The Best Dickens Novel You’ll Never Read

Maybe that title is a little risky. I mean, a lot of people don’t like Victorian literature, and maybe a lot of people haven’t read any Dickens novels, or maybe they hate every Dickens they’ve ever read, which means that there simply can’t be any “best” Dickens novel. Be that as it may, I often champion lesser-known books by famous authors (one day I’ll do a blog on why C.S. Lewis’s last novel is better than anything he ever wrote before it), so today I’m going to go to bat for Dickens’s fifth novel, Barnaby Rudge.

Few people have read this novel, even among Victorianists. It actually seems to have been a bit of a flop from the get-go. Dickens had planned this novel at the outset of his career, back in 1836. If he’d gone ahead and written it, it would have been his first novel; instead, he completed The Pickwick Papers, and then went on to write Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop first, and he didn’t get around to writing it until 1841. Incidentally, he actually wrote it concurrently with The Old Curiosity Shop as a serial novel, an incredible accomplishment. Perhaps this accounts for Rudge’s lack of popularity; The Old Curiosity Shop was extremely popular. Indeed, the first thing one reads about it in its Wikipedia entry is that New Yorkers stood on the docks of the city waiting for the final installment of the novel to be delivered by steamship. So it’s a real possibility that Barnaby Rudge was eclipsed by Dickens’s other, more popular creative work, its twin sibling, so to speak, from the moment of its birth.

And that’s unfortunate, because while The Old Curiosity Shop has not stood the test of time–most readers find it sentimental and melodramatic today–Barnaby Rudge is a novel for the present time. In fact, it’s been really interesting to read it as the January 6 hearings are taking place, because at the heart of the novel lies a riot, an insurrectionary movement perceived as so dangerous that it threatened the rule of order in England. In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the novel (2002), John Bowen begins by saying that “Barnaby Rudge is the most untimely of historical novels.” However, perhaps it isn’t the novel that has to find its time, but rather the time that must find its novel. In other words, I’d argue that Barnaby Rudge may not have been the novel for its time, but it is the novel for our time, a novel whose time has, after nearly two hundred years, finally arrived.

Throughout his career, Dickens wrote only two historical novels–this one and, of course, A Tale of Two Cities, another novel that has eclipsed it, perhaps only because it’s shorter and easier to put on a high school syllabus. But instead of pitting Dickens’s novels against each other, let me just explain why Barnaby Rudge is worth reading:

• As I’ve already indicated, it contains striking parallels with our own time. The central action of the novel (though not necessarily its focus) is the Gordon Riots, a period of anti-Catholic unrest in June of 1780, which resulted in anarchy in London for several days. Prisons were attacked and their prisoners released; stores, residences, foreign embassies and Catholic chapels demolished by frenzied mobs; and the army had to enter London to restore order. Trials and executions ensued. All this, mind you, a full nine years before the French tried the same thing–successfully–at the outset of the French Revolution.
• The eponymous hero of the novel, Barnaby Rudge, is seriously mentally challenged. His mind is disordered and his development delayed. Although 23 years old, he is “simple,” something that almost everyone around him both understands and accepts. I am not aware of any author trying this before Dickens: perhaps my readers can shed more light on the depiction of the intellectually disabled in a somewhat positive light. Dickens’s portrayal of Barnaby is much more sympathetic, on the whole, than one would expect of a Victorian writer, and making him the centerpiece of the novel is an act of creative genius.
• Barnaby has a pet raven named Grip (Dickens himself also had a pet raven named Grip) who so “gripped” the imagination of another writer across the pond that he wrote an entire poem about a raven. No kidding–quoth the Raven, nevermore.
• Dickens examines the origins of the riots a little, but what he excels at most is in demonstrating that the people who participate in riots have their own individual aims and desires, few of which have have much to do with the general cause at hand. This is important because when we look at history, we tend to forget this; Dickens makes it clear in this novel that historical movements are created from many disparate people pulling together into one action for a limited period of time.
• There are the usual loveable (or despised, depending on your view of Dickens’s work) plot points and characters: the thwarted lovers, the carping wife, the happy and bluff old father figure offset by several really rotten father figures, the sassy beauty, the wheedling servants. Dickens paints good portraits of them all.
• In addition, there are a surprising number of physically disabled people in the novel (two), a fact with which I could do all sorts of things in terms of theorizing about amputation and the body politic, but since I’m retired, and since someone else probably has done it or is doing it better than I care to at the present time, I’ll just leave it at that.
• There are all the usual themes about secrets: murders; survivals; illegitmacy; nature versus nurture; generational conflict. These are themes we see in other Dickens novels, and they’re all here, pretty much right on the surface. It’s as if Dickens wrote this as a blueprint for many of his other novels, which makes it all the more interesting for anyone who’s read them.

