Barnaby Rudge

Book excerpt: Barnaby Rudge, a novel by Charles Dickens, was initially published serially and later on, as a book in 1841. This was Dickens’s first attempt at a historical novel. Set in the late 18th century, it presents with great vigour and understanding the spectacle of large-scale mob violence. In what was a case of mistaken identity, Barnaby Rudge, the intellectually disabled son of a murderer, is arrested as a leader of a mob of anti-Catholic rioters. He is jailed and sentenced to death, but he is pardoned at the scaffold. Although it is one of his less popular novels, many called it "one of Dickens's most neglected, but most rewarding, novels.” Set in the year 1775, the plot of Barnaby Rudge revolves around John Willet, proprietor of the Maypole, and his three cronies. Solomon Daisy, one of the three, tells an ill-kempt stranger at the inn a well-known local tale of the murder of Reuben Haredale which had occurred 22 years earlier on that very day. After the murder, Reuben's gardener and steward went missing and were suspects in the crime.