Barnaby Rudge shares many characteristics with both ‘serious’ historical novels and the more popular romances of Ainsworth and G. P. R. James: it follows the progress of a number of characters, from a range of social classes, and shows how their interlinked fates develop through the course of a great historical action; it contains, like so many novels of Scott and Ainsworth, a pair of love stories that are hindered by social and religious barriers and difficulties but which end triumphantly; it has a fast-paced and gripping action, with a complex plot and highly dramatic encounters of competing individuals and social forces; it places ‘real’ historical figures side by side with imaginary characters; it provides a detailed topography of the places in which it is set, and takes pains to be historically and geographically accurate. Like many other historical novels of the period, it climaxes in a dramatic public event – the storming of Newgate prison – which also decides the fate of the individuals whose story we have followed. Like other historical romances, it has conflicts of love and belief that cross class boundaries, and a plot furnished with an upstart apprentice, a scheming aristocrat, an heroic working man, a banished son, a double murderer and no less than three abducted virgins.

  Yet in many ways, Barnaby Rudge is an unusual and deviant example of the form. It is only for example in Chapter the Thirty-fourth, more than a third of the way through the book, that anything remotely like an historical event takes place. Until then, the story seems to be a romance or mystery tale concerning a double murder and a strange disappearance twenty-two years before. Nor is Barnaby Rudge a typical hero: he is a sort of idiot, and in the central action of the novel he is joined by other socially marginal and unheroic figures such as Dennis, the public hangman, and Hugh, the semi-human ostler. Indeed, at one point Dickens’s intention was to have the Riots led by three escapees from Bedlam.3 The plotting seems more to resemble that of a Gothic novel, full of ruins, secrets and ghostly reappearances. Gothic fiction, with stories often set in exotic and mysterious landscapes and buildings, and with plots which were nightmarish explorations of irrational fear and unearthly deeds, had flourished since the latter decades of the eighteenth century, although, by the 1840s, Gothic effects were increasingly confined to ephemeral and popular fiction. In Barnaby Rudge, alongside the normal causal mechanisms and events that we find in historical fiction, we constantly encounter uncanny effects and ghostly mysteries. Although there were precedents for this in Ainsworth’s work in particular, Dickens uses the interplay of ‘Gothic’ and ‘historical’ elements in much more innovative and complex ways, which entangle the historical plot within the stranger, temporally dislocating, forces of Gothic. Modern history rests on our sense that the past is safely over and can become the subject of disinterested knowledge; the Gothic elements of Barnaby Rudge ensure that this novel carries no such reassurance.

  For in this novel, history is a repetitive and strangely doubled business.4 Instead of safely progressing, here things repeat and repeat. Characters, names, events, all return or are in danger of returning. This repetition is of various sorts: psychic repetition; repetition within families, particularly in the relation between fathers and sons; historical repetition where the present repeats the past; and traumatic repetition, where suffering and pain seem able to arrest and disorder time itself. The events of the latter part of the book, set in 1780, repeat those of the earlier chapters, set five years earlier, and both periods are haunted by the murder which occurred more than twenty years before as Rudge Senior, the man thought to be dead, comes back alive. For Lord George Gordon, the leader of the riots that bear his name and which come to dominate the book, the period he is living through is a repetition of the events of both the sixteenth century and the political settlement that debarred Roman Catholics from the throne, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. Dickens’s presentation of events, particularly the climactic burning of Newgate, is self-consciously a repetition or echoing of scenes from the French Revolution, which began in 1789, only a few years later. The scenes also repeat or echo another French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle’s celebrated 1837 history, a book which Dickens admired and which was later to colour deeply his only other historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), which resembles Barnaby Rudge in its subject matter and mode of writing, but which it also differs from in substantial ways. Both books centre on spectacular popular upheavals in the late eighteenth century and the terror of mob rule, both climax with an escape from prison and both move to redemptive and optimistic endings. A Tale of Two Cities is, as its title hints, as fascinated and troubled as Barnaby Rudge is by the power of doubling and repetition in history. But the differences between the two books are equally striking, for A Tale of Two Cities is a shorter and more tightly focused work which subordinates Dickens’s usual rich characterization and linguistic inventiveness to the needs of a fast-paced and dramatic plot. Its emphasis on incident over character, and dialogue over description, has made A Tale of Two Cities successful and popular on a scale that Rudge has never been – although Tale’s ability to win a large readership has never really been matched by a corresponding critical acclaim. Its promise is that revolutionary upheavals, however violent and distressing, can be transfigured by one man’s self-sacrificing love, while Barnaby Rudge has a more complex sense of the strangeness of historical events and the inability of human intentions and actions to influence them.

