The Elizabethans were fond of making a distinction between an `artificial’ fool — a professional comedian who assumed certain mental peculiarities in order to make people laugh, and what they called a `natural’. Shakespeare is playing with these terms in that scene early in Twelfth Night where a drunken Sir Toby Belch and his cronies are making so much noise that Malvolio eventually arrives to quieten them down (2.3). `Beshrew me’, says Olivia’s fool Feste to Sir Andrew Aguecheek, in reference to Sir Toby and just before Malvolio’ s appearance, `the knight’s in admirable fooling’. `Ay, he does well enough if he be disposed’, replies Sir Andrew, who is not the sharpest knife in the box, `and so do I too. He does it with better grace but I do it more natural’.
A `natural’ is what Dickens sometimes calls Barnaby Rudge, who gives his name to his fifth novel, although he also describes him as an idiot some of the opprobrium of that term having been taken from it by Wordsworth’s `The Idiot Boy’. Like the hero of that poem, Barnaby has a devoted mother and a happy disposition, as well as being close to Nature: his constant companion is a raven whom he has taught to say certain words — those who doubt that ravens are like parrots in being able to do this can consult the internet. When Wordsworth’s Johnny goes missing, one of his mother’s fears is that, in his simple-mindedness, `sadly he has been misled / And joined the wandering gypsy-folk’. Barnaby’s fate is worse in that he is persuaded by those much cleverer and socially aware than himself to join the mob that sets fire to parts of London in what became known as the Gordon riots. These took place in 1780 so that Barnaby Rudge is the first of Dickens’s historical novels. He already had a rough plan for it in mind as he was engaged with Pickwick Papers in 1836, and while the literary world was still reeling from the enormous, world-wide success of Walter Scott, but Oliver Twist, Nicolas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop intervened before he could get down to it five years later.
Barnaby’s role is not so central that there is a lack of other contenders for the novel’s protagonist. As Cedric Watts notes, in his introduction to the Wordsworth classics edition of the novel, it was at one point called after Gabriel Vardon, the honest locksmith who is captured by the mob, dragged to the gates of Newgate (the locks of which he himself has provided), but resolutely refuses to open them. This leads to one of Dickens’s most finely written set-pieces: the burning down of those same gates and the release of all Newgate’s prisoners. Another is when the mob go on to attack a distillery because its owner is known to be a Catholic. The starting point of the riots had been Parliament’s refusal to repeal a new law which lifted some, but only some of the severe restrictions on the participation of Catholics in public life. Lord George Gordon had been a vehement opponent of this change and is the leader of an association of protestants dedicated to resisting it. It was because he had given an inflammatory speech to thousands of his supporters shortly before they went on the rampage that the subsequent disorders bear his name.
Organising the narrative around real historical events does not make its management any easier although it is not before the 35th of the novel’s 82 chapters that Lord George Gordon makes his first appearance. Before that, and the description of the riots which follows, Dickens has established a host of characters who will be involved in them to a greater or lesser extent. The initial centre of the action is the Maypole Inn, a dozen or so miles outside London. If Barnaby can accurately be described as simple-minded, the man in charge of the Maypole, John Willett, is a triumphantly comic portrait of someone whose mind is monumentally laborious and slow. He has a son called Jo, whom he refuses to recognise has grown up but also an impressively athletic but only semi-socialised ostler called Hugh who will play a leading role in the riots and will be the main reason Barnaby joins them.
Barnaby himself turns out to be the son of a man who murdered a local country gentleman more than twenty years before and has been on the run ever since. The brother of the murdered man, Geoffrey Haredale, has taken over the estate and has a daughter by the name of Emma. She is loved by a young man called Edward Chester but there is a bitter feud between her uncle, who is in loco parentis, and Edward’s father. This might be reason enough for Sir John Chester to want to prevent a union between Emma and his son but his more profound motive is that he is relying on Edward to marry a woman with far more money than the Haredales have so that he will be able to maintain his idle, sybaritic style of living . Of all the characters in the book, he is one of the most successful: foppish in his mannerisms, coldly selfish and almost always scrupulously polite under pressure, a `gentleman’ of the worse kind.
In the behaviour of all these figures there is little that prefigures the novel’s prolonged and violent climax. The Haredales are, however, a Catholic family whose house is burned down in the riots and there is anti-Catholic feeling in the household of Gabriel Vardon whose wife, along with her maidservant, make financial contributions to Lord George Gordon’s Protestant Association. Vardon also has an apprentice, Simon Tappertit, who is a member of an unofficial, anti-Catholic militia. These people are all linked to the Maypole through Jo Willett’s fondness for Vardon’s pretty but capricious daughter Dolly but when she rejects his advances, and after enduring various indignities at the hands of his father and his cronies, Jo joins the army, only returning to London five years later after having lost an arm at the siege of Savannah in the war of American Independence. Yet this is just in time to join Edward Chester in rescuing both Vardon and his daughter, as well as Emma Haredale, who have been kidnapped by Hugh, Simon Tappertit and other of the rioters.
