader's Digest Condensed Edition; and ending with Dombey and Son. I did not finish that one. Before Dombey and Son, I managed my way through Barnaby Rudge.

Today, Thornfield Hall published Dickens’s Darkest Novel, “Barnaby Rudge”:

Dickens’s dark historical novel, Barnaby Rudge, is not necessarily for Dickens fans.  It is not that Dickens isn’t  dark:  there are some very dark scenes in Our Mutual Friend, which begins with a man and his daughter rowing on the Thames in search of a corpse.  Dickens’ wit and humor usually offset the darkness, but the dark iniquity is almost unremitting in Barnaby Rudge. 

In this tense, fast-paced novel, anti-Catholic feeling culminates in the Gordon Riots of 1780, the result of a movement led by the Scottish aristocrat, George Gordon. On a nine-day spree from June 2-10, rioters terrorized London, looting, committing murders and arson.  Terrified Londoners posted NO POPERY signs on their doors to avert the looters.

I remember thinking it was rather a romp, but after reading this I do think it was a bit dark. Not a Dickens novel that I think gets very much attention. David Frum supports my view in his article, Barnaby Rudge:

 

Barnaby Rudge is one of the less read novels in the Dickens canon. Written in the early years of Dickens’ career (1840-41, just after Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop), it betrays the signs of having been written too fast and with money too much in mind. The principal characters are insipid, the plot is unnecessarily bulked out, and the writing style is over-garrulous.

Yet this is Dickens we are talking about, the great imaginative genius of the English 19th century, and the novel works more than well enough. Barnaby Rudge is set in the years of the American Revolution, culminating in the “No Popery” riots of the summer of 1780.

And this may be why I recall it a romping read:

The issue that fascinates Dickens in Barnaby Rudge is not the religious prejudices that enflamed the London mob, but the mob itself.

Perhaps “fascinates” is the wrong word. “Arrests” or “absorbs” might be better, for Dickens regards mob violence with fear and revulsion, untinged with any of the prurient delight we find in for example his contemporary Thomas Carlyle. Dickens’ liberalism was in its way a very conservative liberalism, anxious against uproar and convulsion. Every one of the rioters is presented in a luridly negative light, as either wantonly destructive, or peevishly envious, or manipulatively vindictive, or vain and frivolous, or all of the above.

I would say read it if you think you have read all of Dickens.

sch 1/28