The number of Master Humphrey’s Clock, containing the conclusion of “The Old Curiosity Shop,” appeared on the 17th of January, 1841, and “Barnaby Rudge” began its course in the ensuing week.  The first had been essentially a tale of modern life.  All the characters that made a kind of background, mostly grotesque or hideous, for the figure of Little Nell, were characters of to-day, or at least of the day when the book was written; for I must not forget that that day ran into the past some six and forty years ago.  Quilp, the dwarf,—­and a far finer specimen of a scoundrel by the by, in every respect, than that poor stage villain Monks; Sampson Brass and his legal sister Sally, a goodly pair; Kit, golden-hearted and plain of body, who so barely escapes from the plot laid by the afore-mentioned worthies to prove him a thief; Chuckster, most lady-killing of notaries’ clerks; Mrs. Jarley, the good-natured waxwork woman, in whose soul there would be naught save kindliness, only she cannot bring herself to tolerate Punch and Judy; Short and Codlin, the Punch and Judy men; the little misused servant, whom Dick Swiveller in his grandeur creates a marchioness; and the magnificent Swiveller himself, prince among the idle and impecunious, justifying by his snatches of song, and flowery rhetoric, his high position as “perpetual grand-master” among the “Glorious Apollers,”—­all these, making allowance perhaps for some idealization, were personages of Dickens’ own time.  But in “Barnaby Rudge,” Dickens threw himself back into the last century.  The book is a historical novel, one of the two which he wrote, the other being the “Tale of Two Cities,” and its scenes are many of them laid among the No Popery Riots of 1780.

A ghastly time, a time of aimless, brutal incendiarism and mad turbulence on the part of the mob; a time of weakness and ineptitude on the part of the Government; a time of wickedness, folly, and misrule.  Dickens describes it admirably.  His picture of the riots themselves seems painted in pigments of blood and fire; and yet, through all the hurry and confusion, he retains the clearness of arrangement and lucidity which characterize the pictures of such subjects when executed by the great masters of the art—­as Carlyle, for example.  His portrait of the poor, crazy-brained creature, Lord George Gordon, who sowed the wind which the country was to reap in whirlwind, is excellent.  Nor is what may be called the private part of the story unskilfully woven with the historical part.  The plot, though not good, rises perhaps above the average of Dickens’ plots; for even we, his admirers, are scarcely bound to maintain that plot was his strong point.  Beyond this, I think I may say that the book is, on the whole, the least characteristic of his books.  It is the one which those who are most out of sympathy with his peculiar vein of humour and pathos will probably think the best, and the one which the true Dickens lovers will generally regard as bearing the greatest resemblance to an ordinary novel.