Barnaby Rudge, page 1
Charles Dickens
BARNABY RUDGE
A Tale of the Riots of ’Eighty
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
John Bowen
Contents
Introduction
A Note on the Text and Illustrations
Barnaby Rudge
Appendix I: On the Illustrations
Appendix II: Master Humphrey’s Clock Material
Appendix III: Preface to the Cheap Edition (1849)
Appendix IV: Running Titles from the Cheap Edition (1867–8)
Appendix V: Map of London at the Time of the Gordon Riots
Appendix VI: Lord George Gordon and the Gordon Riots
Notes
Glossary
A Dickens Chronology
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
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BARNABY RUDGE
Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812, the second of eight children. Dickens’s childhood experiences were similar to those depicted in David Copperfield. His father, who was a government clerk, was imprisoned for debt and Dickens was briefly sent to work in a blacking warehouse at the age of twelve. He received little formal education, but taught himself shorthand and became a reporter of parliamentary debates for the Morning Chronicle. He began to publish sketches in various periodicals, which were subsequently republished as Sketches by Boz. The Pickwick Papers was published in 1836–7 and after a slow start became a publishing phenomenon and Dickens’s characters the centre of a popular cult. Part of the secret of his success was the method of cheap serial publication he adopted; thereafter, all Dickens’s novels were first published in serial form. He began Oliver Twist in 1837, followed by Nicholas Nickleby (1838) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). After finishing Barnaby Rudge (1841) Dickens set off for America; he went full of enthusiasm for the young republic but, in spite of a triumphant reception, he returned disillusioned. His experiences are recorded in American Notes (1842). A Christmas Carol, the first of the hugely popular Christmas Books, appeared in 1843, while Martin Chuzzlewit, which included a fictionalized account of his American travels, was first published over the period 1843–4. During 1844–6 Dickens travelled abroad and he began Dombey and Son while in Switzerland. This and David Copperfield (1849–50) were more serious in theme and more carefully planned than his early novels. In later works, such as Bleak House (1853) and Little Dorrit (1857), Dickens’s social criticism became more radical and his comedy more savage. In 1850 Dickens started the weekly periodical Household Words, succeeded in 1859 by All the Year Round; in these he published Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1860–61). Dickens’s health was failing during the 1860s and the physical strain of the public readings which he began in 1858 hastened his decline, although Our Mutual Friend (1865) retained some of his best comedy. His last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was never completed and he died on 9 June 1870. Public grief at his death was considerable and he was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.
John Bowen was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham, and is now a Reader in the Department of English, at Keele University. He is the author of Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford University Press, 2000), a Trustee of the Dickens Society and a member of the faculty of the Dickens Project of the University of California.
Further Reading
LETTERS
The Letters of Charles Dickens, Volumes 1 and 2: 1820–1839 and 1840–1, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, 1969). Referred to as the Pilgrim Edition. This edition enables the reader to trace in detail Dickens’s changing conception of the novel.
BIOGRAPHIES
Ackroyd, Peter, Dickens (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990). The most vivid and illuminating modern biography.
Forster, John, The Life of Charles Dickens (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872–4); ed. A. J. Hoppé (London: Dent, 1966). The classic Victorian life of Dickens, by his closest friend.
Smith, Grahame, Charles Dickens: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1996). A very useful study of Dickens’s professional life as a writer.
CRITICISM
Bowen, John, ‘The Historical Novel’, in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Patrick Brantlinger and W. B. Thesing (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 244–59. Places Dickens’s work in the wider context of the Victorian historical novel.
——, ‘History’s Grip: Barnaby Rudge’, in Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 157–182. Examines the relation between the historical and the Gothic and melodramatic aspects of the novel.
Brantlinger, Patrick, ‘Did Dickens have a Philosophy of History? The Case of Barnaby Rudge’, Dickens Studies Annual 30 (2001), 59–74.
——, The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics 1832–1867 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 81–96. Influential study of the social and political conflicts of the 1830s and 40s.
Butt, John and Kathleen Tillotson, ‘Barnaby Rudge: The First Projected Novel’, in Dickens at Work (London: Methuen, 1957), pp. 76–89. A path-breaking analysis of the novel’s evolution.
Chesterton, G. K., ‘Barnaby Rudge’, in Chesterton on Dickens, ed. Michael Slater (London: Everyman, 1992), pp. 65–75. A characteristically witty study of the ‘picaresque’ elements in the novel.
Chittick, Kathryn, ‘The Historical Novelist: Jack Sheppard and Barnaby Rudge’, in Dickens and the 1830s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 152–77. A useful comparison of Ainsworth’s novel and Dickens’s.
Collins, Philip, Dickens and Crime (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 44–51.
Connor, Steven, ‘Space, Place and the Body of Riot in Barnaby Rudge’, in Charles Dickens: Longman Critical Readers, ed. Steven Connor (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 211–29. An illuminating discussion of the depiction of space in the book.
Dickens Quarterly 8 (March 1991). Special number on Barnaby Rudge.
