17. Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens, pp. 653-738

Chapter 73 through Chapter the Last

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The riots are over, and Dickens sums up the death and destruction: "Upwards of two hundred had been shot dead in the streets. Two hundred and fifty more were lying, badly wounded, in the hospitals; of whom seventy or eighty died within a short time afterwards.... How many perished in the conflagrations, or by their own excesses, is unknown.... Seventy-two private houses and four strong jails were destroyed in the four great days of these riots." And so on. (The note points out that Dickens's figures are unreliable, and in the case of financial estimates, his numbers are inconsistent; more recent research also suggests that less than half that number of houses were destroyed.)

Barnaby is visited in his cell by his mother, and Grip is there to keep him company. (Grip's whereabouts at any given time, except when Dickens needs him to make a point, are a mystery. Did Barnaby carry him when he was marched off by the soldiers? A similar mystery attends the whereabouts of Miggs, whose departure from their place of captivity is not accounted for. Did she accompany the Vardens to the Black Lion? Did she stay to plague the gravely wounded Sim? She now disappears until the novel's end.) When Barnaby asks, "who cares for Grip?" the raven's reply is "Nobody," an exchange repeated twice, and a reminder that Grip was the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe's "Nevermore"-croaking raven.

"Will they take his life as well as mine?" said Barnaby. "I wish they would. If you and I and he could die together, there would be none to feel sorry, or to grieve for us. But do what they will, I don't fear them, mother!" 

He also asks why his mother shushed him when he mentioned his father, and she tells him, "the endeavour of my life has been to keep you two asunder.... The time has come when you must know it. He has shed the blood of one who loved him well, and trusted him, and never did him wrong in word or deed." Barnaby, whose fear of blood has been established, shudders and hides his bloodstain birthmark. She goes on to caution him, "Do not seem to know him, except as one who fled with you from the jail, and if they question you about him, do not answer them."

She leaves Barnaby because visitors are being told to go, but she decides to pay a last visit to her husband. She tells him that Barnaby is also in the prison, but he is indifferent to the fact: "He can no more aid me than I can aid him." She retorts that Barnaby was "brought here by your guilt; ... for he has been led astray in the darkness of his intellect, and that is the terrible consequence of your crime." (She seems to blame Barnaby's mental retardation -- if that's what it is -- on Rudge's crime, which he confessed to her during her pregnancy.) She urges him to pray for God's forgiveness, but instead he curses her and Barnaby.

Elsewhere, justice is being meted out, though unequally: "the timorous Lord Mayor, who was summoned that night before the Privy Council to answer for his conduct, came back contented; observing to all his friends that he had got off very well with a reprimand." Lord George Gordon has been sent to the Tower, charged with High Treason.

Dennis is in jail, but he remains sure that his previous work as hangman will be taken into consideration and "relieve him from the consequences of his late proceedings, and would certainly restore him to his old place in the happy social system." But when he is moved to Newgate, "where some of the ruined cells had been hastily fitted up for the safe keeping of rioters," he finds to his terror that he is forced to share a cell with the man he betrayed: Hugh.

 

Hugh is asleep when Dennis enters, and the frightened hangman cowers behind a chair until he awakes. When Hugh recognizes him, he grabs Dennis by the collar and shakes him as Dennis tries to claim that he was forced to betray him, or he would be shot, "and what a sight that would have been -- a fine young man like you!" He tries to persuade Hugh that they won't be convicted, and even if they are, hanging isn't so bad: "when it's well done, it's so neat, so skilful, so captiwating, if that don't seem too strong a word, that you'd hardly believe it could be brought to sich perfection." 

Hugh calms down, and accepts his fate: "I'd as soon die as live, or live as die. Why should I trouble myself to have revenge on you? To eat, and drink, and go to sleep, as long as I stay here, is all I care for.... That's all the care I have for myself. Why should I care for you?" Dennis suggests that Hugh should call on his friends and relations, but Hugh scoffs at that: "He talks of friends to me -- talks of relations to a man whose mother died the death in store for her son." Dennis is startled to hear this, and says, "you don't mean to say --." Hugh replies, "I mean to say ... that they hung her up at Tyburn." Dennis wants to hear more about this, but Hugh wants to go back to sleep. 

A month later, Sir John Chester is having his breakfast in bed and savoring the news that Hugh, Dennis and Barnaby have been sentenced to death. He notes that Barnaby would have been pardoned except for the testimony of the Lord Mayor's brother, who affirmed that Barnaby "was sane, and had, to his knowledge, wandered about the country with a vagabond parent, avowing revolutionary and rebellious sentiments." The Lord Mayor's brother is, of course, the "genuine John Bull" who had wanted to buy Grip after being entertained by him when Barnaby and Mrs. Rudge were on the road to London. "Grip little thought how much he had to answer for." Sir John is also entertained by the thought that Hugh "would make a very handsome preparation in Surgeons' Hall." (Executed criminals were turned over to the surgeons for dissection.) 

Sir John's breakfast is interrupted by a visit from Gabriel Varden, who tells him that he has just come from Newgate. This sends Sir John into a brief fit because Newgate is full of "jail-fevers, and ragged people, and bare-footed men and women, and a thousand horrors!" He orders Peak, his servant, to disinfect Gabriel and his surroundings with camphor. But once this is done, Sir John resumes his pleasant attitude. 

Gabriel informs Sir John that he was sent there by Dennis, who has some information for him. Upon learning that Hugh's mother was hanged, Dennis realized that he had been the executioner, and that the woman, a gipsy, had talked with him before her death, vowing, "If I had a dagger within these fingers and he was within my each, I would strike him dead before me, even now." Dennis asked who, and she said she meant the father of her boy. 

He asked her where it was, its name, and whether she had any wish respecting it. She had but one, she said. It was that the boy might live and grow, in utter ignorance of his father, so that no arts might teach him to be gentle and forgiving. When he became a man, she trusted to the God of their tribe to bring the father and son together, and revenge her through her child.

He learned no more from the woman, but years later a gipsy man was sentenced to death, and while he was in prison carved the likeness of Dennis on a stick, which he gave to the hangman. The gipsy told Dennis that he had know the woman who was hanged, and that she had been seduced and abandoned by "a fine gentleman," and was outcast from her tribe. He "told him, too, her real name, which only her own people and the gentleman for whose sake she had left them, knew. -- That name he will tell again, Sir John, to none but you." 

Gabriel now confronts Sir John with the assertion "that you believe this doomed man, Hugh, to be your son." Sir John lightly scoffs at the idea, but Gabriel tells him, "in a fantastic pattern on the stick, he had carved some letters, and when the hangman asked it, he bade him, especially if he should ever meet with her son in after life, remember that place well." The place is Chester. Sir John maintains his composure as Gabriel tells him that if he wants confirmation of the gipsy's revelation to Dennis, he must visit the hangman in his prison cell. And he notes that whereas Sir John remains estranged from his legitimate son, Edward, he still has years left in which to reconcile with him, whereas he has only a few hours left to make his peace with Hugh. 

Sir John dismisses Gabriel's revelations and recommendations with his usual airiness, but after Gabriel leaves, "the smile gave place to a haggard and anxious expression, like that of a weary actor jaded by the performance of a difficult part." (The simile comes naturally to the theater-loving Dickens.) But the anxious mood passes quickly. He consoles himself that he gave Hugh "very good advice. I told him he would certainly be hanged. I could have done no more if I had known of our relationship; and there are a great many fathers who have never done as much for their natural children." 

As Gabriel walks away, the clock strikes twelve, which he knows is the time when Rudge's execution was scheduled. Haredale was there to witness, and Gabriel now goes to meet him. His thoughts turn to tomorrow's executions, and his hope that he can still save Barnaby. "Barnaby was to die," Dickens now writes, and over the next two paragraphs repeats the phrase three more times, as a death-knell. (And as a sign to the sophisticated reader that Barnaby will do no such thing.)  

Mrs. Rudge is at the prison with her son. Dennis and Hugh are on the other side of the courtyard from them, Hugh taking the events as they come, Dennis gibbering in terror. "Hugh's was the dogged desperation of a savage at the stake; the hangman was reduced to a condition little better, if any, than that of a hound with the halter round his neck." When Mrs. Rudge has to leave, she sends Barnaby for her bible, but the guards take her away before he returns. 

Dickens then describes the preparations for the executions, including the building of the gallows and the gathering of the crowds who are eager to witness. "A fairer morning never shone" on the day for the executions. Hugh and Dennis are to be hanged at Newgate, but Barnaby's execution is to take place in Bloomsbury Square. The clergyman who tries to pray with Hugh pronounces him "incorrigible," which Hugh admits he is: "Be no hypocrite, master! You make a merry-making of this, every month; let me be merry, too. If you want a frightened fellow there's one that'll suit you. Try your hand upon him." He means Dennis, of course, "who trembled so, that all his joints and limbs seemed racked by spasms." Barnaby is cheerfully resigned to his death. "The law had declared it so, and so it must be. The good minister had been greatly shocked, not a quarter of an hour before, at his parting with Grip. For one in his condition, to fondle a bird!" 

