Barnaby Rudge, page 85
5. three times three: Three cheers, three times.
6. Quaker cut: Simply and severely cut. Quakers, members of the Society of Friends, dress plainly. Gordon, known for the simplicity of his attire, was in mourning following the death of his mother in December 1779.
7. out in state: As the public hangman.
8. Fifty: A distinct underestimate, as there were more than two hundred capital offences at this period.
9. I’ll have half for myself and Dennis shall have half for himself: Some criminals were pardoned at this period on condition that they joined the Army or Navy.
CHAPTER THE THIRTY-EIGHTH
1. houses of Parliament: In the old Palace of Westminster, destroyed by fire in 1834.
2. the Boot: On Cromer Street, rebuilt in 1801. The current inn would have been known to Dickens, whose home in Doughty Street from 1837 to 1839 is only a short distance away.
3. the fields at the back of the Foundling Hospital: The Foundling Hospital was established in 1741 by Captain Thomas Coram for illegitimate children. In 1745, it moved to a new site on land north of Lamb’s Conduit Street, not far from Doughty Street, where Dickens lived. (It was demolished in 1926.)
CHAPTER THE THIRTY-NINTH
1. seven-shilling piece: In fact the seven-shilling piece only began to be issued in 1797.
2. Saint James’s Chronicle … Public Advertiser: All of these were current newspapers at the time of the Riots, except the Herald, which first appeared in November 1780.
3. The Thunderer: Contemporary pamphlet by C. Thompson, which is reprinted in Thomas Vincent (William Holcroft), A Plain and Succinct Narrative of the Late Riots and Disturbances (Fielding and Walker, 1780), one of Dickens’s major sources. There is a contemporary engraving of the riots reproduced in J. P. de Castro, The Gordon Riots (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), facing p. 92, with a bystander holding a copy of The Thunderer.
4. Old Bailey: The Central Criminal Court, first built beside Newgate prison in 1539 and replaced in 1774.
CHAPTER THE FORTIETH
1. Saint Dunstan’s giants: The Fire of London had stopped just short of the Church of St Dunstan in the West, Fleet Street, and in gratitude the parishioners erected a clock with two giants that struck a bell every fifteen minutes. It was a famous London landmark which also appears in Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Scott’s The Fortunes of Nigel (1822). (The church was demolished in 1830.)
2. Insolvent Act: The Insolvent Debtors Act allowed those imprisoned for debt to apply for release by stating all their debts and liabilities and surrendering their property. Dickens’s father, John Dickens, applied for release from the Marshalsea Prison in 1824 under this act.
3. Bruin: The bear in the fable of Reynard the Fox, hence a boor.
4. Mr Chester: In fact, Sir John.
5. Saville: Sir George Savile (1726–84), eighth baronet, introduced the bill for Catholic relief to the House of Commons and was ‘a likable and uncontroversial member, who had so far had nothing to do with Catholic relief’ (Christopher Hibbert, King Mob (London: Longman, 1958), p. 18). Dickens misspells his name here and in chs. 56 and 73.
CHAPTER THE FORTY -FIRST
1. still small voice: The voice of God, as heard by Elijah in 1 Kings 19:12.
2. Royal East-London Volunteers: An imaginary company, although militia regiments played a important role in the suppression of the Riots. See Tony Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 151–3.
3. Blue Beard: In the fairy-story, first recorded by Charles Perrault in 1697, the wealthy Blue Beard gives his seventh bride the keys to all the rooms in the castle except one, which she is forbidden to enter. When she does so, she discovers the corpses of his previous wives. A favourite story of Dickens, it appears in many of his novels.
4. Inquisition: Founded by Pope Innocent III in the thirteenth century, the Inquisition was charged with investigating, suppressing and punishing heresy and heretics. For many Protestants, its name was synonymous with torture and cruelty.
5. counterfeit presentment: Hamlet III.iv.54.
6. found in: Provided with tea and sugar by her employer.
CHAPTER THE FORTY-SECOND
1. Chelsea Bun-house: Famous cake shop in Jew’s Row (Pimlico Road), Chelsea, with many celebrated customers, including Jonathan Swift and several members of the royal family. (It was demolished in 1839.)