  Barnaby Rudge repeats in other ways too. It echoes the kind of novels that had made Scott famous, for example, as well as certain celebrated scenes within them, like the storming of the Tollbooth in The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818). It also represents (which is itself a form of repetition) certain real persons, such as Gordon and Edward Dennis, the public hangman from 1771 to 1786, who was imprisoned for riot, and whose name Dickens borrows for his fictional rioting hangman. The consequence is that there seem to be many different competing times and temporalities imposed on top of each other in the book: from Varden’s secular and progressive time and Rudge’s haunted and repetitive life outside time to Gordon’s sacred and prophetic time. They are inextricably bound together but difficult to reconcile to a single story or coherent development. This historical doubling is seen as both necessary – no historical understanding is possible without it – and a potentially tragic error, for those, like Gordon, condemned to the misrecognitions it inevitably engenders.

  In his influential study of the historical novel, George Lukács argued that the French Revolution marked an epoch in literary as well as political history.5 The experience of the mass armies of the Napoleonic wars radically changed people’s conception of themselves and their place in society, creating a qualitatively new and historical understanding of the world, as an apparently unchanging social order suddenly gave way to a much more unstable and openly conflictual society. But the French Revolution also saw the birth of an equally powerful and influential form, to which Barnaby Rudge has a strong affinity: melodrama. For Peter Brooks, in his classic account, the loss of the sacred and its institutions of Church and Monarchy at this period, and the eclipse of literary forms such as tragedy and the comedy of manners, led to a distinctively new melodramatic way of depicting and understanding the world.6 Melodrama, both on stage and in fiction, he argues, stages a confrontation of absolute and contending moral forces, which through a procession of heightened and often implausible events leads to a purging of the social order and the triumphant display of moral purity and goodness. The language of melodrama moves to forms of absolute expression, to a perfect externalization of primordial and excessive emotion, to static and polarized oppositions. This leads not to an historical understanding but to the revelation of an essentially unhistorical ‘moral occult’ of dramatically opposed moral qualities, which entails ‘a reassertion of magic and taboo, a recognition of the diabolical forces which inhabit our world and our inner being’.7 This is true of much of Barnaby Rudge, a novel constantly drawn to vivid contrasts, implausible coincidences and heightened emotions: Barnaby’s father, Rudge, for example, is described in characteristic passages as ‘a spectre at … licentious feasts’ (ch. 16) and ‘a ghost upon the earth’ (ch. 17), and his wife fears that the walls will drip blood at the mention of her name.

  Historical fiction is drawn to the battlefield, to the confrontation of public choices and destinies; melodrama to the confines of castles and vaults. History is either the bearer and realizer of human progress through the struggle of classes; or, as in melodrama, a mere backdrop against which the more essential psychic conflicts of generations and families are played out. Perhaps all historical fiction, perhaps all fiction, partakes of both these modes of understanding, but Barnaby Rudge is peculiarly torn by the conflicting claims of popular mass action and public conflict on the one hand, and psychic terror and the conflict of generations on the other. Indeed, it could almost be said that Barnaby Rudge stages the war of these two forces, these two understandings, these two world views – the historical and the melodramatic. In that conflict we find the book’s continuing and disturbing power.

