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davidsandilands's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
weyburn13's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
shadowsmoon's review
4.0
Oh Charles, You are just amazing. I still have that table reservation for you if you fancy turning up one day.
It took me a while to comprehend the sheer amount of complexity in this book and I'm not going to lie, the middle section challenged me beyond words. But I have to say by the last few chapters I had realised how utterly attached I had become to the characters. There are also so many moral views and nuggets of profound wisdom in this novel that I was moved deep inside at times.
Apparently it's one of his least read books, which, I can understand why. But the characters are just as entertaining and intriguing and I defy you not to fall in love with them. It has taken me a long time to read this book, whilst I've been doing other things this year, but it has spanned most of the first half of the year and I still think about it and miss the journey.
Charles, I need that dinner date with you.
It took me a while to comprehend the sheer amount of complexity in this book and I'm not going to lie, the middle section challenged me beyond words. But I have to say by the last few chapters I had realised how utterly attached I had become to the characters. There are also so many moral views and nuggets of profound wisdom in this novel that I was moved deep inside at times.
Apparently it's one of his least read books, which, I can understand why. But the characters are just as entertaining and intriguing and I defy you not to fall in love with them. It has taken me a long time to read this book, whilst I've been doing other things this year, but it has spanned most of the first half of the year and I still think about it and miss the journey.
Charles, I need that dinner date with you.
kiri_johnston's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
alfredgd's review
funny
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
The best book Dickens had written up to this point in his career, though it still has some glaring issues: the structure is quite lazy, many of the plot points are dull, and the wrap-up is about 5 chapters too long. Unusually for Dickens, the characterisation is quite weak. The only real standout is Sir John Chester, all the rest (excluding the titular) are at most one-dimensional and broadly forgettable. Barnaby himself is a fairly interesting case, and probably a key factor in the shortage of adaptations of this one: I don’t think one could portray Barnaby on screen without it being horribly offensive. It somehow doesn’t feel so in Dickens’s hands, which is testament to the power of his (often grating) sentimentality. On the good side, this is the most tightly plotted Dickens to date. We get a bit of foreshadowing and quite a lot of intrigue straight from the off, which pays off handsomely with the superbly written riots in and out of London. An enjoyable book that maybe outstays its welcome and ought to lean into its strengths a little more.
allie_hilleson's review
3.0
A friend and I over a period of about 4 years decided to read all of Dickens completed novels (listed above). This was my last one I’ve now finished all 14 :D.
This book has an interesting mystery and sweet characters and I enjoyed it, though it took me awhile to keep some characters straight. Warning: it also contains some graphic, unpleasant descriptions of things happening in the middle of the riots.
This book has an interesting mystery and sweet characters and I enjoyed it, though it took me awhile to keep some characters straight. Warning: it also contains some graphic, unpleasant descriptions of things happening in the middle of the riots.
millennial_dandy's review against another edition
5.0
Did Charles Dickens Predict Jan 6?
The mantle of religion, assumed to cover the ugliest deformities, threatened to become the shroud of all that was good and peaceful in society.
'Barnaby Rudge' was first published in book form in 1841 and tells the fictionalized story of the very real riots that occurred in London in June of 1780. Then member of Parliament, Edmund Burke, described the events thusly:
"Wild and savage insurrection quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the name of reform.... A sort of national convention ... nosed parliament in the very seat of its authority; sat with a sort of superintendence over it; and little less than dictated to it, not only laws, but the very form and essence of legislature itself.
Hmmm...The idea of political extremism coming out of the woodworks to try and violently force a governing institution to submit to its whims by attacking symbols of that governing institution, ultimately failing, but causing mayhem... Sure sounds familiar, doesn't it?
But what was all of this even about?
Ostensibly, the riots were a response to a bill which proposed officially ending discrimination against Roman Catholics (specifically, the bill would allow them to join the British military without having to take a Protestant oath), the fear being that if Catholics were allowed in the military, they'd turn on Britain from within (Catholics being famously duplicitous, I guess?).
Ok, so riots over an out-group being legally integrated into the majority group.
