63 pages • 2 hours read
Charles DickensBarnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1841A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: Anti-Catholic Sentiment and the Gordon Riots
Content Warning: This section features discussions of ableism, religious intolerance, and bigotry.
Anti-Catholic discrimination had been common in Britain since the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century and King Henry VIII’s establishment of the Protestant Church of England. For over two centuries before the Gordon Riots of 1780, several laws required Catholics to pay far more taxes than Protestants and restricted Catholics from holding office, obtaining land through certain means, and worshiping openly and freely. After the Catholic King James II was deposed in the Glorious Revolution, the 1689 Bill of Rights declared “that no future monarch could be a Catholic or be married to a Catholic. This provision was reaffirmed in the 1701 Act of Settlement and remains in force to this day” (“Catholics and Nonconformists.” UK Parliament).
In 1778, the British Parliament passed the Catholic Relief Act, which allowed Catholics who had sworn an oath of allegiance to the king to join the army and purchase land (“Emancipation.” UK Parliament). The restoration of these few minor rights to Catholics caused several Protestants, namely those of the Protestant Association led by its president Lord George Gordon, to believe that this would lead Catholics to take power and overthrow Protestant supremacy. In 1779, smaller uprisings began in Scotland, which were followed by larger riots in London the next year.
Considered at the time the most destructive uprising in the history of London, the Gordon Riots lasted about a week in the summer of 1780 and led to the deaths of between 300-700 people. Rioters burned several homes, churches, and structures. The destruction reached its peak with the burning of Newgate Prison, where arrested rioters were being held. The riots revealed several cracks in the system of British law enforcement, mainly the fact that they had no established police force at the time. Lord George Gordon, who had lent his name to the riots, was arrested toward their end for high treason but was found not guilty.
Socio-Historical Context: Intellectual Disability in the Long 19th Century
The novel’s titular character, Barnaby Rudge, has an unspecified intellectual disability and is frequently stereotyped by the other characters around him and Dickens himself. Modern Dickens scholars have posited that Barnaby is a person with Williams Syndrome or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), yet neither characters living in the late 18th century nor writers and readers of Dickens’s mid- 19th century would have used this terminology, or known the specific causes and effects of Barnaby’s disability.
During the time in which the novel is set (1775-1780), various negative beliefs about people with intellectual disabilities circulated, such as the idea that their disability is faked (as assumed by the country justice in Barnaby Rudge) or that it was given to them as divine punishment. One of the more common beliefs during this time was that people with intellectual disabilities could not be educated, and educational efforts on a larger scale did not begin until the Victorian era (Wright, David. “The Educable Idiot.” Oxford Academic, 2001).
People of the Victorian era, during which Dickens wrote Barnaby Rudge, still often espoused many of the same negative stereotypes about people with intellectual disabilities. Whereas people with disabilities were often cared for by their family or by a church in the 18th century, the 19th century saw a rise in private institutions and asylums for people with intellectual disabilities, and also for those with physical disabilities and mental health conditions.
Though Dickens does not vilify Barnaby like many of his contemporaries or certain characters in the novel would, the stereotypes Dickens uses to characterize Barnaby cannot be ignored. Contributors to the Dickens Society blog note that Barnaby is described by Dickens and other characters using the terms “‘idiot’ […] ‘an animal’ […] with the ‘absence of soul’ […] ‘blindness of intellect’ […] and even as God’s ‘most slighted and despised work’” (Eblovi, Darren, and Christopher Clardy. “Charles Dickens and Barnaby Rudge.” The Dickens Society, 2017). More villainous characters in the novel suggest the idea that people with intellectual disabilities “really ought to be hanged for the comfort of society” (750).
In other literary works of the long 19th century—such as William Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy” and Dickens’s A Christmas Carol—disability is often symbolic; a stereotype Dickens too implements in Barnaby Rudge by having Barnaby see many situations more clearly than those around him while he is simultaneously being underestimated due to his disability. Dickens also uses Barnaby as a symbol of purity and childhood, often framing Barnaby’s good intentions as something that is inherently connected to his “childish” thinking. Considering the ways in which Dickens both differs from and conforms to contemporary understandings of intellectual disability in his characterization of Barnaby Rudge highlights the complexity of many of the novel’s moral themes.
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