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Barnaby Rudge (book summary)Barnaby Rudgeby: Charles DickensThe plot is a murder mystery interwoven with the historical events of England's Gordon riots of 1780, a violent and bloody clash between fanatical, anti-Catholic Protestants, who vehemently opposed Parliament's recent legislation, the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which loosened some of England's stringent, Anti- Catholic Penal laws. This opposition is alluded to throughout the novel by some of the characters' recurring demotic cries of "no-popery". The action is seen through the eyes of the good-hearted title character, the idiot Barnaby Rudge. The fanatical leader of the Protestant Association, Lord George Gordon, is treated with some sympathy in the novel; Dickens describes his character as follows: "This lord was sincere in his violence and in his wavering. A nature prone to false enthusiasm, and the vanity of being a leader, were the worst qualities apparent in his composition. All the rest was weakness—sheer weakness; and it is the unhappy lot of thoroughly weak men, that their very sympathies, affections, confidences—all the qualities which in better constituted minds are virtues—dwindle into foibles, or turn into downright vices." The first part of the story details the life of the residents of Chigwell, a small village in Epping Forest, just outside London, in the year 1775, the setting for the action being the Maypole Inn, the Warren (the Haredales' stately home) and the surrounding countryside. The tale opens on the nineteenth of March with a sinister recounting of a violent murder that took place exactly twenty- two years before the story begins. During this first part, the book examines life in this village, including interpersonal relationships, in a traditionally Dickensian style. Some of the most important elements in this first section are: * The animosity between Mr Haredale and Sir John Chester * Edward Chester's love for Emma Haredale * Joe Willet's love for Dolly Varden; also Hugh's lecherous desire for her * The tense relationship between Joe and his father * Barnaby's simplicity and need for his mother's protection In chapter 35, with the arrival at the Maypole (on the nineteenth of March, five years after the story begins) of Hugh and other rioters, the stability of village life is interrupted, echoing the destruction that the riots in Gordon's name will cause in London itself, and the themes and characters that Dickens has built up become essential to the reader's understanding of the effects of the riots on society. Another tactic for subtly drawing attention to the way the story is unfolding is Grip the raven and his seemingly nonsensical comments, which often reveal greater truths to the reader than to the characters.The novel concludes with a panoramic description of the riots, which lasted several days. Ενότητα: Book Summaries part 1
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