When called to have his shackles struck off, Hugh "passed out with the gait of a lion." Dennis, of course, has to be dragged out. He begs the prison attendants to check to see if his pardon is on the way, and he reminds them of his "service" as hangman -- maybe they've forgotten about it. But someone says, "since it may possibly produce in this unhappy man a better frame of mind, ... let me assure him that he was well known to have been the hangman, when his sentence was considered." He even pleads to be sent to Bloomsbury Square instead of Barnaby, just to buy a little more time. 

As the bell begins to toll twelve o'clock, Hugh is asked if he has any last words. At first he says no, and then he sees Barnaby. 

There was, for the moment, something kind, and even tender, struggling in his fierce aspect, as he wrong his poor companion by the hand. 

"I'll say this," he cried, looking firmly round, "that if I had ten lives to lose, and the loss of each would give me ten times the agony of the hardest death, I'd lay them all down -- ay, I would, though you gentlemen may not believe it -- to save this one. This one," he added, wringing [Barnaby's] hand again, "that will be lost through me."

....

"You see what I am -- more brute than man, as I have been often told -- but I had faith enough to believe, and did believe as strongly as any of you gentlemen can believe anything, that this one life would be spared. See what he is! -- Look at him!"

....

"What else should teach me -- me, born as I was born, and reared as I have been reared -- to hope for any mercy in this hardened, cruel, unrelenting place! Upon these human shambles, I, who never raised this hand in prayer till now, call down the wrath of God! On that black tree, of which I am the ripened fruit, I do invoke the curse of all its victims, past, and present, and to come. On the head of that man, who, in his conscience, owns me for his son, I leave the wish that he may never sicken on his bed of down, but die a violent death as I do now, and have the night-wind for his only mourner. To this I say, Amen, amen!"

His last gesture is to say that if anyone wants a dog, they'll find his "at the house I came from, and it wouldn't be easy to find a better. He'll whine at first, but he'll soon get over that. -- You wonder that I think about a dog just now.... If any man deserved it of me half as well, I'd think of him." He goes out to his execution, and Dennis is carried out after him, "and the crowd beheld the rest." 

Barnaby is taken out to the cart that will transport him to Bloomsbury Square, and he avoids looking at where Hugh and Dennis are hanging. Dickens then notes that two crippled boys were hanged at Bloomsbury Square, opposite the ruins of Lord Mansfield's house, and enumerates hangings of other boys and women that day. "In a word, those who suffered as rioters were, for the most part, the weakest, meanest, and most miserable among them. It was an exquisite satire upon the false religious cry which had led to so much misery, that some of these people owned themselves to be Catholics, and begged to be attended by their own priests." 

Meanwhile, John Willet and his son are at the Black Lion, where Joe tells his father that Edward Chester has made his fortune in the West Indies and plans to return there. He has assured Joe that he can provide employment for him, so Joe plans to take him up on the offer. But before his father can say anything, "Dolly Varden came running into the room, in tears, threw herself on Joe's breast without a word of explanation, and clasped her white arms round his neck." 

She more or less proposes to Joe, assuring him that it's all right with her father and mother, and he accepts. Joe asks his father, who is still not quite all there, if he knows who Dolly is, and urges him to say something "if it's only 'how d'ye do.'" All John Willet can muster is "Certainly, Joseph.... Oh yes! Why not?" And he sits there motionless for half an hour until he startles them with "a very loud and very short laugh," says "Certainly, Joseph. Oh yes! Why not?" again, and goes out for a walk. 

The damage to the Vardens' house has been repaired in the month since the riots, but "the house had a look of sadness and an air of mourning; which the neighbours, who in old days had often seen poor Barnaby go in and out, were at no loss to understand." Mrs. Rudge is there today, and Haredale and Edward Chester now arrive. Gabriel is out, and has been so all night, trying to get a reprieve for Barnaby. Haredale now confronts the issue that stands between him and Edward: "Sir, you still love my niece, and she is still attached to you." He leaves the room and comes back with Emma, giving them his blessing. He also tells them that when they leave England for the West Indies, he is going to the continent. "There are cloisters abroad; and now that the two great objects of my life are set at rest, I know no better home." 

He prepares to leave them together, but there is a great noise in the streets outside, and he and Edward go out to see what it is. Gabriel and Barnaby are being swept along by a great crowd of people, and when they finally make it to the house, Barnaby rushes upstairs to see his mother. Gabriel and Haredale had spent the night working on a reprieve for Barnaby, and had succeeded in obtaining a full pardon between eleven and twelve o'clock that morning. Haredale had gone straight to the Varden house to inform Mrs. Varden and Mrs. Rudge, and Gabriel had stayed behind to accompany Barnaby. 

That night Edward takes Hugh's body to a churchyard for burial. 

That evening, the Vardens, including son-in-law-to-be Joe Willet, are sitting down to tea when there's a knock on the door of the workshop, which had been closed that day. Joe goes to open it, and returns laughing. He is followed shortly by Miggs, accompanied by "a small boy and a very large box." Gabriel bursts out, "Damme, if it an't Miggs come back!" 

"Here's forgivenesses of injuries, here's amicablenesses!" she chortles. She has arrived under the mistaken impression that she will be welcomed back by the Vardens, and orders the boy, her nephew, to take her trunk upstairs. Gabriel asks his wife if she really wants this, and Mrs. Varden proclaims, "I am astonished -- I am amazed -- at her audacity. Let her leave the house this moment." 

Miggs, hearing this, let her end of the box fall heavily to the floor, gave a very loud sniff, crossed her arms, screwed down the corners of her mouth, and cried, in an ascending scale, "Ho, good gracious!" three distinct times. 

She then delivers herself of her usual Miggsish observations, such as, "It must be great vexations, 'specially considering how ill you always spoke of Mr Joe -- to have him for a son-in-law at last; and I wonder Miss Dolly can put up with him either, after being off and on for so many years with a coachmaker.... It an't so much of a catch, after looking out so sharp ever since she was a little chit, and costing such a deal in dress and show, to get a poor, common soldier, with one arm, is it, mim?" She bursts out in tears and pulls the hair of her nephew as she orders him to carry her box out again. So he runs off and leaves her with it in the street, where she "sat down upon her property to rest and grieve, until she could ensnare some other youth to help her home."

Another month passes, and it's the end of August. Haredale is getting ready to leave for the continent, but he decides to make one last visit to the ruins of the Warren. The sun is setting, and he walks around the building, then "uttered a half-suppressed exclamation, started, and stood still. Reclining, in an easy attitude, with his back against a tree, and contemplating the ruin with an expression of pleasure" was Sir John Chester, "the man whose presence, of all mankind, in any place, and least of all in that, he could least endure." Sir John comments on the ruins of Haredale's house, "How very picturesque this is!" Haredale replies, "You praise your own work very freely." Sir John protests that it isn't his work, but Haredale says, "you set on Gashford to this work -- this work before us now." And he puts his hand to his sword. "In all, you have been the same cold-blooded, hollow, false, unworthy villain. For the second time, and for the last, I cast these charges in your teeth, and spurn you from me as I would a faithless dog!" 

He strikes Sir John on the breast, and Sir John draws his sword and lunges at his heart. Haredale evades the blow and lowers his sword, then cries out, "In God's name, not to-night!" Sir John also lowers his weapon, but he continues to taunt Haredale, calling Edward a fool for being "trapped into marriage by such an uncle and such a niece." Haredale once again urges him not to provoke a duel that night, but when Sir John calls him a coward, the fight is on. Both men sustain wounds, but Haredale finally "plunged his sword through his opponent's body to the hilt." Even in dying, Sir John keeps up appearances, first regarding Haredale "with scorn and hatred in his look; but, seeming to remember, even then, that this expression would distort his features after death, he tried to smile, and, faintly moving his right hand, as if to hide his bloody linen in his vest, fell back dead." 

"Chapter the Last" rounds up everybody in the novel. 

• Haredale flees to the continent, enters a monastery known "for the rigour and severity of its discipline" and dies there. 
• Sir John's body is found two days later. His valet runs off with all the household cash and valuables, poses as a gentleman, almost marries an heiress, but dies of what is "vulgarly termed the jail fever."
• Lord George Gordon is found not guilty of High Treason, is excommunicated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes a libelous pamphlet about the Queen of France, converts to Judaism, is imprisoned for libel in Newgate, and dies there at the age of forty-three, faithfully served till his death by John Grueby. 
• Gashford becomes a spy for the government and dies in poverty, a suicide. 
• Sim Tappertit does time in prison after a hospital stay. Now with two wooden legs, he appeals to Gabriel Varden for assistance and is set up as a shoeblack, earning enough to take on two apprentices and marry "the widow of an eminent bone and rag collector." 
• Miggs becomes the turnkey of a women's prison. "It was observed of this lady that while she was inflexible and grim to all her female flock, she was particularly so to those who could establish any claim to beauty." 
• Joe Willet and Dolly Varden marry, but instead of going to the West Indies, they reopen the Maypole and make it a great success. They also have a farm, and numerous children. 
• John Willet is set up by his son with a cottage at Chigwell, where he entertains Tom Cobb, Phil Parkes and Solomon Daisy every night. "He never recovered the surprise the Rioters had given him, and remained in the same mental condition down to the last moment of his life. On his deathbed, his last words are "I'm a-going, Joseph, ... to the Salwanners" -- i.e., Savannah. Joe inherits a great deal of money on his death. 
• Barnaby and his mother live on Joe Willet's farm, tending the animals. He also seeks out Hugh's dog and takes care of him. 
• Edward and Emma return to England "with a family almost as numerous as Dolly's." 
• Grip is silent for a year after the experience in Newgate, but he regained his speech "and, as he was a mere infant for a raven when Barnaby was grey, he has very probably gone on talking to the present time."

13. Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens, pp. 483-534

Chapters 53-58

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Macbeth put it this way:  

I am in blood 
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, 
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

Dickens puts it this way: "the sense of having gone too far to be forgiven, held the timid together no less than the bold." So the rioters continue to do their mischief:  "They all hoped and believed, in greater or less degree, that the government they seemed to have paralysed, would, in its terror, come to terms with them in the end, and suffer them to make their own conditions." 


Gashford goes to The Boot in search of Hugh, but finds only Barnaby and Dennis. The latter claims he doesn't know where Hugh has gone, but he arrives shortly, with Barnaby welcoming him eagerly. Gashford gives them the news that the King in Council has offered a reward of five hundred pounds "to any one who will discover the person or persons most active in demolishing those chapels." He also announces that the rioters who were arrested have been arraigned, and that there are witnesses against them, "Among others, a gentleman who saw the work going on in Warwick Street; a Catholic gentleman; one Haredale." Hugh tries to shush Gashford, but Barnaby has overheard the name and turns around in surprise. Hugh is able to distract him, however, by urging him to get on guard, and especially to make sure that nobody finds what's under his bed. The name fades "from his memory, like breath from a polished mirror." 


Gashford is most concerned that the witnesses should be intimidated, and particularly Haredale, but Hugh needs no persuading, especially as he has been in communication with Sir John Chester about doing harm to Haredale -- as Gashford knows and alludes to in several references to "your friend." He reiterates: "No mercy, no quarter, no two beams of his house to be left standing where the builder placed them!" Hugh and Dennis hurry out, and Gashford goes to Gordon's house to watch as the rioters make their way to their various targets: Catholic chapels and homes. The group including Sim Tappertit, Dennis, and Hugh is the last to pass by. As Hugh goes by, he acknowledges a spectator on the other side of the street: Sir John. "Gashford had seen him recognise Hugh with the air of a patron." Then a carriage with a woman in it drives up, she and Sir John talk for a minute "in which it was apparent that he was vastly entertaining on the subject of the mob, he stepped lightly in, and was driven away." 


Gashford has his dinner and paces impatiently, and finally climbs upstairs and goes out on the roof, where he sits looking toward the east. 

"'Nothing but gloom in that direction, still!' he muttered restlessly. 'Dog! where is the redness in the sky, you promised me!'" 


At the Maypole, John Willet and his friends Cobb, Parkes, and Daisy are arguing about the riots. Willet maintains, "Don't I tell you that His blessed Majesty King George the Third would no more stand a rioting and rollicking in his streets, than he'd stand being crowed over by his own Parliament!" The others insists that there have been riots and destruction of churches and houses, but Willet is adamant: "'Do you suppose if all this was true, that Mr Haredale would be constantly away from home, as he is?' said John, after another silence. 'Do you think he wouldn't be afraid to leave his house with them two young women in it, and only a couple of men, or so?'" Solomon Daisy admits that the Warren is "a goodish way out of London" and that "some of the Catholic gentlefolks have actually sent trinkets and suchlike down here for safety -- at least so the story goes." Willet pooh-poohs even this: "The story goes that you saw a ghost last March. But nobody believes it."


And so the three friends decide to set out for London to see for themselves. Willet refuses even to shake their hands when they leave. After they have gone, he falls asleep, and when he wakes it is nighttime. Then he hears a sound "very faint and distant" that comes and goes and then gets louder and louder until "it burst into a distinct sound -- the voices, and the tramping feet of many men." His cook and housemaid are terrified and run "screaming upstairs" where they lock "themselves into one of the old garrets, -- shrieking dismally when they had done so, by way of rendering their place of refuge perfectly secret and secure." Willet shouts angrily at them but he uses only "one word, and called that up the stairs in a stentorian voice, six distinct times." The word is "a monosyllable, which, however inoffensive when applied to the quadruped it denotes, is highly reprehensible when used in connection with females of unimpeachable character." (The only word that comes to my mind that both applies to a quadruped and is "reprehensible" is "bitch." Even a veiled allusion to that word seems awfully daring in Dickens's day. And since there are two women in question, wouldn't the word have to be "bitches," which is not a monosyllable? Little help here?) 


Left alone in the Maypole, "John Willet, in whom the very uttermost extent of dull-headed perplexity supplied the place of courage, stationed himself in the porch, and waited for their coming up." He doesn't wait long before the mob attacks and manhandles him, but Hugh intervenes and tells them not to hurt him. And the surprise of the mob and of Hugh's presence in it seems to undo Willet completely: "Mr Willet looked at him, and saw it was Hugh; but he said nothing and thought nothing." From here on he seems to be stunned.

He sits "in an arm-chair, ... watching the destruction of his property, as if it were some queer play or entertainment." The Maypole is laid waste by the mob, "swarming on like insects: noise, smoke, light, darkness, frolic, anger, laughter, groans, plunder, fear, and ruin!" Through it all, even though Hugh is among the most destructive of the rioters, he nevertheless protects Willet from bodily harm, "even when Mr Tappertit, excited by liquor, came up, and in assertion of his prerogative politely kicked John Willet on the shins, Hugh bade him return the compliment; and if old John had had sufficient presence of mind to understand this whispered direction, and to profit by it, he might no doubt, under Hugh's protection, have done so with impunity." 


Finally, the mob starts to move on toward their main goal, the Warren, and there is a debate about what to do with Willet, including burning down the inn with him in it. Hugh overrules all the ideas except tying him to his chair and leaving him there, and Dennis is sent for some rope. Dennis, however, is under the impression that they want the rope for his usual professional duty "and raising his eyes to the ceiling, looked all over it, and round the walls and cornice, with a curious eye." Hugh is surprised when he realizes what Dennis has in mind -- we are reminded that Hugh "was ignorant of his calling" -- and simply binds Willet to the chair, to Dennis's disappointment. 

Traumatized into a waking stupor, Willet sits in the middle of his ruined inn.

John saw this desolation, and yet saw it not. He was perfectly contented to sit there, staring at it, and felt no more indignation or discomfort in his bonds than if they had been robes of honour. So far as he was personally concerned, old Time lay snoring, and the world stood still.

Finally he hears a footstep and a man in "a large, dark, faded cloak, and a slouched hat" appears. It's the mysterious stranger, of course, though his identity won't be mysterious much longer. He asks which way the mob went, and when Willet nods in the opposite direction, the man says he's lying. Then he realizes that Willet is not in his right mind and refrains from striking him. He empties the remaining liquor in a cask into his mouth and voraciously eats some bread and meat that has been left behind. Finally, he asks again where the mob went, and Willet points him in the right direction. But just as he rushes out, an alarm bell begins to ring and "a bright and vivid glare streamed up, which illumined, not only the whole chamber, but all the county." But it's the bell rather than the brightness of the fire that terrifies the man. "He clutched his hair, and stopped his ears, and travelled madly round and round.... There was murder in its every note -- cruel, relentless, savage murder -- the murder of a confiding man, by one who held his every trust."

The rioters, meanwhile, have breached the iron fence around the Warren and surrounded the house, "knocking violently at the doors, and calling to those within, to come down and open them on peril of their lives." No one answers, and they begin to break in, having raided the garden tool-shed for axes, hoes and other implements to use as weapons, and spreading fire from torch to torch so that "at least two-thirds of the whole roaring mass bore, each man in his hand, a blazing brand." Hugh and those closest to him concentrate on the turret where he had met Haredale in the company of John Willet. 

There are a few servants with arms in the hall, but they are so outnumbered that they pretend to be among the rioters and make their escape, "with the exception of one old man who was never heard of again, and was said to have had his brains beaten out with an iron bar ... and to have been afterwards burnt in the flames." The rampaging mob begins to destroy and set fire to everything, including one another, "kindling the building in so many parts that some had no time for escape, and were seen, with drooping hands and blackened faces, hanging senseless on the window-sills to which they had crawled, until they were sucked and drawn into the burning gulf." 

Although the alarm bell rang for a long time, no one came to fight the fire. "Some of the insurgents said that when it ceased, they heard the shrieks of women, and saw some garments fluttering in the air, as a party of men bore away no unresisting burdens." Finally, Hugh gives the signal to disperse, but not everyone is ready to leave.

There were men who rushed up to the fire, and paddled in it with their hands as if in water; and others who where retrained by force from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On the skull of one drunken lad -- not twenty, by his looks -- who lay upon the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from the roof came streaming down in a shower of liquid fire, white hot; melting his head like wax.

