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Just as he uses the French Revolution as the catalyst to resolve the
relationships and destinies of his characters in 'A Tale of Two Cities', Charles
Dickens uses the Gordon Riots to the same effect in Barnaby Rudge, his other
historical novel.
Inspired by the eccentric peer, Lord Gordon, the London mob carried out a
reign of terror in 1780 against Roman Catholics, involving murder, looting,
arson, and acts of sedition including storming several prisons such as the Fleet
and releasing the prisoners. Gordon escaped the consequences, due to lack
of evidence, but other ringleaders were executed in public once the military had crushed the riots.
The riots occupy much of the story, and are brilliantly described. Hatred of the
Papacy was the moral peg on which to hang the violence, and it presented the
mob with specific targets, Roman Catholic churches, RC houses and their
families. A mob out of control and guided by ringleaders will find the lowest
common denominator of behavior. It is formed out of a depressed working
class which has an inbuilt hatred of the 'Establishment' and, individually, old
scores to settle against oppressive employers. Its real motivation is looting,
revenge and the exercise of power. For a time the mob succeeded by instilling
fear into the respectable population at large. Many house-holders put notices
in their windows declaring their Protestantism. Dickens captures and conveys
this sense of fear which dominated London and its suburbs for some weeks.
This is the most successful aspect of the novel. The climax is the detailed
account of the storming, burning and liberation of the Fleet prison.
All the same, there is a certain weakness in the plotting, and this is the
weakness of many of Dickens' novels. Ever the sentimentalist, Dickens sees
to it that all the characters, good and bad, get their just desserts. Life is not
like that, and the plaintive Old Testament cry, Why do the ungodly prosper?
is much nearer the mark. Yet Barnaby escapes the gallows on grounds of
idiocy, even though he had joined the rioters for gain, albeit to help his mother.
So he is a goodie; others are Geoffrey Haredale, a Roman Catholic whose
house was burnt down, and Gabriel Varden, the locksmith who braved the mob
in refusing to open the Fleet door lock. Anyway, his pretty daughter Dolly is
needed for a happy marriage to Edward Chester. And the baddies ? We have
Hugh, the savage ostler, Simon Tappertit and Dennis the hangman. All get
hanged. And the smooth villain, Sir John Chester, a secret fomenter of the
Gordon Riots; Haredale kills him in a duel. Stewart Rudge, Barnaby's father,
had murdered Haredale's brother years previously, but nemesis catches up
with him and he also gets hanged. Even Miggs, the smarmy but treacherous
maid gets sacked. So everything turns out well! All this merely underlines the
fact that Dickens, by far the most popular Victorian novelist, knew his
readership. What did they want? Exaggerated sketches of
low-life characters,
who would make them laugh by their grotesque misuse of English. The good
and bad characters already mentioned. A
love interest, with a happy ending,
after the young lady has been exposed to many perils. An exciting plot, with
vivid descriptions. A well-executed denouement, in which justice is seen to be
done all round. And perhaps an eccentric such as Barnaby Rudge, with his
talking raven. Even the raven survives the ups and downs of the riots.
The novel has all this. It is a masterpiece of popular fiction, but it is still
second-rate.
Most Victorian novelists are too long and wordy for modern tastes. Trollope
suffers from the same verbal diarrhoea, but his denouements grow convincingly
out of his characters rather than being imposed on them.
Dickens' few middle or upper class characters are thin and boring. We know
that Haredale is bluff, rough but honest, whereas Chester is smooth, but
treacherous. Nothing more. The characters representing the various layers of
the working class are far more rounded, but their comic use of English is very
suspect. Working class English cannot have changed so dramatically even in
one and a half centuries. Then as now, they abused the language, but
wordiness, long and involved sentences, and delay in coming to the point were
never features of their conversation, especially in London. Shakespeare
understood this. Dickens did not.
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