On Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge and Donald Trump: How A Victorian Novelist Foreshadowed the MAGA Movement

 

                                                       By Don Curren

                                 

                                       

Barnaby Rudge is not one of Charles Dickens’ best novels.

Nor is it one of his best loved.

When the British novelist Nick Hornby was on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs radio program several years ago, he selected it as the one book he would take to a desert island under the program’s rules, describing it as the Dickens novel “nobody reads.”

(According to a Guardian database, only one other guest among the hundreds who appeared on Desert Island Discs chose Barnaby Rudge: Eric Clapton)

There are reasons for the book’s status as a Dickensian also-ran.

An historical novel set in and around London in the early 1780s, Barnaby Rudge is a dark and at first rather meandering tale.

It lacks the infectious high spirits and humour of Nicholas Nickleby, the depth and satirical reach of Little Dorrit, the warmth and humanity of David Copperfield, or the indelible oratory of Dickens’ only other historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities.

It does share one characteristic of Dickens’ greater novels: its considerable length. Barnaby Rudge. Although the word counts offered by internet sources vary, Barnaby Rudge is about 255,000 words long, which translates to 738 densely packed pages in the used Penguin edition I read.

The first hundred pages or so expend a lot of words describing a rural pub located not far from London, The Maypole, its bumptious proprietor John Willet, and some of the Maypole’s regulars, most of them comic-relief caricatures with only peripheral significance to the plot.

After acquainting us with them, some more central characters, and some necessary back-story, we finally come to the core of the book’s action, the Gordon Anti-Catholic riots of 1780.

(There’s also a Gothic-tinged murder mystery and some familial melodrama interwoven with the riots.)

At this point, the book finally begins to cohere, and I found it compelling reading from there on.

In part because the escalation of the “anti-Popery” movement and the tidal wave of destruction and conflict it unleased on London is a fascinating story, and Dicken tells it with his characteristic panache. (His version might not be entirely accurate historically, but my focus here will be on Dickens’ version.)

But what really made Barnaby Rudge a compelling read for me was the uncanny similarity between the events of the Gordon Riots and the development and trajectory of recent populist movements in the U.S. and elsewhere - and the depth of insight that Dickens brings to phenomena of populism.

Dickens did not predict the rise of Donald Trump in some impossible, Nostradamus-like way. But he did show deep insight into what can happen when rabble-rousing leaders use simplistic ideologies to rally society’s disaffected behind them for their own exploitative purposes.

Historically, the Gordon Riots began when a Scots aristocrat named Lord George Gordon led an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people who converged on London in the summer of 1790 to present a petition to Parliament.

The object of the petition is to reverse a piece of legislation, the Papists Act of 1778, which reduced official discrimination against British Catholics enacted by the Popery Act 1698. 

The agenda of Gordon’s movement, called the Protestant Association, is purely negative, focused on demonizing a minority and constraining their rights; the movement’s most prominent slogan is simply “No Popery.”

Some of its adherents are motivated by nebulous fears that, once restrictions against them are relaxed, Catholics will conspire against the established political order, possibly in league with foreign powers, and somehow bring a despotic absolute monarchy back to England.

Like members of modern populist movements, the members of the Protestant Association also seem to be driven by more general discontent with conditions in England at the time, and a sense that “their” England and the way of life they know and love is threatened by “Papists” and their foreign allies.

Sound familiar?

The parallels between the Protestant Association and the MAGA movement become even more vivid when the Association’s followers march on Westminster in an effort to intimidate lawmakers into reversing the reforms to the regulations governing Catholics.

In Dickens’ version, the rioters not only beleaguer MPs and members of the House of Lords in the streets outside Westminster, but they also break into its precincts. As he puts it, “the members were not only attacked in the streets, but were set upon within the very walls of Parliament.”

The authorities’ lack of organized response to the protestors’ assault on the seat of government is also uncannily similar to the events of January 6, 2021, although it’s arguably more excusable as there was no real professional police force at the time.

And, just as on January 6, the rioters fail to achieve their objective, and the demand for a return to stricter legislation regulating Catholicism is decisively rejected.

The stories diverge at that point, though.

Instead of dispersing as the Jan. 6 insurgents did, the Protestant Association mob takes advantage of the law-enforcement vacuum and goes on a multi-day rampage, pillaging and destroying the property of affluent Catholics, Catholic chapels, and the embassies of Catholic jurisdictions.

They also attack and ransack prisons and free inmates, and stage a violent attack on the Bank of England.

Eventually, the military is called in and the rioters are subdued. About 285 people were shot dead and another 200 wounded, according to Wikipedia.

About 450 of the rioters were arrested, and twenty or thirty were tried and executed. Lord Gordon was arrested and charged with high treason but was acquitted.