But how did it get to that point? Surely, thousands of people didn't just wake up one morning and choose violence.
Enter Lord George Gordon, president of the Protestant Association. In the year leading up to the 'riots of '80', Gordon had successfully prevented the 'Papist's Act' from coming into effect in Scotland, and high (I assume) off of this success, he moseyed over to England, met several times with King George (yes, that King George), but failed to get the King to take his side re: the whole 'Catholics are dangerous, actually, and should not in fact be allowed to enjoy the same social privileges as decent Protestant folk' thing.
He's very loud about this, and stirs up a lot of support for protesting the bill, and this all comes to a head when he calls a meeting of the Protestant Association, puts together a petition to stop the bill from passing, and then, get this, over 50,000 of hisfollowers supporters march on the House of Commons and try to break in, physically threaten the members of the House of Lords as they arrive including vandalizing their carriages, and then riot and loot for another seven days, attack Newgate Prison and the Bank of England, destroy a number of chapels, and carried on wreaking havoc until the government summoned the army to finally put a stop to it.
As per a Wikipedia article on the subject:
The just line by line comparisons of the Gordon Riots to Jan 6 are, on their own, pretty astonishing, but no, that doesn't make Charles Dickens a prophet, not least because the Gordon Riots happened a good sixty years before he was writing about them.
What does feel prophetic, however, or at the very least incredibly predictive, is the way that in 'Barnaby Rudge' the riots come about. The answer, in 600 pages, is: slowly but surely.
Though 'Barnaby Rudge' seems to fly under the radar compared to many of Dickens's other works, I found it to be supremely insightful.
Here, Dickens clearly outlines how extremist movements gain traction, and which types of people swell their ranks.
How exactly does a mob form, and whose fault is it when that mob inevitably gets violent? Who gets punished, and who gets away with it?
Because this is fiction, Dickens is able to lay out the layers of the onion while still giving us good, interpersonal drama.
In the center of it all, we have a 'pied piper' type individual. Charismatic and alarmist, they fear monger about something vague ('the Catholics are going to...do bad stuff...probably. Maybe. Whatever, they suck.') and then tie it to something concrete (the Papist's Act) with enough conviction that the validity of the claim starts to trickle down to the general populace. The idea is that if this one specific threat can be dealt with, the vague threat will also be brought to heel. This central figure may even believe what they're spouting. Lord George Gordon seems to have.
We have the 'true believers' who follow the pied piper because they become convinced he's right, either due to some pre-existing bias (this seems to have been the case with Mrs. Varden) or because, even if they don't understand the specifics, the pied piper seems like a trustworthy guy, so he must be right about...whatever the thing is (this is the group Barnaby falls into). Some, like Barnaby, lack the critical thinking necessary to be easily 'deprogrammed' when things turn nasty. Others, like Mrs. Varden, don't realize they're tacitly endorsing something malevolent, and are more surprised than anyone when it blows up.
Next are the ones who belong to some type of out-group or disenfranchised underclass--just not the one currently being thrown under the bus. These people may or may not believe what the pied piper is piping about, but that's less important than getting the chance to belong to the in-group. This is where characters like Hugh and Simon Tappertit fit in. But for the sudden brotherhood and elevated (sort of) social status granted them by joining up with Lord Gordo, they're outcasts: an illiterate gopher for the local pub and a locksmith's apprentice respectively.
But these two, though in the same category, are still representatives of two different types.
Let's start with Mr. Tappertit:
Says Tappertit:
It's the Simon Tappertits of the world that have always been, to me, the saddest victims of reactionary movements. Online, such people are often branded as having 'main character syndrome'; the idea being that such a person lives an ordinary to lackluster life, but believes that it shouldn’t be that way; that fabulous wealth and success and herodom are being kept from them by an outside force (this force is often personified as the ominous 'them').
Though it's easy when you meet one of these guys to have a chuckle at their expense because of how pathetic such delusions of stolen grandeur are, they are onto something, even if they got that 'something' wrong, or bury it under a bunch of puffed-up nonsense.
