Reviews

What a strange book to try to sum up! I'll start by saying that I've only ever read 'a Christmas Carol' so i have no idea whether the aspects I'm mentioning are typical of Dickens or out of character for him.
Speaking of characters, they are a mixed lot and the first half of the book seems to be setting up a sort of comedy of errors, with such amusing figures as the pontificating landlord, the overzealous maid, the self-important 'prentice, etc. Everyone is plotting and scheming and it's a bit difficult to keep track of, but it's fairly entertaining.
Then the book skips five years, and it feels a bit disjointed as the second half of the book focuses on much more serious matters (but still with amusing and very well-observed examples of human nature and mob mentality).
Everything wraps up neatly at the end, although with a lot of moralising. The plot was entertaining enough, and I did find myself quite 'Gripped' by the end, but honestly the high point for me was the quirky characters who could easily have fitted into a different story.

fictionfan's review against another edition

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4.0

Sins of the fathers...

In 1775, a group of elderly men gather in the Maypole, an ancient inn owned by John Willett, and tell a stranger about a murder that was committed nearby years before. The owner of the large house in the neighbourhood, Mr Harefield, was killed, apparently during a robbery, and some time later another body was found, identified as his servant, also murdered. The servant’s son, Barnaby Rudge, was later born an idiot, assumed to be so because of the shock his widow had suffered during her pregnancy. Now Barnaby is a happy young man, earning a little money by running messages and spending the rest of his time running wild in the countryside, revelling in the natural world which he loves. But Barnaby is gullible and easily influenced, which will one day lead him into serious trouble.

Skip forward five years to 1780, and trouble is abroad in the streets of London. Lord George Gordon is leading protests against the passing of an act that will remove some of the legal restrictions under which Catholics have suffered since the time of the Reformation. A weak man himself, Gordon is surrounded by unscrupulous men using him for their own ends. Some of his followers are men of true religious beliefs, bigoted certainly, but honourable in their own way. But many, many others are the detritus of the London streets – the drunks and thieves, the violent, the cruel. Others are the desperate – those whose argument with the government is nothing to do with religious questions about which they know little and care less. These are the poor and marginalised, those with no hope. Together these men and women will become that great fear of the establishment – the mob, wild, destructive and terrifying. And among them and affected by them are the characters we met in the Maypole, including young Barnaby Rudge...

Structurally this one is a bit of a mess. The two halves are each excellent in their own way but the sudden time shift halfway through, complete with a total change of central characters and tone, breaks the flow and loses the emotional involvement that was built up in the first section. Barnaby Rudge is also an unsatisfactory hero in that, being an idiot with no hope of improvement, there’s no romance for him nor does he get to be heroic. However, even a weaker Dickens novel is always enjoyable and this is no exception. My four star rating is a comparison to other Dickens’ novels – in comparison to almost every book out there, this is still head and shoulders above them.
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If I’d been Dickens, I’d have called it Dolly Varden – she pulls the two strands together more than most of the other characters. Daughter of locksmith Gabriel, Dolly is the major love interest of the character who appears to be the hero in the first half, Joe Willett, son of the owner of the Maypole. Young, flirtatious and silly, Dolly plays hard to get at the wrong moment and Joe takes the King’s shilling and goes off to fight those pesky American colonists who were having some kind of little rebellion round about then. Five years on, Dolly is still single, secretly hoping that one day Joe will return. But her beauty has made her a target for other men, including two who will play major roles in the second half of the book. Dickens often showed how vulnerable women were to unscrupulous men, but with Dolly he takes it a stage further. There is one scene in particular where she is the victim of what can only be described as a sexual assault, and later, in the riots, Dickens doesn’t hold back from showing how rape is one aspect of what happens when there’s a breakdown in social order. While it’s all done by hints and suggestion, very mild to our jaded modern eyes, I imagine it must have been pretty shocking to the original readership. Dolly is an intriguing Dickens heroine – unlike many of his drooping damsels, she’s a lot of fun, revelling in her beauty and the effect it has on men while still being kind-hearted and true. He allows her to grow and mature in those five years, which is not always the case with his heroines, and she’s a great mix of vulnerability and strength of character.