I could go on, but I want to end by emphasizing how reading this novel now, at this moment in U.S. history, has affected the way I’m watching the January 6 hearings. I think I understand better how small people can get caught up in large events, and how people who have nothing but a sort of odd charisma can get others behind them in such numbers that really frightening things can ensue.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about the novel is that in the world that Dickens creates, the story has a somewhat (but not totally) happy ending: people are punished, order is retored, and most of the good characters live somewhat happily ever after. Barnaby Rudge may not be a Bleak House, but I think it’s a better, more interesting novel than The Old Curiosity Shop. I predict that in about ten years’ time, we’ll see a brave soul who recognizes its value decide to stop working on endless re-makes of (something resembling) Jane Austen novels and try a film version of this novel, which would be a wonderful thing, in my opinion.

Finally, there are a couple of really good podcasts on the novel by Dominic Gerrard and guests. Look for Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire on Apple podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/charles-dickens-a-brain-on-fire/id1599241462

An Unexpected Masterpiece: Felix Holt

Turducken–Image from Wikipedia

 

One of the joys of being a retired English professor is that you never really leave your work behind: you just leave all the parts of it that aren’t that much fun. This means that while I don’t have to grade papers or go to pointless committee meetings, I still get to do what inspired me to go to graduate school in the first place: read.

And I do read–a lot. I read all sorts of things, but of course my favorite thing to read is (guess what) Victorian novels. I have taken a lot of pleasure in re-reading the Victorian novels that I studied in depth, like David Copperfield and Jane Eyre, but there is a special sort of pleasure in discovering a new favorite novel. It’s like finding a new star hidden in a constellation you’ve looked at for years, or in a more mundane manner of speaking, like finding that lost sock that went missing in the last load of wash you did.

My lost sock is, to mix metaphors, a turducken of a Victorian novel. We all know that George Eliot is probably the most brilliant of the Victorian novelists; if we didn’t, we have Virginia Woolf declaring, in her autocratic way, that Middlemarch is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” (The Common Reader, “George Eliot”). We also have New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead’s take on the novel in her book My Life in Middlemarch, which apparently qualified her to write a nice essay on the book in the magazine.

But then there are the Eliot works that are too seldom read these days: Romola, Scenes of Clerical Life, Daniel Deronda. And who among us has actually read Felix Holt, the Radical? I confess that I have had a copy of it on my bookshelf since 1999, yet I never opened it until last week. I am thankful that I did, because I now think it’s one of the best Victorian novels I’ve read, despite the fact that, according to Wikipedia, it is one of the least popular of Eliot’s novels–so unpopular, in fact, that although it would make a fantastic mini-series (PBS or BBC, are you listening?), the last time it was adapted for film was in 1915. Yes, 1915.

What makes the novel so wonderful are not just some fantastic statements that are eminently quotable, although the book does contain a couple of real gems. Here is one, from the Introduction:

“Posterity may be shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric pressure from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes; but the slow old-fashioned way of getting from one end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory. The tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as barren as the exclamatory O!”

Eliot goes on to explain that it is a slow, surface journey that allows the traveler to see and experience the varieties of life, not a quick, subterranean (we might add “aerial” here) journey. How prescient Eliot must have been to have seen what would happen to travel in the next generations, to have understood the way in which “getting there” is no longer fun or important. She makes us understand that the saying “it’s the journey that counts, not the destination” refers only to some kind of moral or experiential journey, and sadly, no longer a real, actual one.

Here is another famous quote, from Chapter 3, in which Eliot displays a remarkable sensitivity to social life:

“…there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life, from the time when the primeval milkmaid had to wander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she milked was one of a herd that had made the pastures bare.”

The insight revealed in this novel is remarkable, but these selected quotations are not the chief strengths of Felix Holt. What is absolutely amazing to me is that in this one book Eliot combines a variety of different Victorian novels and still manages to create an incredibly good story, one which pulls you back to it day after day because you cannot wait to find out how the characters will respond to the events they become caught up in.