You'll notice that in his little speech, Tappertit namedrops a couple of things that all relate back to his rage at being seen as some nebbish little nobody, under someone else's thumb. That has nothing to do with the Catholics, or any group of people; it's a systemic issue he's actually talking about. Being a 'prentice, he really didn't have agency over his life and was at the mercy of the whims of whoever he was apprenticed to, and that does suck and reek of social injustice.
Returning to the Wikipedia article for the real Gordon Riots, it is noted that the rioters represented, much like the Jan 6 insurrectionists, a wide range of (sometimes overlapping, sometimes not) grievances that, again, were rarely aimed at people, and mostly aimed at systems (economic, political, etc.).
The thing about systems, though, is that they're slippery, invisible, intangible, and hopelessly complex, whereas The Catholics or The Democrats (or, to be super concrete: Mr. Haredale, whose house is looted and burned down, or Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who was the target of a failed kidnapping plot) are people, and people are easy to hate, and can be easily dealt with. And if these people, who already feel malcontent and frustrated, get told by someone with authority that there's someone they can blame for all of their feelings of struggle, of inadequacy and stunted success it can be mighty tempting to conformation bias their way into joining a reactionary movement.
Suddenly, instead of being just a poor 'prentice who gets bossed around, you get to be the "healer of the wounds of this unhappy country" -- you get to be the hero you always knew you were meant to be.
However, you're also the one most likely to take the fall on the off-chance that the revolution doesn't work out. And well, that's pretty much what happens to everyone in this category in Dicken's novelization.
Next up, we have what nowadays would be classified as 'black-pilled' individuals; people who have donned the mantal of some questionable 'isms', but most importantly, nihilism. Enter Hugh.
Hugh is given the most tragic backstory in the novel. He's (as far as he knows) orphaned after his mother is hanged for stealing, gets raised literally in a barn, gets bossed around a lot by his employer, and represents the absolute lowest of the low of society, lacking all prospects of upward social mobility, and seemingly without a friend in the world. And he really leans into this image of himself. He develops a brutish and violent nature that he unleashes whenever the opportunity arises. And what better excuse for getting back at a society that summarily rejected you than by destroying it with your bare hands? What does it matter to Hugh what the pretext is; he just wants to kick ass and feel a sense of belonging, something immediately taken advantage of by the next group of people that need talking about.
"No Popery, brother!" cried the hangman [Dennis].
"No property, brother!" responded Hugh.
"Popery, Popery," said the secretary with his usual mildness.
"It's all the same!" cried Dennis. "[...] Down with everybody, down with everything! Hurrah for the Protestant religion!" (p.297)
Here, Dennis has illustrated nicely that while there were those with genuine grievances that got horribly disfigured along the way, there were also those who latched onto the cause because for one reason or another it was advantageous for them to do so. In Dennis the hangman's case, he was looking for permission to sow chaos and hurt people (the state-sanctioned executions not being enough to satiate his thirst for the kill). But you know what they say about those that live by the sword...
Also in this category we hit upon the man of the hour: Sir John Chester. Chester is easily the most entertaining character in the tale (aside from the talking raven, Grip, of course). He's deliciously villainous with the air about him of a classic Disney baddie (think Jafar from Aladdin or Scar from The Lion King). He's dripping in class and affectation, and full of dramatic quips worthy of Oscar Wilde.
And that's kind of the paradox of such villains: you enjoy them so much that no matter how evil, how poisonous they might be, you kind of like them.
A lot of early Trump supporters would say as much; 'yeah, the guy's not very PC, and he says some off-color stuff, but he's funny, he's real; I'd have a beer with him.'
There's the other side to this too, for those who see beyond the charm and charisma to the stinger, the knife waiting to be plunged into an unsuspecting back, but rather than be repelled by it, they flock to these people with a scared shrug of 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.'
Dickens explains the phenomenon well: "He [Chester] was one of those who are received and cherished in society (as the phrase is) by scores who individually would shrink from and be repelled by the object of their lavish regard." (p.192)
In 'Barnaby Rudge', John Chester has big plans, and they don't involve his son marrying the daughter of his social rival. Conveniently, his social rival is a Catholic and Catholics in 1780 just so happen to be on the social chopping block, so what does he do? He throws his not inconsiderable influence behind the anti-Catholic movement and plots to have his rival's daughter kidnapped and probably raped just to get them both out of the way once and for all -- all from a safe distance, of course.
