Barnaby Rudge

Set during the violent Gordon Riots of 1780, when London burned with anti-Catholic fury, this novel follows Barnaby Rudge, a gentle young man with silver-white hair and a mind untouched by the world's cruelty. Barnaby lives quietly with his father, a locksmith, tending to his beloved raven Grip, whose gift for mimicry provides dark amusement. But when Barnaby falls in with the wrong men and finds himself at the heart of the mob, his innocence becomes both his greatest vulnerability and his most powerful armor. As the city descends into chaos, as prisons are burned and innocent Catholics hunted, Dickens traces how one simple man's fate becomes entangled with the darkest impulses of a frightened populace. Written in 1841, this was Dickens' first historical novel, and he populates it with a cast that ranges from the heroic to the monstrous, all bound together by the thread of a twenty-year-old murder mystery. The result is a meditation on crowds, cruelty, and the terrible ease with which ordinary people become instruments of violence.