Dransfield, Scott, ‘Reading the Gordon Riots in 1841: Social Violence and Moral Management in Barnaby Rudge’, Dickens Studies Annual 27 (1998), 69–95. Discusses the depiction of insanity in the novel.
Duncan, Ian, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 220–37. Important study of Dickens’s debt to Sir Walter Scott and Gothic fiction.
Fleishman, Avrom, ‘Dickens: Visions of Revolution’, in The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 102–26.
Glavin, John, ‘Politics and Barnaby Rudge: Surrogation, Restoration, and Revival’, Dickens Studies Annual 30 (2001), 95–112.
Gottshall, James K., ‘Devils Abroad: The Unity and Significance of Barnaby Rudge’, Nineteenth Century Fiction 16 (1961), 133–46. Makes an eloquent case for the coherence of the novel.
John, Juliet, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 103–21. An important defence of Dickens’s use of melodramatic techniques in his fiction.
Kincaid, James, ‘Barnaby Rudge: Laughter and Structure’, in Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 105–31. Entertainingly argues that the second half of the novel undercuts the values of the first half.
Lucas, John, ‘Barnaby Rudge’, in The Melancholy Man: A Study of Dickens’s Novels (London: Methuen, 1970), pp. 92–112. A sympathetic and intelligent reading of the novel.
Lukács, George, The Historical Novel (Harmonds worth: Penguin, 1969). The classic study of the historical novel in Europe.
McKnight, Natalie, ‘The Conventional Idiot: Surfaces and Signs in Barnaby Rudge’, in Idiots, Madmen and Other Prisoners in Dickens (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 81–93. Argues that Dickens’s ‘conservative impulses’ silence the radical potential inherent in Barnaby’s character.
McMaster, Juliet, ‘“Better to be Silly”: From Vision to Reality in Barnaby Rudge’, Dickens Studies Annual 13 (1984), 1–17.
Magnet, Myron, ‘Barnaby Rudge’, in Dickens and the Social Order (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), pp. 49–171. Argues at length that Dickens is a more conservative author than is often thought.
Marcus, Steven, ‘Sons and Fathers’, in Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (London: Chatto, 1963), pp. 169–212. A brilliant study of the significance of father–son relationships in the novel.
Michasiw, Kim Ian, ‘Barnaby Rudge: “The Since of the Fathers” ’, ELH 56 (1989), 571–92. A rich study of the novel’s complex relationship to the works of Carlyle and Scott.
Morgentaler, Goldie, Dickens and Heredity: When Like Begets Like (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 111–22.
Newman, S. J., ‘Art and Anarchy in Barnaby Rudge’, in Dickens at Play (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 88–98. Argues that the novel is ‘the nearest Dickens comes to turning art into psychosis’.
——, ‘Barnaby Rudge: Dickens and Scott’, in Literature of the Romantic Period 1750–1850, ed. R. T. Davies and B. G. Beatty (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1976), pp. 171–88.
Parker, David, ‘Barnaby Rudge: Narrative Games’, in The Doughty Street Novels: Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge (New York: AMS Press, 2002), pp. 181–212.
Patten, Robert L., Charles Dickens and his Publishers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). The definitive study of this topic.
——, ‘The Politics of Barnaby Rudge’, in The Changing World of Charles Dickens, ed. Robert Giddings (London: Vision, 1986), pp. 51–74. Makes a thorough case for the presence of detailed similarities between the political situation of the late 1830s and early 40s and that depicted in the novel.
Sanders, Andrew, ‘The Track of a Storm: Charles Dickens’s Historical Novels’, in The English Historical Novel 1840–1880 (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 68–96. A lucid and intelligent account of Dickens’s two historical novels.
Stevens, Joan, ‘“Woodcuts Dropped into the Text”: The Illustrations in The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge’, Studies in Bibliography 20 (1967), 113–33. An excellent account of the significance of the illustrations to Dickens’s conception of the novel.
Tracy, Robert, ‘Clock Work: The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge’, Dickens Studies Annual 30 (2001), 23–44. Discusses the relationship of the novel to its framing material in Master Humphrey’s Clock.
Viswanathan, Gauri, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 22–6. Insightful discussion of ideas of religious toleration and Englishness in the novel.
Walder, Dennis, Dickens and Religion (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), pp. 91–104.
Wilt, Judith, ‘Masques of the English in Barnaby Rudge’, Dickens Studies Annual 30 (2001), 75–94. The best account of Dickens’s portrayal of religious conflict.
For a full bibliography up to 1987, see Thomas Jackson Rice, Barnaby Rudge: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1987).
For early reviews, see Philip Collins, Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 101–11, and New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature Volume 4: 1800–1900, ed. Joanne Shattock, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1206–7.
THE GORDON RIOTS
Ackroyd, Peter, London: The Biography (London: Vintage, 2000), pp. 484–95. A dramatic account of London’s ‘most violent and widespread riot of its last thousand years’.
de Castro, J. P., The Gordon Riots (London: Oxford University Press, 1926). Dated but still useful study of the Riots.
