Barnaby Rudge

Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens's *Barnaby Rudge* opens in 1775 at the Maypole Inn, an old hostelry on the edge of Epping Forest kept by the obstinate, slow-witted John Willet and frequented by his cronies Solomon Daisy, Tom Cobb, and Phil Parkes. On a stormy March night, a mysterious, scarred, poorly dressed stranger questions John's son Joe about the nearby house called the Warren, home of Mr Geoffrey Haredale and his niece Emma, and about Edward Chester, a young guest who has set off on foot for London to see Emma at a masquerade. Solomon Daisy retells the neighborhood's grim legend: twenty-two years earlier, on this same date, Mr Reuben Haredale, Emma's father, was murdered at the Warren; his steward Rudge was found stabbed and thrown in a pond, and the gardener, presumed the murderer, vanished and was never found. The stranger rides off toward London. On the road, locksmith Gabriel Varden nearly collides with this same rider, who threatens his life before galloping on. Varden, tempted back to the Maypole's warmth, eventually continues home to Clerkenwell, where he finds Barnaby Rudge — the widow Mrs Rudge's simple-minded son, red-haired, wild-eyed, accompanied everywhere by his talking raven Grip — standing over the wounded Edward Chester, who has been attacked and robbed. Varden helps carry Edward to Mrs Rudge's house. That night the same sinister stranger comes to her door; her terror and her desperate insistence that Varden not pursue or touch him convince the locksmith she is concealing some dreadful secret connected to the old murder. At home, Varden's household is sketched: his pretty, flirtatious daughter Dolly; his querulous, temper-driven wife Martha, given to fits of religious self-pity egged on by her maid Miggs; and his vain apprentice Simon (Sim) Tappertit, who secretly leads a ragtag secret society, the "Prentice Knights," dedicated to fantastical grievances against masters and to his own advancement, and who slips out at night to preside over their absurd mock-solemn rituals in a Barbican cellar run by the blind Stagg. Joe Willet, chafing under his father's constant belittling and forbidden even ordinary liberties, is in love with Dolly Varden but too tongue-tied and mistreated to declare himself; when he visits the locksmith's house he finds Dolly dressed for a party and indifferent to him, deepening his despair. Meanwhile the elegant, worldly Mr Chester (Edward's father) arrives at the Maypole and arranges a meeting with Geoffrey Haredale, Emma's guardian. Despite their mutual dislike and religious/social enmity, the two men coolly agree to cooperate in breaking off the secret attachment between Edward and Emma, each for his own reasons — Chester valuing worldly advantage over sentiment, Haredale bound by grim duty and old grief. That same evening Edward secretly visits Emma at the Warren but is discovered and expelled by Haredale, who forbids the match; riding back with Joe, Edward learns to his shock that his own father has been staying at the Maypole and had a long private conference with Haredale. The narrative closes with Mr Chester at leisure in his own comfortable London lodgings the next day, his schemes against the young lovers already set in motion.

By Charles Dickens · First published 1841 · Genre: Historical Fiction, Mystery, Drama · 60 chapters · 307,306 words

First lines

In the year 1775, there stood upon the borders of Epping Forest, at a distance of about twelve miles from London -- measuring from the Standard in Cornhill, or rather from the spot on or near to which the Standard used to be in days of yore -- a house of public entertainment called the Maypole; which fact was demonstrated to all such travellers as could neither read nor write (and at that time a vast number both of travellers and stay-at-homes were in this condition) by the emblem reared on the roadside over against the house, which, if not of those goodly proportions that Maypoles were wont to present in olden times, was a fair young ash, thirty feet in height, and straight as any arrow that ever English yeoman drew.

What this Textopian page supports

Barnaby Rudge is listed on Textopian as a novel by Charles Dickens, dated 1841 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

Discussion starters

Similar titles

Genres

Tags

historical fiction · London · French Revolution · mob violence · class struggle · family drama · identity · loyalty · betrayal · romance · adventure · social commentary

Contents

More by Charles Dickens