Reading Order
Barnaby RudgeCharles Dickens Barnaby Rudge Reading Order
Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (1841) is his first historical novel — set during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, in which London mobs burned Catholic chapels and Newgate Prison while the government was paralyzed. The novel's portrait of crowd violence and political demagoguery remained one of the most vivid fictional treatments of collective mob behavior until Gustave Le Bon's sociological account four decades later, and the scenes of Newgate Prison burning are among the most cinematically powerful Dickens ever wrote.
Where to start
Barnaby Rudge
Complete Barnaby Rudge Book List
- 1Buy
Barnaby Rudge
Charles Dickens·1841·Start here — Dickens's first historical novel and his most sustained engagement with collective violence; the Gordon Riots sequences, written at a time when Chartist agitation was worrying the English establishment, carry the urgency of a political warning. - 2Buy
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens·1859·Dickens's second and more famous historical novel — the French Revolution as the backdrop for a love story and a meditation on resurrection; where Barnaby Rudge portrays crowd violence from within English Protestant paranoia, A Tale of Two Cities portrays it from within the French Revolutionary experience. - 3Buy
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne·1850·Hawthorne's historical romance — set in Puritan New England — shares Barnaby Rudge's interest in how religious intolerance and community pressure shape individual lives; both are historical novels that use the past to examine the permanent features of human social behavior. - 4Buy
Rob Roy
Walter Scott·1817·Scott's historical novel — set during the Jacobite rising — was the model for the historical novel form that Dickens was working within; Barnaby Rudge is directly descended from Scott's innovation of using a personal story to organize the material of historical events. - 5Buy
Ivanhoe
Walter Scott·1820·Scott's most famous historical novel and the most popular model for the genre that Barnaby Rudge adapts for a specifically English urban setting; reading Scott before Barnaby Rudge gives the clearest picture of the formal tradition Dickens was inheriting and transforming.
Barnaby Rudge — Frequently Asked Questions
What are the Gordon Riots and why did Dickens write about them?
The Gordon Riots of June 1780 were the most violent civil disturbance in London's modern history — anti-Catholic riots led by Lord George Gordon that resulted in the burning of Catholic chapels, Newgate Prison, and other buildings, and the deaths of more than 300 people. Dickens was writing Barnaby Rudge in 1840–41 at a time when the Chartist movement was agitating for democratic reform, and the fear of working-class mob violence was a preoccupation of the English establishment. His portrait of the riots — showing how demagogues manipulate the poor into destroying their own neighborhoods — reads as both historical recreation and contemporary political warning.
Who is Barnaby Rudge?
Barnaby Rudge himself — the intellectually disabled young man who is swept up in the riots through his innocence and his attraction to their spectacle — is an unusual protagonist for a Dickens novel: more symbol than character, less psychologically real than most Dickens protagonists. He exists as the emblem of innocence corrupted by political demagoguery: a man who cannot understand what he is participating in, and whose participation therefore indicts the people who use him. Dickens treated the intellectually disabled with unusual sympathy and complexity throughout his career, and Barnaby is the fullest and most sustained of these portraits.
Is Barnaby Rudge one of Dickens's best novels?
No — it's generally considered one of his lesser works, most valuable as a historical document of Dickens's engagement with political violence and as context for understanding A Tale of Two Cities. The personal plot (organized around a murder mystery and a forbidden love) is less interesting than the historical sequences; the scenes of the riots burning Newgate Prison are magnificent, but they arrive relatively late and cannot sustain the whole novel. Readers who have exhausted the major Dickens novels and want to read everything will find it rewarding; readers new to Dickens should start elsewhere.
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