Dickens’ abhorrence of mob violence and its tendency to victimize the innocent is evident throughout the sharply drawn riot scenes. But his condemnation of the movement is also vividly conveyed through the way he characterizes the people in the Protestant Association.

His depiction of Lord Gordon is of someone eloquent and charismatic, but also vacuous and irresolute.

In one revealing chapter relatively early in our acquaintance with Gordon and his cronies, he seems doubtful about his own cause, and seeks assurance from his secretary John Gashford that their religion is “true religion.”

Dickens describes Gordon as “moving uneasily in his seat, and biting his nails as though he would pare them to the quick.”

“There can be no doubt of ours being the true one,” Gordon says, as if trying to convince himself. “You feel as certain of that as I do, don’t you Gashford?” he asks.

That night Gordon has a curious dream where both he and his secretary appear to be Jewish.

The dream presages the subsequent course of his life.

Despite his stalwart Protestantism at the time of the riots, Gordon converted to Judaism later in life, and eventually became the leader of a small cult that believed he “was Moses risen from the dead in order to instruct them and enlighten the whole world,” according to the December 15, 1787, edition Bristol Journal.

 “A nature prone to false enthusiasm, and the vanity of being a leader, were the worst qualities apparent in his composition. All the rest was weakness, sheer weakness,” Dickens writes of Gordon’s character.

He’s considerably more scathing to those surrounding Gordon.

His secretary, John Gashford, is depicted as a venal, unscrupulous schemer who seeks to covertly influence the events surrounding the riots to his own advantage, as does Sir John Chester, an icily manipulative hypocrite who also figures in the familial drama that is one of the key plotlines of the sprawling novel.

Gashford doesn’t hesitate to enlist some dubious characters to the movement, including the weaselly, officious apprentice Sim Tappertit, the bloodthirsty hangman Ned Dennis, and the lawless, animalistic Hugh, who works at the Maypole Inn.

The latter helps bring into the movement, with near disastrous results, the title character Barnaby Rudge, an unworldly innocent who might be classified as neurodivergent in our age.

Through these characterizations, Dickens powerfully conveys the morally bankruptcy and opportunism that are rife in populist movements, and as well as their tendency to appeal to those who revel in violence and destruction for its own sake.

In one powerfully worded passage, Dickens describes the overall tenor of the mob as it envelops Westminster: “this vast throng, sprinkled doubtless here and there with honest zealots, but composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London, whose growth was fostered by bad criminal laws, bad prison regulations, and the worst conceivable police.”

Dickens’ heroes are individuals who stand up to the mob, often at great personal risk.

Among them is the locksmith Gabriel Varden, whom the rampaging mob tries to intimidate into breaking open the lock, which he devised, at Newgate Prison. He refuses, and is rescued by two mysterious figures who, perhaps not surprisingly, to out to be pivotal to the resolution of some key plotlines.

 Geoffrey Harewood, a key figure in the novel’s plot and a Catholic gentleman, is another individual who stands up to the mob.

Threatened by a crowd of rioters, Harewood refuses to retreat even when struck by a stone thrown surreptitiously by Gordon’s secretary Gashford, and even appears prepared to take on the entire mob singlehandedly.

He is rescued by Gordon’s retainer John Grueby, who all along has been skeptical of the Protestant movement and suspicious of the dissembling Gashford.

Although Barnaby Rudge was an historical novel chronicling events about 80 years prior to its writing and publication, some literary scholars believe it really expressed Dickens’ disquiet at the Chartist movement in his own time and its potential for violence.

The Chartists were a working-class movement aimed at achieving political solutions to the social problems of the time, and advocated reforms such as universal suffrage.

Dickens’ opposition to violent, populism does not mean he was unquestioningly approving the status quo.

Dickens is well known for his critical stance toward many of the injustices of Victorian society, and likely felt sympathy with many of the positions taken by the Chartists, and perhaps for the circumstances of some of those involved in the Gordon Riots.

In the passage quoted above where he describes the mob as consisting of the “very scum and refuse of London,” he also pointedly links their prevalence to the institutional failures of the day.

He was a reformer, and acutely aware of society’s failings, but he did not believe violence aimed at eradicating them was justified or defensible.

Dickens’ depiction of a populist movement and the kind of people it attracts transcends both the historical period he was depicting and his concerns about the Chartist movement and its potential for violence.

It’s a potent reminder that great literature can capture something essential about phenomena like populism that it’s hard for non-fictional approaches to get at.

It can explore and illuminate the emotional dynamics of phenomena such as populism in a more compelling way than political scientists and historians can readily achieve.

Despite its unevenness, its implausible coincidences and its exaggerated comic-relief characters, Barnaby Rudge still has important things to tell us about the world it depicts, the world it was written in, and the world we live in today.