  2

  It is often thought that Dickens’s decision to use the Gordon Riots as the subject of his novel was an eccentric one and that they were an historically marginal event, chosen simply for the sake of a vivid climax in the burning down of Newgate at the end.8 Although the Riots create little resonance today, this was far from the case when Dickens was writing, for they were ‘the largest, deadliest and most protracted urban riots in British history’ and took place a mere two generations before the book’s publication.9 Nor were they a throwback to an earlier, more intolerant age or simply an excuse for thuggish violence, for they articulated an essential component of British national identity, its Protestantism, and one which was a continuing and living force in Dickens’s day. In 1828–9, for example, in the build-up to the legislation that released Catholics from most legal disabilities, there were hundreds of anti-Catholic petitions to Parliament and in Dickens’s county of Kent a meeting of 60,000 anti-Catholic protesters and the widespread circulation of anti-Catholic tracts that would have warmed the cockles of Mrs Varden and her fellow-proselytes.10 For the British throughout the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century, as Linda Colley has written, ‘the struggles of the Protestant reformation had not ended, but were to be fought over and over again’.11

  Dickens thus chose an event that encapsulated a central part of the political history of both the previous century and his own, in which two of the major forces that shaped the national polity were at work: the fear of insurrection and popular anti-Catholicism. Lukács in The Historical Novel dismissed Dickens’s historical fiction on the grounds that their historical settings were used simply as a background to provide ‘purely accidental circumstances for “purely human” tragedies’.12 This is a misleading judgement, because Dickens here brilliantly seized on a significant moment in national history, which since at least the time of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) had been seen ‘not as an isolated eruption of disorder but as a failed revolution’ with Gordon himself an ‘archetypal revolutionary figure’ who embodied some of the most threatening and unstable forces of the age.13 Dickens was personally sympathetic to Gordon, describing him as ‘at heart a kind man, and a lover of the despised and rejected, after his fashion’,14 but could see in the riots that bear his name a set of events both exceptional in their scale and representative of a vital strain in national self-formation. His dramatization of these riots reveals a complex tangle of forces and motives underpinning a profoundly ambiguous set of events, which are simultaneously an attempted coup d’état, a popular uprising and a religious pogrom.

  Identity, whether national or personal, constitutes itself largely through what it desires and what it rejects or expels, and British identity in this period drew on ‘a vast superstructure of prejudice’ to attack and scapegoat the many ‘men and women who were not allowed to be British so that others could be’.15 Dickens is deeply sympathetic to the victimized Catholics of the story: Geoffrey Haredale is consummately virtuous, and it is his enemy, the sinister Protestant conspirator Sir John Chester, who has the classically ‘Jesuitical’ qualities of deceit and guile. The Protestant Association is brutal and bigoted, and it is Dennis the public hangman who describes his job as ‘sound, Protestant, constitutional, English work’ (ch. 37). As so often in Walter Scott’s novels, romantic love – here that of Emma Haredale and Edward Chester – has to overcome religious difference as well as family enmity in its passage to happiness. But Dickens looks forward as well as back, for, as the nineteenth century progressed, encounters with the Catholic ‘other’ of British identity were increasingly supplanted by similarly polarized and complex encounters with Colonial ‘others’, who were equally desired and feared. In this novel full of doubles, the meetings and conflicts of Protestant and Catholic which dominate the action are doubled by offstage colonial confrontations and exchanges: Edward goes to the West Indies to free himself from his father’s sway, and Joe Willet finds his self by losing his arm in the American War of Independence.16

  In the main action, political questions, as so often in Dickens’s novels, are entangled with those of justice and the law. When the novel opens, this appears to be an essentially private matter: the unsolved mystery of Reuben Haredale’s murder. As the book develops, it becomes a matter of public policy and struggle, as Gordon’s mob besieges the Houses of Parliament in an attempt to force it to repeal the Catholic Relief Act, and the Riots culminate in the burning of the house of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield. Dickens’s relationship to the law throughout his career is a complex one, in which he is drawn to the enforcement of the law in his fiction while taking an often disturbing delight in its transgression. While planning the novel he wrote in a letter to John Cay, an Edinburgh lawyer, to say that ‘I think I can make a better riot than Lord George Gordon did’,17 and nearing its completion gleefully wrote to his friend and future biographer, John Forster, that he had ‘let all the prisoners out of Newgate, burnt down Lord Mansfield’s, and played the very devil. Another number will finish the fires, and help us on towards the end. I feel quite smoky when I am at work.’18 Often savagely critical of the existing legal apparatus, Dickens is rarely simply an exponent or enactor of the law, nor is he an anarchic opponent of it. It is probably best to think of him as what we could call a paranomian, a figure who simulates and disorders the law, and yet also holds out the hope and possibility of a better justice.