"Men of your capacity plot in secret and safety, and leave exposed posts to the duller wits." (p.337) Too right, Haredale, too right.
So there we have the broad strokes of the type groupings that, when brought together under just the right circumstances, when shaken and stirred in just the right way, can result in a folie a deux-esque explosion of violence and destruction perpetrated almost entirely by people who think of themselves as the 'good guy with a gun', and urged on by people who, if that civil unrest gets quashed, can raise their palms and declare: 'Riot? Me? I didn't do anything.'
In the case of January 6, things played out much in this fashion, to the exasperation of many who, while they might agree that the people who physically broke into the Capitol building probably deserved a time out, would have liked to have seen the ones in positions of power who fanned the flames of 'The Big Lie' get their comeuppance too.
In the real Gordon Riots, Lord George Gordon was initially arrested for high treason, but ultimately acquitted. In Dickens's fictionalized version, the punishments doled out by officials are stratified by social class: the lower the social class, the higher the price paid for participating in the riots. That is to say, things don't end well for the Hughs of the movement, marginally better for the Tappertits, and, officially, the Chesters get to just walk away.
It's a pretty bleak, but unfortunately realistic depiction of the justice system (one of those institutions we were talking about before) and how it is harshest on those already downtrodden before turning to mayhem and crime.
So did Dickens predict Jan 6? No. But he did lay out a handy road map for how to spot a brewing reactionary movement, and how to identify those most likely to get sucked into one.
Tackling the genesis and evolution of a reactionary movement was a dense undertaking, even for Dickens, and it's amazing how well he managed to capture something so complex while remaining supremely readable. The way he let things simmer in the background for the first several hundred pages to focus on the interpersonal drama before bringing it roaring to the forefront and producing some of the most horrific scenes in anything of his I've read was a masterclass in plotting that culminates in a mob that "never reasoned or thought at all, but were stimulated by their own headlong passion, by poverty, by ignorance, by the love of mischief, and the hope of plunder." (p.410)
Truly phenomenal stuff.
It's true that the plot takes a while to fully kick in, and much of the first several hundred pages comprise small slice-of-life style scenes and seemingly petty drama including a double romance, one Romeo and Juliet-style, the other more Lady and the Tramp. There are family squabbles, seething servants, the ever-joyous, titular Barnaby Rudge and his delightful raven companion, and old men telling yarns in front of the Maypole fire. But underneath the mundanity, sinister things are lurking, and this seemingly sleepy community is about to get rocked, and we the reader with it.
So kick your shoes off, sit in your favorite reading chair, and give Dicken's most neglectd work a chance, because unlike the claim made in a weirdly hostile introduction that "the details [of the novel] are of the sort that only a certified public accountant is likely to find interesting" (p.3), this is a rich and complex novel wrapped in a quintessentially Dickensian bow.
Justice for "Barnaby Rudge"!
'Barnaby Rudge' was first published in book form in 1841 and tells the fictionalized story of the very real riots that occurred in London in June of 1780. Then member of Parliament, Edmund Burke, described the events thusly:
"Wild and savage insurrection quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the name of reform.... A sort of national convention ... nosed parliament in the very seat of its authority; sat with a sort of superintendence over it; and little less than dictated to it, not only laws, but the very form and essence of legislature itself.
Hmmm...The idea of political extremism coming out of the woodworks to try and violently force a governing institution to submit to its whims by attacking symbols of that governing institution, ultimately failing, but causing mayhem... Sure sounds familiar, doesn't it?
But what was all of this even about?
Ostensibly, the riots were a response to a bill which proposed officially ending discrimination against Roman Catholics (specifically, the bill would allow them to join the British military without having to take a Protestant oath), the fear being that if Catholics were allowed in the military, they'd turn on Britain from within (Catholics being famously duplicitous, I guess?).
Ok, so riots over an out-group being legally integrated into the majority group.
