Recommendations
Books Like Barnaby Rudge
Best books to read after Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens
Barnaby Rudge is Dickens's first historical novel — set during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, and written at a time when Chartist agitation was making the English establishment nervous about working-class violence. If the novel's portrait of crowd violence and political demagoguery moved you, these books share its interest in how mobs form and what individuals can do in the face of collective violence.
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A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's second historical novel and the most famous — the French Revolution as backdrop for a love story and a meditation on resurrection and sacrifice; where Barnaby Rudge portrays crowd violence from within English Protestant paranoia, A Tale of Two Cities portrays it from within the French Revolutionary Terror; the essential companion in Dickens's own work
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Ivanhoe
by Walter Scott
Scott's most famous historical novel — the formal predecessor of Barnaby Rudge in the genre of the English historical novel; both are organized around the conflict between Norman and Saxon, Protestant and Catholic, establishment and rebellion, and both use personal stories to organize the material of historical events
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The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hawthorne's historical romance about Puritan intolerance is the American parallel to Barnaby Rudge's portrait of how religious intolerance generates mob violence; both use the historical setting to examine permanent features of human social behavior — the tendency of communities to identify and destroy those who differ from the majority
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Darkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler
Koestler's novel about the Stalinist show trials — a Communist intellectual who is arrested and subjected to the logic of revolutionary ideology that demands he confess to crimes he did not commit — is the twentieth-century parallel to Barnaby Rudge's portrait of collective violence and political manipulation; both are about what happens to individuals when they are caught in the machinery of political movements
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The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
Eco's historical detective novel set in a medieval monastery — the most popular contemporary heir to the tradition of historical fiction Barnaby Rudge works within; where Dickens uses the 1780 riots to examine political violence, Eco uses a medieval monastery to examine how institutions suppress knowledge and how violence follows from the suppression of ideas
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Romola
by George Eliot
Eliot's historical novel set in Renaissance Florence — the most serious Victorian literary parallel to Barnaby Rudge in its attempt to use historical fiction for philosophical and moral purposes; less immediately entertaining than Dickens's historical fiction but more intellectually ambitious
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Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
Golding's novel about schoolboys who establish a murderous social order on a desert island is the most powerful twentieth-century examination of how mob violence emerges from social breakdown; where Barnaby Rudge shows the Gordon Riots as a historical event with identifiable causes, Golding shows the same dynamics emerging from human nature in miniature
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The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's historical novel about Paris in 1482 — the French parallel to Barnaby Rudge in its portrait of crowd violence, religious intolerance, and political authority; both novels use their historical settings to examine the permanent human capacity for collective cruelty, and both combine melodrama with genuine moral argument
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