John Willet's friends from the Maypole have continued their journey toward London, hearing reports of continued destruction along the way, and being warned that they should wear blue cockades in their hats if they want to escape harm. As they get nearer to the city, they see "No Popery" chalked on almost every door. 

At a tollbooth a horseman rides up from the city and calls for the gate to be opened. The gatekeeper comes out and notices that the sky is lighted up by another fire. "At this, the three turned their heads, and saw in the distance -- straight in the direction whence they had come -- a broad sheet of flame, casting a threatening light upon the clouds." The horseman, who is Haredale, realizes what is on fire and urges the gatekeeper to open the gate. The gatekeeper recognizes and urges him not to go -- "You will be murdered" -- or at least to wear a blue cockade to protect himself, handing him the one from his own hat. When the three friends join in urging him to do so, Haredale recognizes Solomon Daisy, and asks him to come with him. Daisy gets on the horse behind him and they ride on till they reach the Maypole. 

They find the destruction at the inn and the demented Willet still bound to the chair. Daisy is distraught "That the Maypole bar should come to this, and we should live to see it!" But Willet stares "at him with an unearthly glare, and display[s], by every possible symptom, entire and complete unconsciousness." Daisy asks if they beat him, and finally Willet seems to come to his senses: "If they'd only had the goodness to murder me, I'd have thanked 'em kindly." As Haredale is untying the ropes, Willet says, "let's go and pitch ourselves in the nighest pool of water as is deep enough to hold us; for our day is over!" 

Haredale asks if he had seen Emma, but Willet says no. "'They rode away, I trust in Heaven, before these dreadful scenes began,' said Mr Haredale, who, between his agitation, his eagerness to mount his horse again, and the dexterity with which the cords were tied, had scarcely yet undone one knot." Then Willet asks them, "either of you gentlemen -- see a -- a coffin anywheres, did you?" He tells them, "a dead man called a little time ago, on his way yonder. I could have told you what name was on the plate, if he had brought his coffin with him, and left it behind." 

Haredale realizes the significance of what Willet is saying, and hurries off with Solomon Daisy in tow. When they reach the house, Haredale draws his sword and they search all around the house for signs of life. He calls the names of his servants but gets no response. They stop at the foot of the turret where "a part of the staircase still remained, winding upward from a great mound of dust and cinders." Then they hear a faint noise, and Haredale covers Daisy's mouth and signals for him to stay there and be silent. Then he enters the turret with his sword drawn. Daisy stays below and watches, "And now a figure was dimply visible; climbing very softly; and often stopping to look down." Daisy looks at a place illuminated by the moonlight where if the figure continues to ascend it will appear. When it finally does, and looks around, "The horror-stricken clerk uttered a scream that pierced the air, and cried, 'The ghost! The ghost!'" Then Haredale appears and grabs the figure by the throat. 

"Villain!" cried Mr Haredale, in a terrible voice.... "Dead and buried, as all men supposed through your infernal arts, but reserved by Heaven for this -- at last -- at last -- I have you. You, whose hands are red with my brother's blood, and that of his faithful servant, shed to conceal your own atrocious guilt -- You, Rudge, double murderer and monster, I arrest you in the name of God, who has delivered you into my hands. No. Though you had the strength of twenty men," he added, as the murderer writhed and struggled, "you could not escape me or loosen my grip tonight!" 

 Barnaby has stood guard at The Boot, with Grip as his companion. (Has anyone else wondered about Grip all this time? Where was he when Barnaby was in the middle of the mob, or ransacking a church?) Now Grip is busying himself with "scattering the straw, hiding under it such small articles as had been casually left about, and haunting Hugh's bed, to which he seemed to have taken a particular attachment." He has also learned to say "No Popery!" 


Lord George Gordon and John Grueby ride up. Gordon talks with Barnaby a while, and listens as he explains that Grip is "my brother, Grip is -- always with me -- always talking -- always merry -- eh, Grip?" Unfortunately, Gordon doesn't know what to make of Barnaby, and when he asks Grueby, the servant says Barnaby is mad. This bothers Gordon, perhaps because he himself is mad, and he gets angry at Grueby, who says, "look at his dress, look at his eyes, look at his restless way, hear him cry 'No Popery!' Mad, my lord.... Stark, staring, raving, roaring mad." Gordon turns on him: "You are an ill-conditioned, most ungrateful fellow, ... a spy, for anything I know.... You will leave me to-night -- nay, as soon as we reach home. The sooner the better." 


Grueby accepts this verdict, knowing that Gashford is in part behind it, but he is concerned about Barnaby, too. "He had better get to a place of safety if he can, poor creature." He tells Barnaby, "I think, young man, ... that the soldiers may turn out and take you; and that if they do, you will certainly be hung by the neck till you're dead -- dead -- dead. And I think you had better go from here, as fast as you can. That's what I think." But Barnaby retorts with, "Let them come! Gordon for ever!" Which pleases Gordon, of course: "This a madman!" he says to Grueby. And to Barnaby, "I am proud to be the leader of such men as you." It's a case of the mad leading the mad. Gordon rides off, "glancing angrily round to see that his servant followed." Grueby does follow, "but not before he had again warned Barnaby to retreat." 


Barnaby continues his patrol. Late in the afternoon, some men arrive to warn the inmates of The Boot that soldiers are on their way, and everybody but Barnaby and an old woman clears out. Five minutes later the soldiers arrive. One of them is the man whom Barnaby knocked off his horse with his flagstaff at Westminster. There are two civilians as well. Barnaby is ordered to surrender, but he stands in the doorway holding his flagpole crosswise. The soldiers move in, and Barnaby fends them off with his pole until finally he is struck with the butt of a gun and taken prisoner. 


Then an officer expresses surprise: Grip "had plucked away the straw from Hugh's bed, and turned up the loose ground with his iron bill.... Golden cups, spoons, candlesticks, coined guineas -- all the riches were revealed." Barnaby is marched away by four soldiers with fixed bayonets: "those cold, bright, sharp, shining points turned towards him: the mere looking down at which, now that he was bound and helpless, made the warm current of his life run cold." 


He is taken to a barracks where a double guard is set for him. He dozes for a while and then hears two men talking about him. One is a sergeant and the other is a civilian called Tom Green. The sergeant is protesting that the magistrates have not given the military the authority to quell the riots: "Here's a proclamation. Here's a man referred to in that proclamation. Here's proof against him, and a witness on the spot. Damme! Take him out and shoot him, sir. Who wants a magistrate?" Tom Green asks when Barnaby goes before Sir John Fielding, the presiding magistrate. The sergeant says eight p.m., but he expects that when Barnaby is committed to Newgate Prison, the soldiers will be attacked by the mob and forced to retreat because the magistrates haven't given them order to fire on the rioters. 


Barnaby peeks out at the men, and sees that Tom Green "was a gallant, manly, handsome fellow, but he had lost his left arm." His bearing suggests that he had once been a soldier. And he says, "it makes a man sorrowful to come back to old England, and see her in this condition." Then when the sergeant says that they have a bird in the guard-house that "bawls 'No Popery,' like a man -- or like a devil, as he says he is," Tom Green starts to go take a look at the bird when Barnaby calls out that it's his friend Grip: "He's the only friend I have left now." And he begs them not to hurt him. The sergeant taunts him with a threat to kill the bird and him as well, and Barnaby angrily replies, "Kill anything you can, and so revenge yourself on those who with their bare hands untied could do as much to you!" Barnaby rarely sounds "idiotic," but here he breaks character entirely, at least until he begins to cry, and mutter, "Good bye, Grip -- good bye, dear old Grip!" He has noticed that the one-armed man seemed sympathetic, but he does nothing to help him at this point. 


Barnaby is taken to Bow Street, where "a blind gentleman" -- i.e., Fielding, who was Henry Fielding's half-brother -- sends him to Newgate. As the sergeant had predicted, the mob attacks the soldiers taking him to the prison, but they succeed in getting him there. A "set of heavy irons" are riveted on him and he is taken to a cell. There he is joined by "Grip, who, with his head drooping and his deep black plumes rough and rumpled, appeared to comprehend and to partake, his master's fallen fortunes." 

10. Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens, pp. 375-415

Chapters 40-44

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Hugh's belated visit is to John Chester, who is now Sir John Chester, M.P., owing to some conniving and toadying. We learn from the visit that it is Sir John who read the flier from the Protestant Association to Hugh, and who encouraged him to investigate the organization, especially as a way of using Hugh against the Catholic Geoffrey Haredale. Hugh says, "I'd do anything to have some revenge on him -- anything. And when you told me that he and all the Catholics would suffer from those who joined together under that handbill, I said I'd make one of 'em, if their master was the devil himself." He tells Chester that when he signed up he met Dennis, and Chester asks if Dennis told him what his trade is. Hugh says, "He keeps it secret," and Chester assures him, "you'll know it one day, I dare swear."

When Hugh leaves, Chester meditates on the way his plots are shaping up: "we cannot commit ourselves by joining with a very extravagant madman, such as this Gordon most undoubtedly is," but he has "a very apt instrument" in his "savage friend." And if they "inflict some little chastisement on Haredale" it "would amuse me beyond measure." But he fears that Hugh is "following fast in the footsteps of his mother. His intimacy with Mr Dennis is very ominous."