Hibbert, Christopher, King Mob: The Story of Lord George Gordon and the London Riots of 1780 (London: Longman, 1958). A lucid, popular account of Gordon and the Riots.
Linebaugh, Peter, ‘The Delivery of Newgate, 6 June 1780’, in The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1991), pp. 333–70. A vivid account of the central event of the Riots.
McAlman, Ian, ‘Prophesying Revolution: “Mad Lord George”, Edmund Burke and Madame La Motte’, in Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison, ed. Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), pp. 52–65. Discusses the symbolic significance of Gordon as a figure of revolution.
Rogers, Nicholas, ‘Crowd and Power in the Gordon Riots’, in The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 39–55.
Stevenson, John, Popular Disturbances in England 1700–1832, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 94–113. Clear, modern account of the Riots in the wider context of popular disturbances in the period.
Introduction
Barnaby Rudge is a novel full of mystery, and it is almost impossible to discuss the book without revealing some of its secrets. Readers new to the novel may prefer to read the story first and treat this introduction as a postscript.
1
Barnaby Rudge is the most untimely of historical novels. It was untimely in its birth, its publishers, its subject matter, its title and its initial reception. It is untimely still. Dickens’s fifth novel was first published in his short-lived weekly magazine Master Humphrey’s Clock in 1841, immediately following the triumphant success of The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens was then at the top of the tree, at twenty-nine the most successful of all English novelists, with a popular following which had recently reached another peak with the heart-wringing (to contemporary readers at least) death of Little Nell. Barnaby Rudge, however, failed to repeat the success of its precursor, and the magazine’s circulation fell steadily from an initial 70,000 to 30,000 by the end: a more than respectable number by most standards, but not those of Dickens, who had become used to an ever-rising reputation and readership. Unlike some of his critically less successful later novels, such as Hard Times or Little Dorrit, Barnaby Rudge has, so far, not been rescued by later generations and, despite some vigorous defences of its achievement, it has remained probably the least-liked and most neglected of his novels. Yet passages, particularly the scenes of the storming of Newgate, have long been among the most admired in his work, and have a continuing dramatic force and power. In part because of its comparative neglect, Barnaby Rudge still retains the power to shock and surprise its readers; it can still take our breath away.
Uniquely among Dickens’s novels, the composition of Barnaby Rudge was repeatedly delayed. Dickens had first mooted a tale about the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 (to be called ‘Gabriel Vardon: The Locksmith of London’) in 1836, seizing on one of the most dramatic episodes of popular unrest in London’s history as the basis for his first attempt at an historical novel. He did not begin writing the book, however, until January 1839, but this was to be a false start, to be followed by another in October of that year; turning back to his manuscript once more in 1841, he succeeded in completing what was now called Barnaby Rudge; A Tale of the Riots of ’Eighty. The novel of Dickens most concerned with time and what appears in time consistently refused to appear on time. There were several reasons for this, not least his troubled relations with the three different publishers to whom at various points he had promised the book, but perhaps the most important was the quite unprecedented success of his first novel, Pickwick Papers (1836–7), which made his reputation as a novelist of contemporary life. Its successors – Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop – built on this, and added a campaigning radicalism against social injustice. Barnaby Rudge was a departure in both subject matter and tone, with none of the vivid life of contemporary England that had made Dickens famous, and a more complex sense of political motivation and action. It was closer to the ideas and terrain of his great predecessor Sir Walter Scott, or of friends and rivals such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and William Harrison Ainsworth, whose own novel about a great conflagration in London, Old Saint Paul’s, was serialized in the Sunday Times at the same time as Barnaby Rudge was appearing. When Dickens first thought of writing an historical novel five years before as a struggling hack author, it had seemed to promise the chance of literary respectability as well as popular success. When it finally appeared, it did so within a literary culture that had been transformed by his own work.
Historical fiction was ‘the most successful form of the century’1 and one that almost every major figure of the age attempted at some stage in his or her career: not only Dickens with A Tale of Two Cities and Barnaby Rudge, but also William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. The historical novel had great appeal, both to readers and authors, from its emergence in the late eighteenth century with the novels of Scott; an appeal that continued throughout the nineteenth century. Yet today, as John Sutherland puts it, it is the ‘least-honoured of Victorian fictional genres’,2 and there are miles of mouldering library shelves to confirm it. Nothing seems to date more quickly than a previous era’s view of the past, and even those novels by the masters of Victorian prose are only marginal to our sense of their creators’ achievement: no one now would see Romola (1863) as George Eliot’s greatest work, admire Collins’s Antonina, or The Fall of Rome (1850) over The Woman in White (1860), or read Trollope’s tedious La Vendée (1850) in preference to the Barchester chronicles. Fiction’s attempt to master history leads, more often than not, to being made redundant by it. Yet it was a persistent desire of Victorian novelists to repeat the success of Scott and to raise the novel to the seriousness and dignity that history was thought to offer, and to animate their stories with a newly expanded historical knowledge, a desire too often undercut by the wish for novelty and simple wish-fulfilment, for stories of heroic apprentices, distressed virgins and villainous barons.
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