But how did it get to that point? Surely, thousands of people didn't just wake up one morning and choose violence.
Enter Lord George Gordon, president of the Protestant Association. In the year leading up to the 'riots of '80', Gordon had successfully prevented the 'Papist's Act' from coming into effect in Scotland, and high (I assume) off of this success, he moseyed over to England, met several times with King George (yes, that King George), but failed to get the King to take his side re: the whole 'Catholics are dangerous, actually, and should not in fact be allowed to enjoy the same social privileges as decent Protestant folk' thing.
He's very loud about this, and stirs up a lot of support for protesting the bill, and this all comes to a head when he calls a meeting of the Protestant Association, puts together a petition to stop the bill from passing, and then, get this, over 50,000 of his
As per a Wikipedia article on the subject:
Despite being aware of the possibility of trouble, the authorities had failed to take steps to prevent violence breaking out. [...] Those that were present in the House of Commons were not strong enough to take on the angry mob. Eventually a detachment of soldiers was summoned, and they dispersed the crowd without violence. Inside the House of Commons, the petition was overwhelmingly dismissed by a vote of 192 to 6.
The just line by line comparisons of the Gordon Riots to Jan 6 are, on their own, pretty astonishing, but no, that doesn't make Charles Dickens a prophet, not least because the Gordon Riots happened a good sixty years before he was writing about them.
What does feel prophetic, however, or at the very least incredibly predictive, is the way that in 'Barnaby Rudge' the riots come about. The answer, in 600 pages, is: slowly but surely.
Though 'Barnaby Rudge' seems to fly under the radar compared to many of Dickens's other works, I found it to be supremely insightful.
Here, Dickens clearly outlines how extremist movements gain traction, and which types of people swell their ranks.
How exactly does a mob form, and whose fault is it when that mob inevitably gets violent? Who gets punished, and who gets away with it?
Because this is fiction, Dickens is able to lay out the layers of the onion while still giving us good, interpersonal drama.
In the center of it all, we have a 'pied piper' type individual. Charismatic and alarmist, they fear monger about something vague ('the Catholics are going to...do bad stuff...probably. Maybe. Whatever, they suck.') and then tie it to something concrete (the Papist's Act) with enough conviction that the validity of the claim starts to trickle down to the general populace. The idea is that if this one specific threat can be dealt with, the vague threat will also be brought to heel. This central figure may even believe what they're spouting. Lord George Gordon seems to have.
We have the 'true believers' who follow the pied piper because they become convinced he's right, either due to some pre-existing bias (this seems to have been the case with Mrs. Varden) or because, even if they don't understand the specifics, the pied piper seems like a trustworthy guy, so he must be right about...whatever the thing is (this is the group Barnaby falls into). Some, like Barnaby, lack the critical thinking necessary to be easily 'deprogrammed' when things turn nasty. Others, like Mrs. Varden, don't realize they're tacitly endorsing something malevolent, and are more surprised than anyone when it blows up.
Now Mrs. Varden [...] was impressed by a secret misgiving that she had done wrong; that she had, to the utmost of her small means, aided and abetted the growth of disturbances, the end of which it was impossible to foresee; that she had led remotely to the scene which had just passed. (p.401)
Next are the ones who belong to some type of out-group or disenfranchised underclass--just not the one currently being thrown under the bus. These people may or may not believe what the pied piper is piping about, but that's less important than getting the chance to belong to the in-group. This is where characters like Hugh and Simon Tappertit fit in. But for the sudden brotherhood and elevated (sort of) social status granted them by joining up with Lord Gordo, they're outcasts: an illiterate gopher for the local pub and a locksmith's apprentice respectively.
But these two, though in the same category, are still representatives of two different types.
Let's start with Mr. Tappertit:
Says Tappertit:
You meet in me not a 'prentice, not a workman, not a slave, not the victim of your father's tyrannical behavior, but the leader of a great people, the captain of a noble band [...] You behold in me, not a private individual, but a public character; not a mender of locks, but a healer of the wounds of this unhappy country. (p.461)
It's the Simon Tappertits of the world that have always been, to me, the saddest victims of reactionary movements. Online, such people are often branded as having 'main character syndrome'; the idea being that such a person lives an ordinary to lackluster life, but believes that it shouldn’t be that way; that fabulous wealth and success and herodom are being kept from them by an outside force (this force is often personified as the ominous 'them').