  Many of the most important scenes in Dickens’s fiction take place in prison, and Barnaby Rudge is no exception. His father had been imprisoned for debt when Dickens was a boy, and it is only in prison that Barnaby can meet his own errant father. More darkly, in one of the more grotesque scenes in a novel full of grotesquerie, Dennis the hangman breaks into Newgate in company with the rioters in order to gloat over the deaths of the men in the condemned cells, trapped by the fire that is supposed to liberate them. Dickens here takes one of the most important images of Romantic literature and culture, that of liberation from a prison, and turns it into something more sinister. For many nineteenth-century writers, history was the history of human beings gradually learning to choose the form of their society and culture and in the process liberating themselves from the tyranny of superstition. Although there are occasions when men and women make their own history in this book, as when Gabriel Varden heroically resists the mob, more often characters find themselves trapped in actions or patterns of behaviour without apparent sense or reason. This is often an uncanny matter, as when Haredale, for all his virtue, is finally led or driven to the Warren where he meets, fatally, the phantom that has haunted him so long. Much of the time, the characters seem to move without foreknowledge, their actions contradictory and self-defeating: some of the anti-Catholic rioters, Dickens tells us at the end, ‘owned themselves to be catholics’ (ch. 77).

  The psychic life of the novel is thus as strange as the events it depicts. There is a repeated emphasis on the violence of history and the mental disturbance and disorder that both precedes and is caused by it. In Dickens’s account, Gordon is a sort of political hysteric, who suffers from a compulsive need to remember and re-enact the past, projecting his psychic disorder on to public life, just as Sim Tappertit directs his adolescent resentment into the fantasies of the Apprentice Knights. Perhaps the most remarkable is the character of Barnaby himself, who must be one of the most unusual heroes of any Victorian novel. Dickens had pioneered in Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop the use of children as the moral and emotional centres of the books. Here, he attempts something even more difficult and surprising: naming a novel after someone as socially marginal and intellectually weak as Barnaby is a remarkable act of confidence in his own dramatic powers. The nature of Barnaby’s condition has been disputed over the years. Dickens clearly draws on the tradition of the ‘holy fool’ who is wise as well as foolish, and on figures from Romantic literature such as Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy’ and Scott’s Madge Wildfire in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, but there is also something dangerous about him: the narrator at one point describes the state of his mind as ‘ghastly’ and ‘cunning’ (ch. 25).19 It is in Hugh, the ostler at the Maypole, however, who we later learn is the illegitimate son of Sir John Chester, where desire and violence unconstrained by rational thought are most deeply explored by Dickens. Like Barnaby, his mental affliction seems deeply, if obscurely, linked to the evil and neglect he suffers from his father; unlike Barnaby he is dangerous both sexually and politically. Mental disorder is not just the property of these characters however, and the novel moves towards a number of climactic events – the sacking of the Maypole, the burning of the Warren, the fall of Newgate – all of which have psychically devastating consequences for those who experience or witness them. Indeed, the whole novel is built around traumatic events, as when John Willet watches the total destruction of his world in the sacking of the Maypole or Rudge Senior in prison is ‘fearful alike, of those within the prison and of those without; of noise and silence; light and darkness; of being released, and being left there to die’ (ch. 65). It is almost as if to witness or experience any historical event in this book is to suffer trauma: a single glimpse of the condemned men escaping from Newgate, writes the narrator, is ‘an image of force enough to dim the whole concourse; to find itself an all-absorbing place, and hold it ever after’ (ch. 65).

 

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