At his workshop, Gabriel Varden is working merrily away, but he stops work to finish putting on "the uniform of a serjeant in the Royal East London Volunteers," who are meeting that night. Mrs. Varden, naturally, disapproves of his volunteer soldiering as "unchristian," but he soothes her by pointing out that it is in defense of Dolly and of her. The last appeals to her, and she relents.

Dolly enters, and Dickens effuses about her blooming charms and countless suitors, as well as the envy she arouses in other girls: "How many young ladies had publicly professed, with tears in their eyes, that for their tastes she was much too short, too tall, too bold, too cold, too stout, too thin, too fair, too dark -- too everything but handsome!" But "she was Dolly Varden still, all smiles and dimples and pleasant looks, and caring no more for the fifty or sixty young fellows who at that very moment were breaking their hearts to marry her, than if so many oysters had been crossed in love and opened afterwards." She has accepted Haredale's offer to be a companion to Emma, so she spends most of her time at the Warren, which concerns Gabriel. She tells him that Haredale "has been away from home for some days past," and hasn't told Emma why he is traveling. Gabriel, who is aware of the anti-Catholic fervor, knows, but doesn't want to tell her. She also asks him about "this ghost story, which nobody is to tell Miss Emma, and which seems to be mixed up with his going away." Gabriel dismisses it as "some foolish fear of little Solomon's," and advises her, "Read Blue Beard, and don't be too curious."

Mrs. Varden overhears the reference to Blue Beard and "could not find it in her conscience to sit tamely by, and hear her child recommended to peruse the adventures of a Turk and Musssulman." She advises Dolly instead to watch Fox News ... uh, read "the Thunderer, where she would have an opportunity of reading Lord George Gordon's speeches word for word." She has a collection box for the Protestant Association, and is dismayed that her husband has put nothing in it but "two fragments of tobacco-pipe" and that Dolly spends her money on "ribbons and such gauds" instead of on "the great cause." She points out that Miggs "flung her wages, as it were, into the very countenance of the Pope, and bruised his features with her quarter's money." Miggs announces that her "sacrifices ... are quite a widder's mite" and accompanies the statement "with a great burst of tears -- for with her they never came on by degrees." Her constant show of "self-denial" is amply rewarded by Mrs. Varden, so that her contributions return "interest, at the rate of seven or eight per cent. in money, and fifty at least in personal repute and credit."

Dolly helps her father get "into one of the tightest coats that ever was made by mortal tailor, but when he advises her "never marry a soldier" and begins to talk about how the uniform reminds him of "poor Joe Willet," Dolly tries to hide her emotions. When he continues to talk about Joe, she finally breaks out in tears. He's puzzled:  "'What have I done?' said poor Gabriel. 'It was agreed that Mr Edward's name was never to be mentioned, and I have not spoken of him, have I?'" And he leaves, muttering, "Every man came into the world for something; my department seems to be to make every woman cry without meaning it."

When he gets home after the meeting of the volunteers, Geoffrey Haredale is waiting in a hackney-coach outside his house. Haredale invites Gabriel to ride with him, and in the coach he tells him that he is on a strange errand. Gabriel asks if he has had any news of Barnaby and Mrs. Rudge, but Haredale says the search has been hopeless. He has had an uneasy feeling since the night of the nineteenth of March, he tells Gabriel, and he is now on his way to Mrs. Rudge's former house, where he plans to spend the nights. He asks Gabriel not to tell Emma or Dolly where he is, and he probes Gabriel with questions about the man he saw at Mrs. Rudge's.

When they reach the house, Gabriel goes in with him, and when Haredale lights a candle, "the locksmith saw for the first time how haggard, pale, and changed he looked; how worn and thin he was." But he looks "perfectly collected and rational," which reassures Gabriel. They explore the house, and return to the downstairs where "Mr Haredale unbuckled his sword and laid it on the table, with a pair of pocket pistols; then told the locksmith he would light him to the door." Gabriel leaves him there, "listening in the solitary house to every sound that stirred."

 Haredale keeps up this vigil for weeks. He spends the day in a lodging in Vauxhall, but "every night he was at his post, the same stern, sleepless, sentinel." One evening, on his way from the daytime lodging to Mrs. Rudge's house, he passes through Westminster Hall, where "a pretty large concourse of people assembled round the Houses of Parliament. "As he made his way among the throng, he heard once or twice the No-Popery cry, ... but holding it in very slight regard, and observing that the idlers were of the lowest grade, he neither though nor cared about it."

Then he notices two people, "a gentleman in elegant attire" and "an obsequious, crouching, fawning figure." He moves to avoid them but they "faced about quickly, and stumbled upon him." Sir John Chester recognizes and greets him, then says, "You know our friend here, Haredale?" The "friend" obviously wants to avoid this meeting, but Haredale is acquainted with Gashford, who used to be a Catholic. In fact, as Sir John is pleased to observe, the three of them were "schoolfellows, in Westminster Hall; tree old boarders in a remarkably dull and shady seminary at Saint Omer's, where you, being Catholics and of necessity educated out of England, were brought up; and where I, being a promising young Protestant at the time, was sent to learn the French tongue from a native of Paris!" Haredale responds by noting the irony "that some of you Protestants of promise are at this moment leagued in yonder building, to prevent our having the surpassing and unheard-of privilege of teaching our children to read and write." He observes of them, "You are the essence of your great Association, in yourselves." Sir John protests that he's mistaken: "I don't belong to the body." But Haredale knows the truth: "Men of your capacity plot in secrecy and safety, and leave exposed posts to the duller wits."

The standoff is interrupted by the appearance of Lord George Gordon, and the "lurking look of triumph" on the faces of Chester and Gashford "made it a natural impulse on Mr Haredale's part not to give way before this leader, but to stand there while he passed." As he reaches where they're standing, "Lord George turned round and, making a few remarks of a sufficiently violent and incoherent kind, concluded with the usual sentiment, and called for three cheers to back it." Sir John introduces Haredale and Gordon, and Haredale says of Gordon's address, "For shame, my lord, for shame!... If every one of those men had arms in their hands at this moment, as they have them in their heads, I would not leave this place without telling you that you disgrace your station." He goes on to denounce Gashford as a thief in his boyhood and "a servile, false, and truckling knave ... who has crawled and crept through life, wounding the hands he licked, and biting those he fawned upon."

Gordon feigns indifference to Haredale's accusations, but on his "unwholesome face the perspiration had broken out during this speech, in blotches of wet."

"Is it not enough, my lord," Mr Haredale continued, "that I, as good a gentleman as you, must hold my property, such as it is, by a trick at which the state connives because of these hard laws; and that we may not teach our youth in schools the common principles of right and wrong; but must we be denounced and ridden by such men as this! Here is a man to head your No-Popery cry! For shame. For shame!"

Gordon briefly says that he won't be "deterred from doing my duty to my country and my countrymen" by Haredale's attack, and walks away with Gashford and Chester, as Haredale turns and goes to the top of the stairs down to the river, where he hailed a boatman. But the crowd surges behind him, pushing Gordon, Chester, and Gashford in front of them to the top of the stairs.

There are cries of "Down with the Papists!" and "Stone him" and "Duck him" and "No Popery!" and then someone throws a stone that strikes Haredale "on the head, and made him stagger like a drunken man. The blood sprung feely from the wound, and trickled down his coat." Haredale turns and faces the mob, demanding "Who did that? Show me the man who hit me." There is no answer from the crowd. Haredale then seizes Gashford: "Dog, was it you? It was your deed, if not your hand -- I know you." He throws Gashford to the ground, and when some of the crowd try to take hold of him, Haredale draws his sword and they back off. He charges Gordon and Chester to draw their swords, and strikes Chester with the flat of his sword: "there was a change in Sir John's smooth face, such as no man ever saw there."

Finally John Grueby makes his way through the crowd, and urges Haredale, "Now do retire, sir, or take my word for it you'll be worse used than you would be if every man in the crowd was a woman, and that woman Bloody Mary." Grueby helps Haredale into the boat and gives it a shove off. The mob, intimidated by Grueby, backs off, and dissipates into random vandalism.

Gashford spots Hugh and Dennis in the mob, and, "breathing curses and threats of vengeance," follows them to a shantytown in Green Lanes. He asks them who threw the stone, and after he says, "It was well done!" Dennis praises Hugh for doing it: "If it hadn't been for me to-day, he'd have had that 'ere Roman down, and made a riot of it, in another minute." Hugh replies, "And why not? ... Where's the good of putting things off? Strike while the iron's hot; that's what I say." But Dennis counsels patience and preparation, and Gashford supports him: "Dennis has great knowledge of the world." "I ought to have, Muster Gashford, seeing what a many people I've helped out of it, eh?"

Then Gashford tells them that Gordon "consigns to you two ... the pleasant task of punishing this Haredale. You may do as you please with him, or his, provided that you show no mercy, and no quarter, and leave no two beams of his house standing where the builder placed them. You may sack it, burn it, do with it as you like, but it must come down; it must be razed to the ground; and he, and all belonging to him, left as shelterless as new-born infants whom their mothers have exposed." Hugh is delighted to hear this. 

8. Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens, pp. 297-342

Chapters 31-35

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Barricaded in his room, Joe waits to be confronted by his father for his assault on Cobb, but when morning comes, he climbs out of his window and leaves, looking "up at the old Maypole, it might be for the last time." He reaches the Black Lion pub in London, where he learns that a recruiting sergeant is signing men up. The recruiter is eager to have him, but Joe wants to wait until that evening, so that he has time to talk to Dolly. The recruiter promises that if he does sign, he'll leave London the next day: "You'll go abroad -- a country where it's all sunshine and plunder -- the finest climate in the world." That sounds to Joe exactly like what he wants. "Needs must when the devil drives; and the devil that drives me is an empty pocket and an unhappy home."

By evening, he has spent all his money on food, while waiting for a time when Mrs. Varden usually goes out to a lecture. He finds Dolly alone (or so he thinks).

Dolly welcomes him in her father's workshop, but when he tells her he is there "to say good-bye -- to say good-bye for I don't know how many years; perhaps for ever. I am going abroad," she reacts coldly. "Dolly released her hand and said, 'Indeed!' She remarked in the same breath that it was a fine night, and in short, betrayed no more emotion than the forge itself." Unfortunately for Joe, "that gallant coachmaker had vowed but the night before that Miss Varden held him bound in adamantine chains." She is expecting to be wooed, not to be forced to confront reality.

Joe had small experience in love affairs, and had no notion how different young ladies are at different times; he had expected to take Dolly up again at the very point where he had left her after that delicious evening ride, and was no more prepared for such an alteration than to see the sun and moon change places.

So even though he now declares, "I love you dearly, with all my heart and soul; with as much truth and earnestness as ever man loved woman in this world, I do believe," Dolly is expecting more. She "was a coquette by nature, and a spoilt child," convinced that "The coachmaker would have been dissolved in tears, and ... done all kinds of poetry." The truth of what she has done by not begging him to stay is slow to hit her. After he has left, she waits for him to come back, looks out into the street, waits some more and then "went upstairs humming a tune, bolted herself in, laid her head down on her bed, and cried as if her heart would break."

After she has gone, Sim comes out from his hiding place in triumph, admires his legs in the mirror, and proclaims, "Tremble, Willet, and despair. She's mine! She's mine!"

Joe goes to the recruiting sergeant and signs up, and the next morning, "The party embarked in a passage-boat bound for Gravesend, whence they were to proceed on foot to Chatham; the wind was in their favour, and they soon left London behind them; a mere dark mist -- a giant phantom in the air."

Dickens announces the parallel father-son story, that of Edward and John Chester, with "Misfortunes, saith the adage, never come singly."

Phiz underscores a point: Notice the picture of Abraham sacrificing Isaac above John Chester.

John and Edward Chester are dining together, the father trying to cheer up the son. But when Edward calls him "father," John protests, "for Heaven's sake don't call me by that obsolete and ancient name. Have some regard for delicacy. Am I grey, or wrinkled, do I go on crutches, have I lost my teeth, that you adopt such a mode of address? Good God, how very coarse!" And Edward only makes it worse when he protests, "I was about to speak to you from my heart, sir." For John, the heart is only "the centre of the blood-vessels and all that sort of thing.... How can you be so very vulgar and absurd? These anatomical allusions should be left to gentlemen of the medical profession. They are really not agreeable in society.... Men are sometimes stabbed to the heart, shot to the heart; but as to speaking from the heart, or to the heart, or being warm-hearted, or cold-hearted, or broken-hearted, or being all heart, or having no heart -- pah! these things are nonsense, Ned."

Edward, perhaps to put an end to his father's lecture, says, "No doubt." But John continues, narrowing his focus to Emma: "No doubt in your mind she was all heart once. Now she has none at all." Edward protests that though she appears to have changed, it was "by vile means, I believe." John insists, "She supposed you to be rich, or at least rich enough; and found you poor. Marriage is a civil contract; people marry to better their worldly condition and improve appearances; it is an affair of house and furniture, of liveries, servants, equipage, and so forth. The lady being poor and you poor also, there is an end of the matter." Dickens certainly wants us to believe that this is John Chester's heartless materialism, and therefore to be dismissed, but modern readers may find some uncomfortable truths in it. And then he goes on to a revelation:

"Edward, my father had a son, who being a fool like you, and, like you, entertaining low and disobedient sentiments, he disinherited and cursed one morning after breakfast. The circumstance occurs to me with a singular clearness of recollection this evening. I remember eating muffins at the time, with marmalade. He led a miserable life (the son, I mean) and died early; it was a happy release on all accounts; he degraded the family very much." 

This would seem to be a significant revelation to Edward: that he had an uncle who went astray. Perhaps his father is only making it up as a warning, but in a novel filled with hints and secrets, such as the identity of the mysterious stranger who robbed Edward and threatens Mrs. Rudge, or the parentage of Hugh and John Chester's motive for his intense scrutiny of Hugh's face, it also give the reader a license to speculate. But only for a moment, for John now responds to his son's plea for an audience to his concerns with a bitter dismissal: "if, in short, you are resolved to take your own course, you must take it, and my curse with it."

Now it's Edward's turn to surprise us: "'The curse may pass your lips,' said Edward, 'but it will be but empty breath. I do not believe that any man on earth has greater power to call one down upon his fellow -- least of all, upon his own child -- than he has to make one drop of rain or flake of snow fall from the clouds above us at his impious bidding." This is the kind of skepticism about melodramatic devises such as paternal curses that we would normally expect from John Chester, not from Edward. But John Chester naturally knows how to turn it back on his son: "You are so very irreligious, so exceedingly undutiful, so horribly profane.... Return to this roof no more, I beg you. Go, sir, since you have no moral sense remaining; and go to the Devil, at my express desire. Good day."

Edward leaves, "and turned his back upon the house for ever." So with both Joe and Edward cast adrift upon the world, Dickens now jumps ahead five years, from 1775 to 1780. 

It's a night of terrible weather, and Joe Willet, Tom Cobb, and Phil Parkes are waiting for their companion, Solomon Daisy, in the coziness of the Maypole kitchen. Dickens makes much of the contrast between the warm, quiet interior and the cold, windy night outside, so much so that it's almost an inversion of the disjunction between nature and humanity that we saw earlier when John Chester was making his way inattentively through a beautiful spring day. It is half past ten at night, and Willet is snoring -- although he is awake: "his breathing was pretty much the same, awake or asleep, saving that in the latter case he sometimes experienced a slight difficulty in respiration" (which we would call apnea).

Over the chimney there is a poster of "a youth of tender years running away very fast." After Joe's disappearance, Willet had distributed these, offering a reward of five pounds, but he "obstinately peristed, despite the advice and entreaties of his friends, in describing his son as a 'young boy;' and furthermore as being from eighteen inches to a couple of feet shorter than he really was," with the result that he has had delivered to him "at various times and at a vast expense, ... some five-and-forty runaways varying from six years old to twelve."

Finally a cry is heard outside and Solomon Daisy enters, terror-stricken and for a moment unable to speak. Willet decides the way to get him to tell them what has happened is to bully him: "Tell us what's the matter, sir, ... or I'll kill you.... How dare you look like that?" Finally Daisy is able to tell them "to lock the house-door and close and bar the shutters of the room, without a moment's loss of time." They follow his advice, and he begins to moan, "Why did I leave this house to-night! On the nineteenth of March -- of all nights in the year, on the nineteenth of March!" This is the anniversary of the murder of Reuben Haredale, twenty-seven years ago. He tells them that he realized that he had forgotten to wind the clock in the church, and he went to do it, even though the storm was raging outside, and no one else was about. When he got there, he realized it was the nineteenth of March, and "at the very same moment, I heard a voice outside the tower -- rising from among the graves." It was the kind of cry one might give "if something dreadful followed us in a dream, and came upon us unawares; and then it died off: seeming to pass quite round the church."

When he opened the church door to leave, "there crossed me -- so close, that by stretching out my finger I could have touched it -- something in the likeness of a man. It was bare-headed to the storm. It turned its face without stopping, and it fixed its eyes on mine. It was a ghost -- a spirit." He falls back weakly as the others demand "Whose?" but only Willet hears the answer: "'Gentlemen,' said Mr Willet after a long pause, 'you needn't ask. The likeness of a murdered man. This is the nineteenth of March.'"

Receiving this news, they all vow to keep it to themselves. But after they leave, Willet decides that he has to share this information with Geoffrey Haredale as soon as possible. So he summons Hugh, who complains about going out at midnight in a storm, but whom Willet needs to lead him through the darkness to the Warren. When they reach it, the place is dark except for a light in one of the towers, which Willet realizes is "Mr Reuben's own apartment, God be with us! I wonder his brother likes to sit there, so late at night -- on this night too." Hugh scoffs at this: "Is it less warm or dry, because a man was killed there?" Willet begins "to think it just barely possible that he was something of a dangerous character, and that it might be advisable to get rid of him one of these days."

