Barnaby Rudge

Charles John Huffham, DICKENS (1812-1870), son of a clerk in the Navy pays office. His father was imprisoned for debt and this was followed by a period of intense misery which deeply affected him. When he was 12 year old worked in a blacking warehouse. This painful period inspired much of his fiction. Then he worked as an office boy, studied shorthand and became reporter of debates in the Commons for the “Morning Chronicle”, collaborating later with other newspapers. These attracted much attention and led to an approach from Chapman and Hall which resulted in the creation of Mr. Pickwick, and the publication in twenty monthly numbers of “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”. Dickens captured the popular imagination as no other novelist had done and was admired by contemporaries as varied as Queen Victoria and Dostoevsky. Later criticism has tended to praise the complexity of the sombre late works at the expense of the high spirited humour and genius for caricature.
“Barnaby Rudge” (1841). The earlier of Dickens’s two historical novels, it is set at the period of the Gordon anti-popery riots of 1780. Like the later, “A Tale of Two Cities”, it contains powerful evocations of mob violence. Dickens wrote: “my object has been to convey an idea of multitudes, violence and fury; and even to lose my own dramatis personae in the throng...”