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The novel opens in 1775 at the Maypole Inn near London, on the anniversary of a murder committed twenty-two years before. Barnaby Rudge, a gentle, simple-minded young man who wanders the countryside with his talking raven Grip, lives with his widowed mother, who hides a terrible secret about his father. Five years later, when the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots break out in London, Barnaby is swept into the mob that burns houses, chapels and Newgate Prison, while two romances, Joe Willet's and Dolly Varden's and Edward Chester's and Emma Haredale's, are torn apart by family hatreds.
Context and significance
Charles Dickens's first historical novel, published in 1841, gives a vivid and frightening picture of mob violence. Grip was based on Dickens's own pet raven, and Edgar Allan Poe, who reviewed the book, is thought to have been inspired by it to write The Raven. Dickens later wrote A Tale of Two Cities; see his life.
About the author
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) worked in a boot-blacking factory as a boy while his father was in a debtors' prison, and poverty and wronged childhood run through his novels, from Oliver Twist to the largely autobiographical David Copperfield.