Though it's easy when you meet one of these guys to have a chuckle at their expense because of how pathetic such delusions of stolen grandeur are, they are onto something, even if they got that 'something' wrong, or bury it under a bunch of puffed-up nonsense.
You'll notice that in his little speech, Tappertit namedrops a couple of things that all relate back to his rage at being seen as some nebbish little nobody, under someone else's thumb. That has nothing to do with the Catholics, or any group of people; it's a systemic issue he's actually talking about. Being a 'prentice, he really didn't have agency over his life and was at the mercy of the whims of whoever he was apprenticed to, and that does suck and reek of social injustice.
Returning to the Wikipedia article for the real Gordon Riots, it is noted that the rioters represented, much like the Jan 6 insurrectionists, a wide range of (sometimes overlapping, sometimes not) grievances that, again, were rarely aimed at people, and mostly aimed at systems (economic, political, etc.).
The thing about systems, though, is that they're slippery, invisible, intangible, and hopelessly complex, whereas The Catholics or The Democrats (or, to be super concrete: Mr. Haredale, whose house is looted and burned down, or Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who was the target of a failed kidnapping plot) are people, and people are easy to hate, and can be easily dealt with. And if these people, who already feel malcontent and frustrated, get told by someone with authority that there's someone they can blame for all of their feelings of struggle, of inadequacy and stunted success it can be mighty tempting to conformation bias their way into joining a reactionary movement.
Suddenly, instead of being just a poor 'prentice who gets bossed around, you get to be the "healer of the wounds of this unhappy country" -- you get to be the hero you always knew you were meant to be.
However, you're also the one most likely to take the fall on the off-chance that the revolution doesn't work out. And well, that's pretty much what happens to everyone in this category in Dicken's novelization.
Next up, we have what nowadays would be classified as 'black-pilled' individuals; people who have donned the mantal of some questionable 'isms', but most importantly, nihilism. Enter Hugh.
Hugh is given the most tragic backstory in the novel. He's (as far as he knows) orphaned after his mother is hanged for stealing, gets raised literally in a barn, gets bossed around a lot by his employer, and represents the absolute lowest of the low of society, lacking all prospects of upward social mobility, and seemingly without a friend in the world. And he really leans into this image of himself. He develops a brutish and violent nature that he unleashes whenever the opportunity arises. And what better excuse for getting back at a society that summarily rejected you than by destroying it with your bare hands? What does it matter to Hugh what the pretext is; he just wants to kick ass and feel a sense of belonging, something immediately taken advantage of by the next group of people that need talking about.
"No Popery, brother!" cried the hangman [Dennis].
"No property, brother!" responded Hugh.
"Popery, Popery," said the secretary with his usual mildness.
"It's all the same!" cried Dennis. "[...] Down with everybody, down with everything! Hurrah for the Protestant religion!" (p.297)
Here, Dennis has illustrated nicely that while there were those with genuine grievances that got horribly disfigured along the way, there were also those who latched onto the cause because for one reason or another it was advantageous for them to do so. In Dennis the hangman's case, he was looking for permission to sow chaos and hurt people (the state-sanctioned executions not being enough to satiate his thirst for the kill). But you know what they say about those that live by the sword...
Also in this category we hit upon the man of the hour: Sir John Chester. Chester is easily the most entertaining character in the tale (aside from the talking raven, Grip, of course). He's deliciously villainous with the air about him of a classic Disney baddie (think Jafar from Aladdin or Scar from The Lion King). He's dripping in class and affectation, and full of dramatic quips worthy of Oscar Wilde.
