Barnaby Rudge — Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens classic novel with biography, plot summary, character analysis and more.

The plot is a murder mystery interwoven with the historical events of England's Gordon riots of 1780, a violent and bloody mob action of fanatical, anti-Catholic Protestants, who vehemently opposed Parliament's recent legislation, the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which loosened some of England's stringent, Anti-Catholic Penal laws. This opposition is alluded to throughout the novel by some of the characters' recurring demotic cries of "no-popery". The title refers to one of several central characters, the good-hearted idiot Barnaby Rudge.