Premium
Controlling the Riots: Dickens, Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution
Author(s) -
McCalman Iain
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.12
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1468-229X
pISSN - 0018-2648
DOI - 10.1111/1468-229x.00118
Subject(s) - watson , politics , literature , romance , criticism , biography , context (archaeology) , history , philosophy , art , law , political science , archaeology , natural language processing , computer science
Barnaby Rudge (1841) remains one of Charles Dickens's most consistently underestimated and misunderstood novels. Though he thought of it with pride as his most ambitious early work and planned it longer and more meticulously than any other of his novels, its poor critical reception has persisted up to the present day. Early commentators believed that Dickens departed too far from the historical record in his sympathetic treatment of ‘mad’ Lord George Gordon, instigator of the anti‐papal Gordon Riots of June 1780; modern criticism has tended to see the book as a crudely polemical and counter‐revolutionary attack on the Chartist movement of Dickens's own day. This article seeks to illuminate Dickens's literary and political motives by exploring the historical sources and real‐life figures on which he drew, particularly the Scottish writer–revolutionary Robert Watson. Watson was not only the inspiration for the slimy villain John Gashford in Barnaby Rudge , but he was also the real‐life author of a biography of Gordon which Dickens used heavily, if selectively. This article argues that understanding the historical context of Barnaby Rudge reveals Dickens's formidable literary and political achievements as an analyst of British Romanticism and revolution.