Just Finished Reading Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens

Barnaby Rudge is one of the early stories that celebrated Victorian-era English author Charles Dickens published, and it is a historical novel at that, concerning itself with the infamous anti-Catholic Gordon Riots that occurred in London in 1780...and I just finished reading it.  The title refers to one of the characters, a pleasant young man whose mental abilities are at about the level of cinema's Forrest Gump...in today's highly-charged politically-correct parlance, he might be called an "innocent".  Barnaby, however, is not the central figure in this tale...actually no one is.  Instead, Dickens flits back and forth in his narrative among five families: the Willets, who have an inn on London's outskirts, the wealthy and virtuous Haredales, the Vardens with their locksmith business, the also-wealthy and upper-class Chesters with the villainous father, and of course the Rudges.  There are two romances in the story, as well as a number of subplots...including a mysterious stranger, an unsolved murder, two father-son rifts, and a simmering lower class rebellion that ultimately finds its expression in, as I had mentioned earlier, anti-Catholic riots manipulated by a real historical figure: Lord George Gordon.  And like Forrest Gump with his number of presidential encounters, our hero Barnaby unwittingly finds himself drawn into the middle of this real historical event.

This novel probably would have meant more to me were I alive in England at the time of this novel's publication in the early 1840s.  Back then there were evidently growing tensions between the rigidly-defined social classes as well as religious divisions between Protestants and Catholics going back centuries.  So in this sense Barnaby Rudge was educational and enlightening...although sadly not very entertaining.  It was the lack of a strong central character, the book's title notwithstanding, that makes me want to go on to read some more of Charles Dickens' works in search of something better: I have, after all, "great expectations" of this renown writer...