Barnaby Rudge is underrated

Salon next week
My salon series How to Read a Novel continues next week on October 4th, all about Silas Marner. Make sure to book a ticket.

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The Dickens Chronological Reading Club continues and has reached Barnaby Rudge. I will note in passing, before we start proper, that having just written a rant about the common reader I was lucky enough to meet some of the other members of the Dickens Chronological Reading Club on a call, all of them splendid common readers, some of whom read Dickens’ complete works during long commuting journeys. Like I said last week, the common reader is real and critics need to do a better job of reaching them.

Rudge is one of Dickens’ most underrated novels and you should all read it. It is, however, a novel not much thought of by Dickens scholars. I say not much thought of, rather than not thought much of, because it is in fact missing from the Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, a sin of omission if ever there was one.

The reasons for this book’s neglect are pretty obvious. In his review, Edgar Allen Poe was quite frustrated with Dickens’ handling of the murder mystery plot, because concealment was the main device, clumsily handled. It was all “the keenest interest of mere mystery” spun out for a long time and then veering off halfway through into a story about the Gordon Riots. And indeed, the big reveal is not so shocking as all that after seven hundred pages. As Poe says, if you look back, Dickens’ handling of the clue is occasionally careless.

This sort of loose structuring and handling of the flow of information is standard criticism of Dickens. Poe is right that these are “trivial defects” (he was, overall, a big fan) but there is a long history of critics considering Dickens insignificant compared to writers like George Eliot because he cannot show us the characters’ inner life, and produces a sprawling story not a well-planned plot. He has no formal ethical vision or system. It was not until Dombey & Son, his seventh novel, that Dickens actually started making notes about characters, timing, pace and actually plotting his books.

But this is not a defect. It is a difference. There are no laws of art that say stories must be well-contained, of regular proportions and hew to a theme without languid and crackling deviations. The beginning-middle-and-end form is only one of many. There is a type or novel like that, with many advocates. But that’s not the same thing as saying all other types of novel are illegitimate.

Dickens came out of the tradition of Fielding and Smollett, with their rambling, scenic, picaresque structures — this is the novel of Cervantes, not Jane Austen. Drifting is his biggest weakness: his books are often so long because they are brimming with needless details and deviations. But this is also the spirit that provides his stories with energy, delight, mood, perspective, detail, irony, sarcasm, humour, and all the other facets that make rambling comedies great and entertaining.

Nicola Bradley lists his techniques as “the deferral tactics of Arabian Nights, the capacity of the journalist to observe and report, the power of the satirist for reform and the clown or tragedian to move or entertain.” John O. Jordan notes that “Recent criticism has come to value not only the journalistic side of his work, but the very qualities of excess — sprawling melodramatic plots, larger-than-life characters, verbal extravagance — that earlier critics had identified as signs of artistic weakness.”

All of which is to say, those critics who praise Dickens for his faults — his verbosity, his excess, his inability to get to the point, and so endlessly on — really ought to reconsider Barnaby Rudge. It has everything you want in a Dickens novel: a murder mystery, a talking raven, a suspicious criminal, melodramatic churchyard scenes, a charming country inn with a John Bull landlord, a dramatic mob, riots, fires, a hangman, a blindman, some lovely Georgian world building, some terribly crooks and some loveable old men. (The women are, as usual, either harridans, frumps, or airheads. This is one of the old boy’s genuine limitations.)

Dickens’ genius for the buzz of a city, the life of a building, and the tumult of events is at high pitch in Barnaby Rudge. It is full of sneaking, snitching, sinister people. There are innocents abused and criminals who prosper. It also makes heroes of the ordinary. There are also good honest characters who anchor the novel in homely and honest bourgeois values.

But it is not sentimental or middle-class. There is violence in this novel. Deep, dark, and flaring violence. People roll in fire and swim through flames. They lap up burning liqueur. Prisons are burned. Murderers get free. The terror and thrill and libertine spirit of the marauding mob is given full licence. It is half charming, bucolic, merry old England, half the wild and flaming world of semi-feudal, dispossessed England let loose and brought to the brink of anarchic power.

John Carey, in The Violent Effigy, is right that despite all this, the book remains essentially comic. Some of the prisoners released from Newgate, for example, wander back in and “lounge about the place.” But that is exactly what makes this novel so gripping: while the fires burn and show us the horrifying gleam in the eyes of the newly empowered rioters, it flickers and plays with the shadows of newly released prisoners who don’t want to leave their home. Dickens is not being a social, religious, or political critic: he is creating a theatre of the absurd. Such, he half-comically, half-terrifyingly says, is life.

Barnaby Rudge is Dickens preparing for the great novels of the 1850s. Mr Chester is halfway between Mr Tulkinghorn and Mr Jingle. His fancy slippery speech and fake charm reminds me of Jingle, whereas the secret-keeping and skulking around begins to introduce Tulkinghorn. There are the creaking, living buildings of Little Dorrit and the gruff criminals abroad of Great Expectations. The homely and the exploitative share offices. The dual use of fire, at once a symbol of hearth and home but also ravaging and destruction, is vibrant here, as it will be again and again, especially in Bleak House. In Barnaby Rudge, the comic is turning sinister.

And of course, Barnaby Rudge is very relevant today. We live in a sprawling, messy world where rioters can storm the Capitol in America, Twitter mobs can swim in the fire of their indignation, otherwise innocent people get taken to the edge of despair by inadvertently joining or battling the riot, populists and demagogues abound. In all of this, our politics and our culture is not neat and well-proportioned. The news rolls along with Dickensian fervour and disregard for the quiet life we all supposedly wish for.

So be damned, you critics who want everything neat and structured and to have the pleasure of writing essays about how Dickens got all the pieces in the wrong place. Dickens, like Shakespeare, puts life before art. He breaks the rules to show us London, whirling, spirited, and riotous, as it really was and is. The novel is an inadequate mode for intellectual commentary. Dickens was an inadequate thinker on social issues: he was too teeming with ideas, contradictions, observations, vexations, perplexities, comedies — and on and on his towering world is built, novel (almost) unlimited.

That is the joy of reading Barnaby Rudge. Start it tonight and I guarantee you will wake up thinking about it, wondering where it will go next.

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Salon next week
My salon series How to Read a Novel continues next week on October 4th, all about Silas Marner. Make sure to book a ticket.

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