Here’s a simple way of putting it: In George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical (ironically, we are halfway through the book before we realize that Felix Holt is no Radical), we find a turducken of a novel, one which combines and recombines aspects of several different subgenres of the 19th-century novel, fitting many novels, miraculously, into one organic whole. For example, we see the re-education of Esther Lyon, in a Mansfield Park (Jane Austen) narrative; we have the political machinations that are redolent of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels; we have the emphasis on hidden secrets and parentage, on madness and eccentricity that Dickens loved to play with; we are treated to a look at a kind of Orientalism, which is worthy of Wilkie Collins; and we have a legal plot about long-hidden heirs and family trusts that blends both Trollope and Dickens with Thomas Hardy. And at the center of it all, we find a difficult love story, starring Esther Lyon and Felix Holt, who are clearly borrowed from some of Sir Walter Scott’s best romances.

With all these things going on, you’d think this would be a mess of a novel, but Eliot is a master craftsman, and she manages to create a wonderful story from these disparate threads, replete with excellent character depictions and some memorable scenes. In short, this is a fine novel, probably just as good as Middlemarch, and quite a bit shorter. It deserves to be read. I certainly wish I hadn’t waited almost 20 years to read it, but I’m very glad I finally have.

So go out and get a copy and read it. Or, if you want, you can always wait for the BBC Miniseries to air. Julian Fellowes or Emma Thompson, it’s time for you to get to work on the script!

Anthony Trollope wants to know: Are you a Liberal or a Conservative?

Anthony Trollope. Image from Wikipedia

There’s a lot of ink being spilled right now about the failure of liberal democracies, and I am guilty of pouring some of it myself. But it might be helpful to go back to redefine the two terms which invest so much of our discussions and arguments these days.

What, exactly, is the difference between liberal and conservative thought?

I’m not satisfied with responses that point to contemporary political positions: they are too fraught with bias, and thus don’t yield a reliable answer. In order to provide such a good answer, then, we will need to go back and define the terms themselves, to think about what it really means to be a liberal or a conservative.

And this proves quite tricky–so tricky, in fact, that although I first asked myself this question back in the 1980s, I have never been able to come up with a good answer. But thankfully, I don’t have to, because it turns out that Anthony Trollope provided an excellent answer back in 1876.

In his novel The Prime Minister, the Duke of Omnium, who is serving as the ineffective prime minister of Great Britain in a coalition government (and who fully realizes that nothing of consequence will be accomplished during his term of office) pauses to consider why people align with either the Liberal or the Conservative Party. In Chapter 68 (it is a very long novel), entitled “The Prime Minister’s Political Creed,” the duke questions his colleague Phineas Finn about why he is a liberal. (The duke, while obviously an aristocrat, is somewhat paradoxically a member of the Liberal Party.) In doing so, he reveals why he himself is a liberal:

I began life with the misfortune of a ready-made political creed. There was a seat in the House for me when I was twenty-on. Nobody took the trouble to ask my opinions. It was a matter of course that I should be a Liberal…. It was a tradition of the family, and was as inseparable from it as any of the titles which [we] had inherited…”

But now, at the apex of his political career, when he realizes that he will soon have to resign as prime minister, the duke thinks about what makes him a liberal. He begins by explaining what he considers conservative thought: the idea that God has fashioned the world in a certain way, and it is up to man to maintain that structure. The liberal thinker, says the duke, works to improve the world in order to reach a millenium (which I take to mean a Utopian period of human existence) in which the social and political order is perfected. However, this millenium, he says, “is so distant that we need not even think of it as possible.” He goes on to tell Phineas, “You are a Liberal because you know that it is not all as it ought to be.”

I think there’s quite a lot to learn from this chapter, even after though more than a century has passed since its publication. First of all, many of us begin our adult lives as liberals or conservatives simply because we have been handed those labels and told that they belong to us. Perhaps our parents were conservatives, so we identify as one–or perhaps we go the other way, rebelling against our parents and their beliefs. But I think it would be better for us, like the Duke of Omnium, to stop and think about why we behave as we do, and why we believe the things we believe.

When you simplify the issue as much as possible (I realize the danger of simplistic analysis, but it is sometimes worth the risk), the difference between the Liberal thinker and the Conservative one, as Trollope’s novel portrays it, is this: the conservative view holds that things were better in the past and should be maintained that way, while the liberal view holds that, however things were in the past, they are highly imperfect in the present and should be improved–and although a state of human perfection, while theoretically possible, is light years away, this is no reason to shirk the work involved in getting there.

In other words, the conservative view looks to the past, wanting to keep things as they are: stable, predictable, and functioning. After all, the past got us to the present, so it must work. The liberal view, in contrast, looks to the future, with a supreme confidence that improvement is possible in the human condition.

I endorse neither views at this point. I just want to posit a new way of looking at these terms to help open up a badly-needed space for discussion.

… But I also want to say that Anthony Trollope totally rocks the Victorian novel.