Haredale lets them in, and they climb the stairs to the room, though Haredale asks Hugh to wait outside. "He has an evil eye," he tells Willet. After Willet tells him what Solomon Daisy saw, Haredale says it was a good idea to keep it secret, though he regards the story as "a foolish fancy on he part of this weak-brained man, bred in his fears and superstition. But Miss Haredale, though she would know it to be so, would be disturbed by it if it reached her ears."

When Willet prepares to leave, Haredale offers Hugh a drink, and when he gives it to him, Hugh "threw part of it upon the floor." Willet scolds him, but Hugh says, "'I'm drinking a toast... to this house and its master.' With that he muttered something to himself, and drank the rest, and setting down the glass, preceded them without another word." Willet is "scandalised" by this. And when they leave, Willet notices that Haredale's "face had changed so much and grown so haggard since their entrance, that he almost seemed another man."

Willet and Hugh take to the road again, but are suddenly almost run down by three men on horseback. They stop and ask if this is the road to London. "'If you follow it right, it is,' replied Hugh roughly." The man who asked calls Hugh's manner "churlish," but Willet assures them it is, and then scolds Hugh for provoking "three great neck-or-nothing chaps, that could keep on running over use, back'ards and for'ards, till we was dead, and then take our bodies up behind 'em, and drown us ten miles off." When he informs the men that London is thirteen miles away, they decide it's too far to ride that night, and ask for an inn, which Willet is happy to answer.

One of the men then asks if Willet has "one excellent bed, landlord? Hem! A bed that you can recommend -- a bed that you are sure is well aired -- a bed that has been slept in by some perfectly respectable and unexceptionable person?" And he launches into a long speech about how "forty thousand men of this our island in the wave (exclusive of women and children) rivet their eyes and thoughts on Lord George Gordon; and every day, from the rising up of the sun to the going down of the same, pray for his health and vigour." And so on. He insists that only Gordon needs the bed: "Let me sleep on a chair -- the carpet -- anywhere. No one will repine if I take cold or fever." And as for the third man, "Let John Grueby pass the night beneath the open sky -- no one will repine for him."

Willet, "who had never heard so many words spoken together at one time, or delivered with such volubility and emphasis as by the long-winded gentleman," assures them that he has accommodations for all three of them. And we learn that the three men are Gordon, his secretary Gashford ("the long-winded gentleman"), and his servant, John Grueby. Gordon says they will follow Willet and Hugh to the Maypole, but Grueby doesn't like Hugh's looks and insists on riding ahead with him. As they proceed, Hugh sizes Grueby up:

He was a square-built, strong-made, bull-necked fellow, of the true English breed; and as Hugh measured him with his eye, he measured Hugh, regarding him meanwhile with a look of bluff disdain. He was much older than the Maypole man, being to all appearance five-and-forty; but was one of those self-possessed, hard-headed, imperturbable fellows, who, if they are ever beaten at fisticuffs, or other kind of warfare, never know it, and go on coolly till they win.

Which is pretty much what happens now, as Hugh decides to challenge Grueby on his skill with a cudgel, waving his about and receiving a blow on the head from the butt end of Grueby's whip. Grueby comments, "You wear your hear too long; I should have cracked your crown if it had been a little shorter." Hugh meditates on escalating the combat, but backs down, recognizing that he was dealing with "a customer of almost supernatural toughness."

 Willet shows them to the Maypole, where he observes that Gordon is "about the middle height, of a slender make, and sallow complexion, with an aquiline nose, and long hair of a reddish brown, combed perfectly straight and smooth about his ears, and slightly powdered, but without the faintest vestige of a curl." He is "not yet thirty," and "his face ... was thin and mild, and wore an air of melancholy; but it was suggestive of an indefinable uneasiness." Gashford "was taller, angularly made, high-shouldered, bony, and ungraceful.... His manner was smooth and humble, but very sly and slinking. He wore the aspect of a man who was always lying in wait for something that wouldn't come to pass; but he looked patient -- very patient -- and fawned like a spaniel dog." (Dickens will do this better when he creates Uriah Heep, though "lying in wait for something that wouldn't come to pass" is quite wonderful.)

When they are settled in, Gordon and Gashford look back on what Gashford calls "the blessed work of a most blessed day," and Gordon prompts the secretary to tell him how he moved the Protestants of Suffolk: "They cried to be led against the Papists, they vowed a dreadful vengeance on their heads, they roared like men possessed." He goes on to say, "when you cried 'Perish the Pope and all his base adherents; the penal laws against them shall never be repealed while Englishmen have hearts and hands' -- and waved your own an touched your sword; and when they cried, 'No Popery!' and you cried 'No; not even if we wade in blood,' and they threw up their hats and cried 'Hurrah! not even if we wade in blood; No Popery! Lord George! Down with the Papists -- Vengeance on their heads.'"

Gordon seems to be under Gashford's spell. He even asks, "But -- dear Gashford -- did I really say all that?" Gashford assures him he did, and he reminds him that he, Gashford, had been "stricken by the magic of his eloquence in Scotland but a year ago, [and] abjured the errors of the Romish church." Gordon continues to be in something of a daze, and to need Gashford's reassurance. He has "a heightened colour" and puts a "fevered hand" on Gashford's shoulder; "struggling through his Puritan's demeanour, was something wild and ungovernable which broke through all restraint." Meanwhile, Gashford is taking more than his share of the mulled wine.

Willet and Grueby arrive to show "the deluded lord into his chamber." Gashford falls asleep by the fire, only to be awakened by Grueby, who is concerned about his master's state of mind: "'Between Bloody Marys, and blue cockades, and glorious Queen Besses, and no Popery, and Protestant associations, and making of speeches,' pursued John Grueby, ... 'my lord's half off his head.... One of these evenings, when the weather gets warmer and Protestants are thirsty, they'll be pulling London down, -- and I never heard that Bloody Mary went as far as that.'"  

7. Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens, pp. 259-297

Chapters 26-30

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Gabriel Varden tells Geoffrey Haredale that he isn't surprised at Mrs. Rudge's decision to forgo her annuity and disappear: He has, after all, witnessed her strange behavior earlier: "I say, in the passage of her house one evening after dark, the highwayman who robbed and wounded Mr Edward Chester, and on the same night threatened me." Moreover, he tells Haredale, she prevented him from apprehending the stranger. Haredale wonders if she has secretly married again: "Suppose she married incautiously -- it is not improbably, for her existence has been a lonely and monotonous one for many years -- and the man turned out a ruffian, she would be anxious to screen him, and yet would revolt from his crimes." Moreover, he wonders if it's possible that Mrs. Rudge had deceived them all along, "that this connection was formed in her husband's lifetime, and led to his and my brother's --"

Gabriel interrupts to protest: "Five-and-twenty years ago, where was there a girl like her? A gay, handsome, laughing, bright-eyed damsel!" He had courted her, and although he thinks she was too good for Rudge, he also thinks she was too good for himself. Haredale retreats from his suspicions, admitting that Varden's characterization of Mary Rudge is correct.

Varden has accompanied Haredale to the meeting at Mrs. Rudge's, but when they arrive they discover only John Chester at the house. He tells them that, as part of his plan to separate Edward and Emma, he has bought off Mrs. Rudge and Barnaby, giving them money and sending them away. "She appointed to see you here to-night, I know, but found it inconvenient, and couldn't wait. Here is the key of the door. I am afraid you'll find it inconveniently large; but as the tenement is yours, your good-nature will excuse that, Haredale, I am certain!"

Chester leaves Varden and Haredale, who are furious at this turn of events, but goes to Varden's house, where he is greeted by Sim Tappertit, who once again reminds Chester of the name of his enemy: Joseph Willet.  Sim admits Chester to the parlor, where Mrs. Varden, Dolly, and Miggs are sitting. Chester pretends to mistake Mrs. Varden for Dolly and to be amazed when Miggs cries out, "If he an't been and took Missis for her own daughter." Then he insists that Dolly must be Mrs. Varden's sister. "'My daughter, indeed, sir,' returned Mrs V., blushing with great juvenility." Dolly, however, has the sense to see through this flattery, and notes that "there was a broad, bold look of admiration in Mr Chester's face, refined and polished though it sought to be, which distressed her very much."

Chester goes on to pretend to piety when he sees Mrs. Varden's copy of the Protestant Manual: "My favourite book, dear madam." (So much for Lord Chesterfield's letters.) He lays it on thick, aware that "as hollow vessels produce a far more musical sound in falling than those which are substantial, so it will oftentimes be found that sentiments which have nothing in them make the loudest ringing in the world, and are the most relished.... Even Dolly ... could not help owning within herself that he was the sweetest-spoken gentleman she had ever seen."

He now presses his advantage by asking Mrs. Varden if he can speak with her privately, and they withdraw to an upstairs sitting-room. There he works his charm first to dissuade her from further support of Edward in his courting of Emma: "there are grave and weighty reasons, pressing family considerations, and apart even from these, points of religious difference, which interpose themselves, and render their union impossible; utterly im-possible." He tells her, moreover, that Edward "is bound by his duty to me, by his honour, by every solemn tie and obligation, to marry some one else." Of course, he doesn't specify that there is a particular "some one else" he is bound to marry, for there isn't. But naturally Mrs. Varden takes it that way, which instantly brands Edward in her mind as a cad.