The first half is the fairly typical Dickens fare of various eccentric characters and young lovers and a mystery in the past, of the style of Oliver Twist or Martin Chuzzlewit, say. The second half is much more reminiscent of the later, and much better, A Tale of Two Cities. The mob scenes in this are just as horrifying, but the characters aren’t as unforgettably drawn as Sidney Carton or Madame Defarge. More than that, it seems as if Dickens is less sure of where his sympathies lie. The Gordon rioters are fighting to ensure that anti-Catholic laws remain in place, and clearly Dickens thinks this is abhorrent. But that means that he almost comes over as pro-Establishment, since on this occasion the Establishment are the ones wanting to do away with those laws. So while in Two Cities he’s against the mob but understanding of the poverty and inequality that drives them, here he gets a bit muddly – he clearly wants to suggest that it’s all because they’re poor and uneducated but has to also show that they’re religious fanatics, fighting not to better themselves but to keep others down. However, I thoroughly enjoyed Dennis the hangman, who is not only a typically Dickensian villain but is also based on the real-life hangman of the time, and gives Dickens an opportunity to show the gruesome barbarity of this form of social control.

As always with Dickens there are far too many aspects to cover in a review without it becoming as long as one of his novels. Overall, this is one where the individual parts may not come together as well as in his greatest novels, but it’s well worth reading anyway, for the riots and for the interest of seeing Dickens experiment with the historical novel as a form. I read the Oxford World’s Classics version – my first experience of a Dickens novel in their edition – and thoroughly enjoyed having the informative introduction and particularly the notes, which I found extremely helpful since this is an episode of history I knew little about. The book is also generously full of the original illustrations. I say it every time but I’m so glad I live in a world that once had Dickens in it!

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Oxford World’s Classics.

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sheryl_macca's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Dickens' first historical novel has long been regarded his biggest flop but it definitely has it's fans. I'm afraid I'm not one of them. I disliked the same things that most others seem to - the villains get all the focus, a lot of the action occurs 'off stage' and we only learn of it second hand, the first half of the book is too slow and arduous. I also feel that the satire no longer works since the anti-catholic Gordon Riots are hardly known of.

I can understand why there's a passionate following for this book though. Dickens' legendary world building and character development is as strong as ever. The villains are truly hateful, manipulative, sly and self serving. His social commentary on Victorian Britain is ever present in the fatherless heroes, the doomed love of those who are considered too lowly and the gossip and judgements at the Maypole Inn (which is a thoroughly reputable establishment you understand).

I'm glad I stuck with it, the Gordon Riots deserve to be highlighted but it was a flop for me.

duffypratt's review against another edition

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2.0

As Dicken's goes, this was about the worst that I've read. I ended up caring about none of the "heroes,' and found myself rooting for a couple of the villains towards the end, because they were the only ones who were even remotely interesting. Lots of the main action, especially at the end, occurred offstage. We then heard about it in a second hand fashion and not in much detail.

Lots of people say that even the worst Dickens is great. I feel pretty much the opposite. Except for Great Expectations, I tend to think that even the very best in Dickens has terrible, and overwrought, moments. Here the balance tipped fairly strongly in that direction. There were things in this book that I thought were really great, and I'm not sorry that I read it. But if it were the only thing he wrote, I don't think anyone would even know who he was.

jasonfurman's review against another edition

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4.0

This was my second time reading Barnaby Rudge, which is probably Charles Dickens' least regarded novel. It is a historical novel set in the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, one of the two historical novels Dickens wrote (the other, of course, being A Tale of Two Cities).

Dickens had achieved super-stardom with a series of hits (The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop) when he published Barnaby Rudge which was a comparative flop in its own time and remains so today. Most all of those other books were written rapidly under the deadline pressures of monthly installments. In contrast, Barnaby Rudge (originally provisionally titled Gabriel Vardon after another character) was written and reworked over several years as Dickens aspired to something more important than his earlier novels, something in the spirit of Walter Scott that went beyond mere entertainment.

There is, indeed, a certain amount of cringe in Barnaby Rudge--with the biggest cringe being the title character himself, an "idiot" in the words that Dickens uses who barely understands the world around him and gets swept up in a gullible fashion by whatever trickster or mob wants to use him--even if he is ultimately simple and good hearted. Also cringe are some of the absurd (and in fact unnecessary coincidences) and the heavy-handed way in which it metes out the moral fates that each character deserves.

But Barnaby Rudge also has some extraordinary historical scenes that capture the way that mobs can be instigated, grow, and the chaos that they--and their suppression--can engender. And how individuals get swept up on either side of them. It also has a number of memorable characters and comic scenes (not least Simon Tappertit, a journeyman locksmith who fancies himself a Napoleonic-like head of a group of journeymen). And some of the usual forbidden and inevitable romances that are perfectly charming.

All told, Barnaby Rudge is certainly not close to the best of Dickens but it is not the worst (sorry Hard Times) and perfectly good in its own right. But if you haven't read much Dickens there are about ten to thirteen other books you'll want to read before this one.

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