Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'eighty
1841
London, 1780. The Gordon Riots are coming - a wave of anti-Catholic fury that will leave the city in ashes and blood. Dickens weaves this real historical catastrophe into a novel that feels startlingly contemporary: a story about mob violence, wrongful accusation, and how quickly civilization collapses when prejudice meets mob mentality. At its center is Barnaby Rudge himself - a young man whose gentle demeanor masks a tortured past and an inexplicable connection to a double murder that haunts the narrative like a ghost. As the riots erupt, Barnaby becomes a figure of both danger and vulnerability, pursued by forces he cannot understand while the city tears itself apart around him. Fathers turn against sons, apprentices rise against masters, and the thin veneer of civilized society peels away to reveal something feral beneath. Gothic and grim, Barnaby Rudge is Dickens at his most darkly romantic - a novel where secrets breed in shadowed coaching inns and the past refuses to stay buried. It is for readers who crave historical fiction with teeth, who relish the electricity of a city in flames, and who understand that some curses are inherited.
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“Time has been lost and opportunity thrown away, but I am yet a young man, and may retrieve it.””
— Charles Dickens
“…a lady of what is commonly called an uncertain temper--a phrase which being interpreted signifies a temper tolerably certain to make everybody more or less uncomfortable.””
— Charles Dickens
“I hope I know my own unworthiness, and that I hate and despise myself and all my fellow-creatures as every practicable Christian should.””
— Charles Dickens
“[...] certain it is that minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort, and like them, are often successfully cured by remedies in themselves very nauseous and unpalatable.””
— Charles Dickens
“I have broken where I should have bent; and have mused and brooded, when my spirit should have mixed with all God's great creation. The men who learn endurance, are they who call the whole world, brother. I have turned from the world, and I pay the penalty.””
— Charles Dickens
“[...] There are tales among us that you have sold yourself to the devil, and I know not what.''We all have, have we not?' returned the stranger, looking up. 'If we were fewer in number, perhaps he would give better wages.””
— Charles Dickens
“That what we falsely call a religious cry is easily raised by men who have no religion, and who in their daily practice set at nought the commonest principles of right and wrong; that it is begotten of intolerance and persecution; that it is senseless, besotted, inveterate and unmerciful; all History teaches us.””
— Charles Dickens
“Let no man turn aside, even so slightly, from the broad path of honor, on the plausible pretence that he is justified by the goodness of his end. All good ends can be worked out by good means. Those that cannot, are bad; and may be counted so at once, and left alone.””
— Charles Dickens
“A mob is usually a creature of very mysterious existence, particularly in a large city. Where it comes from or whither it goes, few men can tell. Assembling and dispersing with equal suddenness, it is as difficult to follow to its various sources as the sea itself; nor does the parallel stop here, for the ocean is not more fickle and uncertain, more terrible when roused, more unreasonable, or more cruel.””
— Charles Dickens
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Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'eighty. Lex, lex-books.com/book/barnaby-rudge-a-tale-of-the-riots-of-eighty-336bd920-4809-477d-8211-c222853ab90e.Dickens, C. (1841). Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'eighty. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/barnaby-rudge-a-tale-of-the-riots-of-eighty-336bd920-4809-477d-8211-c222853ab90eDickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'eighty. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/barnaby-rudge-a-tale-of-the-riots-of-eighty-336bd920-4809-477d-8211-c222853ab90e.