On the other hand, Mrs. Varden feels a twinge where Emma is concerned: "if you take Miss Emma's lover away, sir, what becomes of the poor thing's heart then?" He assures her, "A marriage with my son, whom I should be compelled to disown, would be followed by yeas of misery; they would be separated, my dear madam, in a twelvemonth." And now he plays his trump card: He has heard that Dolly has been in the company of "a young man (I am sorry to say, a dissolute fellow, of very indifferent character) of whom I have heard Ned speak -- Bullet was it -- Pullet -- Mullet --" She identifies him as Joe Willet, and Chester goes in for the kill: "Suppose this Joseph Willet now, were to aspire to the affections of your charming daughter, and  were to engage them." Mrs. Varden is indignant at the thought.

And having achieve his goal (and Sim Tappertit's as well), Mr. Chester takes his leave. Only Dolly is not completely seduced: "For all his politeness and pleasant speaking, I am pretty sure he was making game of us, more than once." Mrs. Varden is so shocked by this that she bursts into tears.

It has to be said here that although Dickens's characters are really just caricatures, he plays with them so skillfully that a reader can't help becoming indignant at John Chester's villainy, Mrs. Varden's credulousness, and the predicament into which he has cast Dolly, Joe, Edward and Emma.

Chester retires to "a noted coffee-house in Covent Garden" where he gloats (and stiffs the waiter). Then he returns home where he finds Hugh asleep on the staircase. While Hugh sleeps, Chester bends over and examines his face closely, observing the sleeping man "with a searching eye." The only reason for this action would seem to be that Chester has some suspicions about Hugh's identity, his true parentage. Finally he wakes Hugh, who tells him that he has had a "curious" dream in which Chester was a part. "'I hope it may never come true, master." It is "a comfort," he says, that we're not where I thought we were.' He looked round him as he spoke, and in particular looked above his head, as though he half expected to be standing under some object which had had existence in his dream." Dickens doesn't tell us what the object is: the gallows, perhaps?

They go into Chester's drawing room, where Hugh explains that he's there because Edward had tried to see Emma but was unsuccessful, so he left a "letter or some message" for Joe to deliver to her. But John Willet forbade Joe from delivering it: "He says (that's the old one does) that none of his people shall interfere and get him in trouble." Chester calls John Willet "a jewel ... and the better for being a dull one." Dolly also wrote Emma a message to tell her that she had lost the letter she was supposed to give to Edward, which Joe was also forbidden to deliver. Joe gave it to Hugh to deliver, but he now hands it over to Chester.

But to Hugh's surprise, Chester doesn't burn this letter as he did the one from Emma to Edward. Again he chides Hugh for breaking the law: "Don't you know that the letter you brought to me, was directed to my son who resides in this very place? And can you descry no difference between his letters and those addressed to other people?" Chester tells Hugh that he will deliver it, and asks when Emma usually walks in the garden at the Warren. Hugh tells him, and Chester cautions him not to show signs around other people that they have any prior acquaintance other than the casual one of Maypole servant and Maypole guest.

Hugh departs, and after reflecting "the plot thickens," Chester goes to bed and falls asleep, "but had not slept long when he started up and thought that Hugh was at the outer door, calling in a strange voice, very different from his own, to be admitted." He gets up and looks out, and even calls Hugh's name, but no one is there. Finally he falls asleep again. The plot thickens, indeed.

The next day Chester rides to the Warren to see Emma. Dickens uses the journey to moralize: "The thoughts of worldly men are for ever regulated by a moral law of gravitation, which, like the physical one, holds them down to earth. The bright glory of day, and the silent wonders of a starlit night, appeal to their minds in vain." So it is that Chester rides through a beautiful spring day, "so fair a world" redolent with "hope and promise," but takes no notice of it. He has "no greater thought of the day or the scene through which he moved, than that he was fortunate (being choicely dressed) to have such favourable weather. He smiled very complacently at such times, but rather as if he were satisfied with himself than with anything else."

He stops at the Maypole, where Hugh comes out to assist him at the same time that John Willet appears. Willet is "rather surprised by the quickness with which he appeared," and treats Hugh harshly. Then, after Chester observes that Hugh is "an active fellow," Willet orders Hugh to perform a trick for him: to hang Willet's wig from the weathercock, which Hugh does with "inconceivable rapidity" and then vaults on his horse and leaves. "There never was such a chap for flinging himself about and never hurting his bones," Willet comments. Chester asks about Joe, and Willet informs him, "My son, sir, is upon his patrole." This confuses Chester, "who naturally thought that being on patrole, implied walking about somewhere." Chester, it turns out, means that Joe is "on parole," or as he explains, "He is upon patrole of honour, sir, not to leave the premises," to keep him from "doing anything unpleasant in opposing your desires."

Chester makes his way to the Warren, where he finds Emma taking her walk and accosts her, introducing himself as "the father of him whom you honour and distinguish above all other men." She is a little alarmed, but he assures her, "Edward is well -- quite well. It is of him I wish to speak, certainly; but I have no misfortune to communicate." Then he says, "You have heard me described as cold-hearted, calculating, selfish --" But she assures him that neither Edward nor her uncle has ever spoken of him that way. Of her uncle she says, "It is not his nature to stab in the dark, nor is it mine to love such deeds." This is the opening Chester needs so he can proclaim, "apostrophising the air; 'it is this frank, ingenuous, noble nature, Ned, that you can wound so lightly. Shame -- shame upon you, boy!'"

She is angered at this, but he proceeds to flatter her in preparation for saying, "Miss Haredale, you are deceived; you are deceived by your unworthy lover, and my unworthy son." He gives her Dolly's note, claiming, "It reached my hands by chance, and by mistake, and should have accounted to you (as I am told) for my son's not answering some other note of yours." She responds to this as he hoped she would, as "something so very candid, so scrupulously honourable, so very truthful and just," and bursts into tears. He comforts her, and moves in for the kill:

"Edward seeks to break with you upon a false and most unwarrantable pretence. I have it on his own showing; in his own hand.... There lies on his desk at this present moment, ready for transmission to you, a letter, in which he tells you that our poverty -- our poverty; his and mine, Miss Haredale -- forbids him to pursue his claim upon your hand; in which he offers, voluntarily proposes, to free you from your pledge; and talks magnanimously (men do so, very commonly, in such cases) of being in time more worthy of your regard -- and so forth."

He puts it more bluntly: Edward, he says "not only jilts you ... but affects to make a merit and a virtue of the act."

Just as she is falling for this line, her uncle appears and demands an explanation for his presence. She leaves them, and Chester tells Haredale that he was informing Emma that his son has written a letter breaking off with her, "a boyish, honest, sentimental composition, which remains as yet in his desk, because he hasn't had the heart to send it.... If she receives Ned's letter by to-morrow noon, you may date their parting from to-morrow night." Haredale informs Chester that he is sorry he ever got involved with him. "When I am most remorseful for this treachery, I will think of you and your marriage, and try to justify myself in such remembrances, for having torn asunder Emma and your son, at any cost." We now learn that Haredale had been in love with the woman whom Chester married, or as Chester puts it, as he leaves Haredale, he "could not keep his mistress when he had won her, and threw me in her way to carry off the prize; I triumph in the present and the past." Chester also draws his sword, thinking how much he would enjoy crossing swords with Haredale, but puts the sword away and became "his unruffled self again."

Joe Willet, meanwhile, is suffering from his father's treatment more than ever, and John Willet's "Maypole cronies" aid and abet his harshness, praising him as "a father of the good old English sort" and claiming "that there were no new-fangled notions or modern ways in him; that he put them in mind of what their fathers were when they were boys," and so on. "In short, between old John and old John's friends, there never was an unfortunate young fellow so bullied, badgered, worried, fretted, and brow-beaten; so constantly beset, or made so tired of his life, as poor Joe Willet."

When Chester reaches the Maypole and his horse is brought out, Joe goes to help him, but is reined in by his father: "No breaking of patroles. How dare you come out of the door, sir, without leave?" But Joe also notices "the smile upon their visitor's face, and observes the pleasure his disgrace afforded him." He goes in and lays his head on his arms on a table and reflects that "but for Dolly, who I couldn't bear should think me the rascal they would make me out to be if I ran away, this house and I should part to-night."

That evening, the usual company of Willet's friends are at the Maypole, and Tom Cobb provokes Joe with another admonition to "obey his father in all things." Joe tells him, "don't talk to me," but Cobb sneers at him for talking back.

Crowding into one moment the vexation and the wrath of years, Joe started up, overturned the table, fell upon his long enemy, pummelled him with all his might and main, and finished by driving him with surprising swiftness against a heap of spittoons in one corner; plunging into which, head foremost, with a tremendous crash, he lay at full length among the ruins, stunned and motionless.

Joe goes to his room and barricades the door with furniture, then thinks, "The Maypole and I must part company. I'm a roving vagabond -- she hates me for evermore -- it's all over!"