CHAPTER THE FORTY -THIRD
1. Westminster Hall: Built in 1097, it was the location of the chief courts of England from the thirteenth century until 1825. The late fourteenth-century oak hammer-beam roof has the widest unsupported span in the country. (It is now the vestibule of the House of Commons.)
2. Saint Omer’s: Jesuit College, founded in 1592 in St Omer in north-eastern France.
3. Great Protestant petition: The petition begged Parliament to repeal the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which had removed some forms of legal discrimination against Catholics. It was claimed to have more than 100,000 signatures.
4. these hard laws: See Appendix VI.
CHAPTER THE FORTY-FOURTH
1. My stars and halters: Dennis’s variation on the mild oath or expletive ‘My stars and garters’.
CHAPTER THE FORTY-FIFTH
1. a citizen of the world: ‘If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world’, Francis Bacon, ‘Of Goodness, and Goodness of Nature’, Essays (1625). It is also the title of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World, or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher (1762).
2. for we are … almost divine: These lines are added to the manuscript in small letters above the line. The Pilgrim editors suggest that they were added in response to a letter protesting against his treatment of Stagg. Dickens wrote in reply:
My intention in the management of this inferior and subordinate character, was to remind the World who have eyes, that they have no right to expect in sightless men a degree of virtue and goodness to which they, in full possession of all their senses, can lay no claim – that it is a very easy thing for those who misuse every gift of Heaven to consider resignation and cheerfulness the duty of those whom it has deprived of some great blessing – that whereas we look upon a blind man who does wrong, as a kind of monster, we ought in Truth and Justice to remember that a man who has eyes and is a vicious wretch, is by his very abuse of the glorious faculty of sight, an immeasurably greater offender than his afflicted fellow. (Pilgrim, 2, pp. 336–7)
The Pilgrim editors describe tbnr00007354his as a ‘disingenuous’ defence and add that Dickens’s treatment of Stagg changes from this point in the novel, probably in response to the protest.
CHAPTER THE FORTY-SIXTH
1. seven senses: The senses are usually thought of as five – sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste – but were sometimes brought up to the more symbolic and mystical seven by adding speech and animation.
2. Six guineas: A guinea was worth £1 1 shilling (£1.05).
CHAPTER THE FORTY-SEVENTH
1. the cage, the stocks, and the whipping-post: Forms of punishment for vagrancy and other offences.
2. fear and trembling: A phrase that appears several times in the Bible, notably 2 Corinthians 7:15, Ephesians 6:5; Philippians 2:12.
3. John Bull: A typical Englishman, after Dr John Arbuthnot’s The History of John Bull (1712).
4. second of June: Dickens has made a mistake here, as was pointed out to him by the Revd. G. W. Brameld (Pilgrim, 2, p. 401n). Barnaby and his mother were discovered by Stagg ‘in June’ and have been travelling for a week.
5. Westminster Bridge: The second masonry bridge over the Thames, opened in November 1750 and replaced in 1862.
CHAPTER THE FORTY-EIGHTH
1. Middlesex to the Surrey shore: From the north to the south banks of the Thames.
2. Saint George’s Fields: Undrained tract of land on the south bank of the Thames, between Westminster and Blackfriars bridges.
3. a roaring lion, going about and seeking whom he may devour: ‘your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour’ (1 Peter 5:8).
CHAPTER THE FORTY-NINTH
1. a boy at a breaking-up: A schoolboy at the end of term.
2. The strangers’ gallery: Of the House of Commons, to which members of the public were admitted.
3. General Conway: Henry Seymour Conway (1721–95), nephew of Sir Robert Walpole, later a Field Marshal and Commander-in-Chief. He had a varied and distinguished military and political career and was at this point MP for Bury St Edmunds.
4. Colonel Gordon: Lord Adam Gordon (1726?–1801), son of Alexander, second Duke of Gordon. MP for Kincardineshire, later general and commander of forces in Scotland, and Lord George Gordon’s uncle.