Throughout his account of the Gordon riots, Dickens makes his dislike of religious intolerance plain enough as he does his contempt for the more puritanical forms of Protestantism. His vivid descriptions of the horrifying aspects of mob violence come from a member of a generation still traumatised by memories of the French Revolution (the burning down of Newgate by the rioters occurred only ten years before the storming of the Bastille) but also uncomfortably aware of the large crowds that were beginning to turn out in support of further Parliamentary reform under the banner of what became known as Chartism. Yet his approach to what had happened in 1780 was far from being that of a reactionary. He follows the historical record in making Lord George a twisted and not altogether sane idealist, misled by scheming subordinates, and he criticises the Establishment of the time for their inept handling of the week-long disturbances. The punishments that ensue once they are over allows him to express how repelled he is by the remarkable severities of the late 18th century penal code, many features of which had survived into his own time, and by the barbarity of public executions (one of which he had himself attended).
Lord George Gordon was tried for treason but then acquitted on grounds eerily reminiscent of recent events in the United States: that his inflammatory address was not intended to incite actual violence. His trial is not a detail included in Barnaby Rudge and for another figure from the historical record who appears in the novel Dickens changes the outcome. This is Edward (Ned) Dennis, the real name of a former public hangman whom Dickens successfully evokes as someone with a pathological and obsessive pride in having been able to perform his grisly trade efficiently. In the novel, Dennis is executed for having taken part in the riots whereas, in reality, he was pardoned and even allowed to return to his old job. Two entirely fictional characters for whom there is no pardon are Barnaby’s father, who is finally made to account for the murder of Haredale’s brother and the ostler Hugh. His case is treated with some sympathy by Dickens, involving as it does the vexed issue of how far the social background of criminals should excuse their crimes. The father of Hugh is revealed to be Sir John Chester who has abandoned both him and his gypsy mother before or just after his birth. She had then been persuaded to handle some fake currency to relieve the destitution of herself and her son. This was a capital offence so that, in being hanged outside Newgate, Hugh was following where his mother had already led, his prominent role in the riots being an example of how those for whom Society has done little or nothing are hardly likely to want to defend it, that extreme poverty breeds resentment and crime. The only regret Hugh expresses for his actions, before his execution, is in having been the chief reason why Barnaby became involved in them.
Given that his father is hanged, although for a crime which has nothing to do with the riots, a case for reprieving Barnaby could be made that is similar to Hugh’s but the more powerful reason is his complete ignorance of what they have been about and his lack of understanding of the action going on around him. His last-minute pardon, chiefly achieved through the efforts of Gabriel Vardon, is the major feature of what was becoming for Dickens a traditional settling of accounts. His knew that his readers wanted to know what happened to all his various characters and that, although the risk he had taken in killing off little Nell had been a triumphant success, they no doubt preferred to see the good prosper and the bad put down. Both they and he must have known that this is not what always happens in the real world although Barnaby’s narrow escape is not in fact quite as far removed from reality as it might seem. Perhaps precisely because the penal code was so severe, reprieves were very common in the early part of the 19th century even if the alternative to a death sentence was not usually immediate freedom, as in Barnaby’s case, but transportation. Although, again according to Cedric Watts, 62 death sentences were passed after the riots, only 25 of them were carried out.
It would be interesting to speculate quite why `happy endings’ went out of fashion in the higher reaches of literature towards the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries and why so many of the novels of Dickens’s more `Modernist’ successors do not so much end as stop. In an article published in 2022, Caroline Levine noted that the most common or at least critically approved ending for a novel in the post-Dickens period was `deliberate indeterminacy’ with anything other than `open-endedness’ regarded as a `docile submission to the status quo’. `Happy endings’, she paraphrases Terry Eagleton as saying, `are illusory resolutions to the churning social contradictions that inexorably continue in the material world’. Yet with our own prospects now so much worse than they have been for some time, given the effects of climate change and the increased danger of nuclear war (`we live in an age of acute precarity’), Levine argues that we should be more receptive to endings that pay `a deliberate attention to ongoingness, the project of sustaining life over time’, that are conservationist rather than, or as well as conservative, and which draw our attention to the value of `stable shelter and ongoing routines of labor, food, and rest’.[1]
Whether Victorians of the 1840s felt more secure that we now do may be a moot point, but they certainly liked a happy ending and Dickens was the man to give them one. There is a temptation to look back on this process as unsophisticated yet it is perhaps a mistake to conclude that both parties did not, as they say, `know what they were doing’. All of five chapters from the end of Barnaby Rudge (there is a lot for Dickens to deal with!), John Willett makes his final appearance, still shell-shocked after the rioters have ransacked the Maypole but reconciled to his son and with now a prospective daughter-in-law in Dolly Varden. Confused by all the changes that have taken place in his previously settled life, he decides to go for a walk although not in the direction of `The Golden Key’ which is where Gabriel Vardon has both his home and workshop. `But the Golden Key lies in our way, though it was out of his,’ Dickens remarks, at the beginning of chapter 79, `so to the Golden Key this chapter goes’ and he then proceeds to wrap up a few remaining loose ends. This not an address to readers of the same kind as in those `picaresque’ novels by Fielding or Smollet Dickens so much admired but it does suggest a certain connivance between him and them, a knowingness in the exercise of giving them what they want. And after all, if having everything turn out well does not necessarily give a faithful picture of our daily experience, neither does the opposite.
[1] Caroline Levine, `In Praise of Happy Endings: Precarity, Sustainability, and the Novel’, in Novel (November 2022, 55:3), 388-405.