THE WORKS OF

CHARLES DICKENS

BARNABY RUDGE

ILLUSTRATED

WITH INTRODUCTION, CRITICAL

COMMENTS, AND NOTES BY

WALTER JERROLD

EDGAR ALLAN POE, JOHN FORSTER

ANDREW LANG

ADOLPHUS WM. WARD

WM. DEAN HOWELLS

AND OTHERS

PF COLLIER & SON

NEW YORK

INTRODUCTION.

IN "Barnaby Rudge," the first attempt made by Charles Dickens to lay the scene of his story away from the time in which he lived, we have the best romantic rendering of a certain extraordinary episode in English history; the episode, that is to say, in which lawless crowds reduced London to a state of anarchy for a few days, and of which the central figure was that eccentric and unbalanced individual Lord George Gordon. The Gordon Riots are familiar to students of history as forming a brief incident in the record of fanatical attempts to debar Roman Catholics from exercising any of their rights as citizens. The cry of "No Popery" was raised, and Lord George Gordon became an idol of the crowd, though he was a man who, in the words of the late Sir Leslie Stephen, "would clearly have been in an asylum at the present day."

In 1779 Lord George Gordon, then at the age of twentyeight, accepted the presidency of the Protestant Association formed to secure the repeal of an Act by which certain Catholic disabilities had been removed. Five years earlier he had become member of Parliament for Ludgershall, Wiltshire, and when the Association passed a resolution on the subject of the recent Act it was Gordon who presented the consequent petition to the House of Commons, he being supported by a body of many thousands of persons gathered about the neighbourhood of the House. The House of Commons not unnaturally refused to come to a decision at such a moment, and voted an adjournment, on which the mob became demonstrative. Gordon addressed the people, seeking to pacify them; and on the arrival of troops on the scene the mob quietly dispersed, but during the course of the night some chapels belonging to the Roman Catholics were destroyed.

On the following day-June 5th, 1780-the Association

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of which Gordon was president, issued an appeal to the people to behave peaceably. On June 6th the adjourned debate in Parliament was to take place, and then a menacing mob assembled again in the immediate neighbourhood of the Houses. Once more the Commons adjourned the debate without having come to a decision, and on that night the mob got entirely out of hand; Newgate being burned, and the inmates of that and other prisons, to the number of about two thousand, turning out to swell the ranks of the inflamed rabble, while the houses of Lord Mansfield and of Sir John Fielding, the blind police magistrate, and of many others were destroyed. Fielding was a half-brother of the novelist, and was currently said to know more than three thousand thieves by their voicewhich would perhaps of itself account in some measure for the violence of the recruited mob against his property. On the next day the rioters destroyed the King's Bench Prison and the New Bridewell, and threatened the Bank. Troops were gathered together to the number of about twenty thousand, and on the following day (June 8th) the riot was finally quelled by necessary force, about three hundred of the rioters having been killed. Of the prisoners taken-presumably in addition to those escaped prisoners retaken, or those criminals who, freed by the populace, gave themselves up again to authority-there were close upon two hundred convicted of, and of these twentyfive were executed for, participation in the disorders. Lord George Gordon himself was kept in the Tower for eight months before being brought to trial for high treason early in 1781; he was finally acquitted, thanks, it is said, to the eloquence of his counsel, Erskine, who urged in defence of the young nobleman that he had advised the people to peaceful conduct, and that he had offered his services to the King when the trouble was at its height. Gordon had helped to raise a power that he could by no means control, and the very earnestness of his "No Popery" agitation was defeated by the attraction to its standard of the criminal and other of the worst elements of the populace.

In Boswell's "Life of Johnson" will be found a number of extracts from Johnson's letters, in which he gives particulars of some of the outrages committed during the riots; of the way in which there was something of "an