5. The Riot Act: (1715) made it illegal to remain in a particular area after one hour following the proclamation of the Riot Act by a magistrate. The law was difficult to enforce, and caused considerable confusion, and ‘a great deal of damage was done in the statutory hour on many occasions during the 1780 riots, because the authorities believed themselves unable to interfere’ (Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England, p. 10).
CHAPTER THE FIFTIETH
1. Duke Street … and in Warwick Street Golden Square: The chapel of St Anselm and St Cecilia, used by the Sardinian ambassador and a resort of Roman Catholic nobility and gentry, was in Duke Street, off Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The chapel of the Bavarian ambassador was in Warwick Street, Golden Square, Soho.
CHAPTER THE FIFTY-FIRST
1. Tower Stairs: Landing-place at the foot of Tower Hill, leading down to the Thames.
CHAPTER THE FIFTY-SECOND
1. Moorfields … a rich chapel: One of the poorest districts in London, just east of the slum quarter of St Giles, with a large Irish population. The chapel was in Ropemaker’s Alley.
2. pioneers upon a field-day: Soldiers who prepare the ground and dig trenches for the main body of an army on the day of a military exercise or review.
CHAPTER THE FIFTY-THIRD
1. the King’s birth-day: King George III’s birthday was on 5 June (24 May, old style).
2. demolishing those chapels on Saturday night: A mistake. The chapels were demolished on Friday night. Dickens has already said ‘All day, Saturday, they remained quiet’ (ch. 52).
3. East Smithfield: Area east of the Tower of London.
CHAPTER THE FIFTY-FOURTH
1. a monstrous carbuncle in a fairy tale: It is not clear if Dickens is referring to a particular fairy-tale here. Carbuncles, which are precious stones of a red or fiery colour, appear in a number of tales, of which the best-known is probably ‘The Fisherman and his Wife’ collected by the Brothers Grimm. Nathaniel Hawthorne in ‘The Great Carbuncle: A Mystery of the White Mountains’ (Twice Told Tales, 1837) tells the story of a search for the great carbuncle, a ‘wondrous gem’ which ‘gleams like a meteor’.
CHAPTER THE FIFTY-FIFTH
1. the candles … made long winding-sheets: Solidified grease on the side of a candle, thought to resemble long folded sheets and to be an omen of death.
CHAPTER THE FIFTY-SIXTH
1. Clare Market … Sir George Saville’s house in Leicester Fields: Clare Market was established in the seventeenth century on land close to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Savile House stood on the west side of Leicester House, in Leicester Square (See also note 5 to ch. 40.)
CHAPTER THE FIFTY-SEVENTH
1. whispering secrets to the earth and burying them: Midas, the legendary king of Phrygia, had ass’s ears bestowed upon him by Apollo, whom he had offended. He hid them with his head-dress, but his barber learned of them and found relief from the burden of the secret by whispering it into a hole in the ground. The reeds which grew over the hole whispered the secret whenever the wind blew over them. The tale is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 11, 153ff. In later editions, Dickens makes the reference more explicit, by adding the phrase ‘Midas-like’.
CHAPTER THE FIFTY-EIGHTH
1. Sir John Fielding: Blind half-brother (1721–80) of Henry Fielding the novelist, whom he succeeded as Chief Magistrate at No. 4, Bow Street, his office and court, in 1754. He continued in office until his death and was responsible for a number of reforms in policing, including the creation of the original Bow Street Runners and the use of foot patrols on the main roads out of London.
2. he built on sand: Matthew 7:26.
CHAPTER THE SIXTIETH
1. Farringdon Street: Formed in 1737 when the Fleet River was covered over and a meat and vegetable market was established on the site with two rows of one-storey shops. It was cleared 1826–30.
CHAPTER THE SIXTY-FIRST
1. Mile-end: Area in the East End, one mile beyond the City of London boundary.
2. Mansion House: The official residence of the Lord Mayor of London, built in 1739–52. The Lord Mayor is chief magistrate of the City.
3. Lord Mayor: Alderman Brackley Kennet (died 1783), a former brothel-keeper, made little serious effort to contain the riots.