"Ah, father!" cried his son, "if--"
"My good fellow," interposed the parent hastily, as he set down his glass and raised his eyebrows with a startled and horrified expression, "for Heaven's sake don't call me by that obsolete and ancient name. Have some regard for delicacy. Am I gray, or wrinkled, do I go on crutches, have I lost my teeth, that you adopt such a mode of address? Good god, how very course!" (p.252)
And that's kind of the paradox of such villains: you enjoy them so much that no matter how evil, how poisonous they might be, you kind of like them.
A lot of early Trump supporters would say as much; 'yeah, the guy's not very PC, and he says some off-color stuff, but he's funny, he's real; I'd have a beer with him.'
There's the other side to this too, for those who see beyond the charm and charisma to the stinger, the knife waiting to be plunged into an unsuspecting back, but rather than be repelled by it, they flock to these people with a scared shrug of 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.'
Dickens explains the phenomenon well: "He [Chester] was one of those who are received and cherished in society (as the phrase is) by scores who individually would shrink from and be repelled by the object of their lavish regard." (p.192)
In 'Barnaby Rudge', John Chester has big plans, and they don't involve his son marrying the daughter of his social rival. Conveniently, his social rival is a Catholic and Catholics in 1780 just so happen to be on the social chopping block, so what does he do? He throws his not inconsiderable influence behind the anti-Catholic movement and plots to have his rival's daughter kidnapped and probably raped just to get them both out of the way once and for all -- all from a safe distance, of course.
"Men of your capacity plot in secret and safety, and leave exposed posts to the duller wits." (p.337) Too right, Haredale, too right.
So there we have the broad strokes of the type groupings that, when brought together under just the right circumstances, when shaken and stirred in just the right way, can result in a folie a deux-esque explosion of violence and destruction perpetrated almost entirely by people who think of themselves as the 'good guy with a gun', and urged on by people who, if that civil unrest gets quashed, can raise their palms and declare: 'Riot? Me? I didn't do anything.'
In the case of January 6, things played out much in this fashion, to the exasperation of many who, while they might agree that the people who physically broke into the Capitol building probably deserved a time out, would have liked to have seen the ones in positions of power who fanned the flames of 'The Big Lie' get their comeuppance too.
In the real Gordon Riots, Lord George Gordon was initially arrested for high treason, but ultimately acquitted. In Dickens's fictionalized version, the punishments doled out by officials are stratified by social class: the lower the social class, the higher the price paid for participating in the riots. That is to say, things don't end well for the Hughs of the movement, marginally better for the Tappertits, and, officially, the Chesters get to just walk away.
It's a pretty bleak, but unfortunately realistic depiction of the justice system (one of those institutions we were talking about before) and how it is harshest on those already downtrodden before turning to mayhem and crime.
So did Dickens predict Jan 6? No. But he did lay out a handy road map for how to spot a brewing reactionary movement, and how to identify those most likely to get sucked into one.
Tackling the genesis and evolution of a reactionary movement was a dense undertaking, even for Dickens, and it's amazing how well he managed to capture something so complex while remaining supremely readable. The way he let things simmer in the background for the first several hundred pages to focus on the interpersonal drama before bringing it roaring to the forefront and producing some of the most horrific scenes in anything of his I've read was a masterclass in plotting that culminates in a mob that "never reasoned or thought at all, but were stimulated by their own headlong passion, by poverty, by ignorance, by the love of mischief, and the hope of plunder." (p.410)
Truly phenomenal stuff.
It's true that the plot takes a while to fully kick in, and much of the first several hundred pages comprise small slice-of-life style scenes and seemingly petty drama including a double romance, one Romeo and Juliet-style, the other more Lady and the Tramp. There are family squabbles, seething servants, the ever-joyous, titular Barnaby Rudge and his delightful raven companion, and old men telling yarns in front of the Maypole fire. But underneath the mundanity, sinister things are lurking, and this seemingly sleepy community is about to get rocked, and we the reader with it.
So kick your shoes off, sit in your favorite reading chair, and give Dicken's most neglectd work a chance, because unlike the claim made in a weirdly hostile introduction that "the details [of the novel] are of the sort that only a certified public accountant is likely to find interesting" (p.3), this is a rich and complex novel wrapped in a quintessentially Dickensian bow.
Justice for "Barnaby Rudge"!