4. Langdale: Thomas Langdale (1714–90), a prominent Catholic distiller. His premises in Holborn were next to Barnard’s Inn and contained 120,000 gallons of spirits. According to the Public Advertiser of 20 June 1780: ‘For several days after the fire at Mr. Langdale’s the Pump at Barnard’s Inn yielded nothing but spirits’ (de Castro, The Gordon Riots, p. 134). See also note 1 to ch. 73.
5. thief-takers: Sir John Fielding employed seven thief-takers, the original Bow Street Runners, who formed one of the first organized bodies to undertake the detection and arrest of criminals.
CHAPTER THE SIXTY-SECOND
1. a man again: Macbeth III.iv.107.
CHAPTER THE SIXTY-THIRD
1. the Commander-in-Chief Jeffrey, Baron Amherst (1717–97), former governor of Virginia and commander-in-chief, 1778–92.
2. Houndsditch: Poor area in the East End of London, with substantial Jewish population (as had Whitechapel).
3. the Pope of Babylon: Revelation 17. As Dennis Walder points out, Miggs ‘cannot bring herself to use the word “Whore”’ (Dickens and Religion (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), p. 100).
CHAPTER THE SIXTY-FOURTH
1. Mr Akerman: Richard Akerman (1722–92), keeper of Newgate, 1754–92, and a friend of James Boswell.
2. St Sepulchre’s: The Church of the Holy Sepulchre without Newgate was founded in 1137 and largely rebuilt after the Great Fire of London. At the junction of Snow Hill and Holborn, it stood opposite Newgate prison and its bell marked the time of impending executions. Death carts would stop outside St Sepulchre’s while the prisoners were presented with a nosegay.
CHAPTER THE SIXTY-FIFTH
1. a Lucifer among the devils: Satan, the Devil. See Isaiah 14:12.
2. the good old laws on the good old plan: Cf. Dickens’s song ‘The Fine Old English Gentleman, to be said or sung at all Conservative Dinners’: ‘The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips and chains, / With fine old English penalties and fine old English pains’ (published in Examiner, 7 August 1841; John Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, ed. A. J. Hoppé (London: Dent, 1966), Vol. 1, pp. 163–5).
3. Sessions House: Built in 1534 beside Newgate prison and replaced in 1774, it was the main location for criminal trials in London.
4. a face go by: Dickens may have spoken to eyewitnesses of the riots. His paternal grandmother, for example, was in service with the Crewe family, whose London house from 1777 was at 18, Grosvenor Street (see note 2 to ch. 67), an area where, as Dickens points out, many houses were barricaded and had soldiers to defend them. Michael Allen, ‘The Dickens/Crewe Connection’, Dickens Quarterly 5:4 (December 1988), 175–86, explores this connection further.
CHAPTER THE SIXTY-SIXTH
1. Secretary of State: David Murray (1727–96), seventh Viscount Stormont, Secretary of State for the Southern Division who himself had been roughly handled by the mob and pelted with mud on 2 June.
2. myrmidons of justice: Originally the loyal followers of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad; by this time it was a common phrase to mean agents or hired ruffians. Byron refers to ‘Bow-street myrmidons’ in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), and Dickens also uses the phrase in Great Expectations, ch. 12.
3. took … a large quantity of blood: It was customary until well into the nineteenth century to ‘bleed’ certain categories of patients, removing blood either through cupping or with leeches.
4. Lord Mansfield’s house in Bloomsbury square: William Murray (1705–93), first Earl of Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice, 1756–88, called by Macaulay ‘the father of modern Toryism’. His house was on the east side of Bloomsbury Square, a fashionable location in West London, laid out in the early 1660s (it was destroyed in the Riots).
5. Caen Wood: Now known as Kenwood House; originally built c. 1616 but extensively remodelled by Robert Adam in 1764, it was Lord Mansfield’s country house from 1754.
6. canary birds: This occurred at the house of Mr Malo, a merchant of Irish extraction in Moorfields. See Hibbert, King Mob, pp. 57–61 and de Castro, The Gordon Riots, p. 77.
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