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BARNABY RUDGE
BARNABY RUDGE CHARLES DICKENS PREFACE
The late Mr Waterton having some time ago expressed his opinion
that ravens are gradually becoming extinct in England I offered
the few following words about my experience of these birds.
The raven in this story is a compound of two great originals of
whom I was at different times the proud possessor. The first was
in the bloom of his youth when he was discovered in a modest
retirement in London by a friend of mine and given to me. He had
from the first as Sir Hugh Evans says of Anne Page 'good gifts'
which he improved by study and attention in a most exemplary
manner. He slept in a stable--generally on horseback--and so
terrified a Newfoundland dog by his preternatural sagacity that he
has been known by the mere superiority of his genius to walk off
unmolested with the dog's dinner from before his face. He was
rapidly rising in acquirements and virtues when in an evil hour
his stable was newly painted. He observed the workmen closely
saw that they were careful of the paint and immediately burned to
possess it. On their going to dinner he ate up all they had left
behind consisting of a pound or two of white lead; and this
youthful indiscretion terminated in death.
While I was yet inconsolable for his loss another friend of mine
in Yorkshire discovered an older and more gifted raven at a village
public-house which he prevailed upon the landlord to part with for
a consideration and sent up to me. The first act of this Sage
was to administer to the effects of his predecessor by
disinterring all the cheese and halfpence he had buried in the
garden--a work of immense labour and research to which he devoted
all the energies of his mind. When he had achieved this task he
applied himself to the acquisition of stable language in which he
soon became such an adept that he would perch outside my window
and drive imaginary horses with great skill all day. Perhaps
even I never saw him at his best for his former master sent his
duty with him 'and if I wished the bird to come out very strong
would I be so good as to show him a drunken man'--which I never
did having (unfortunately) none but sober people at hand.
But I could hardly have respected him more whatever the
stimulating influences of this sight might have been. He had not
the least respect I am sorry to say for me in return or for
anybody but the cook; to whom he was attached--but only I fear as
a Policeman might have been. Once I met him unexpectedly about
half-a-mile from my house walking down the middle of a public
street attended by a pretty large crowd and spontaneously
exhibiting the whole of his accomplishments. His gravity under
those trying circumstances I can never forget nor the
extraordinary gallantry with which refusing to be brought home he
defended himself behind a pump until overpowered by numbers. It
may have been that he was too bright a genius to live long or it
may have been that he took some pernicious substance into his bill
and thence into his maw--which is not improbable seeing that he
new-pointed the greater part of the garden-wall by digging out the
mortar broke countless squares of glass by scraping away the putty
all round the frames and tore up and swallowed in splinters the
greater part of a wooden staircase of six steps and a landing--but
after some three years he too was taken ill and died before the
kitchen fire. He kept his eye to the last upon the meat as it
roasted and suddenly. turned over on his back with a sepulchral
cry of 'Cuckoo!' Since then I have been ravenless.
No account of the Gordon Riots having been to my knowledge
introduced into any Work of Fiction and the subject presenting
very extraordinary and remarkable features I was led to project
this Tale.
It is unnecessary to say that those shameful tumults while they
reflect indelible disgrace upon the time in which they occurred
and all who had act or part in them teach a good lesson. 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. But perhaps we
do not know it in our hearts too well to profit by even so humble
an example as the 'No Popery' riots of Seventeen Hundred and Eighty.
However imperfectly those disturbances are set forth in the
following pages they are impartially painted by one who has no
sympathy with the Romish Church though he acknowledges as most
men do some esteemed friends among the followers of its creed.
In the description of the principal outrages reference has been
had to the best authorities of that time such as they are; the
account given in this Tale of all the main features of the Riots
is substantially correct.
Mr Dennis's allusions to the flourishing condition of his trade in
those days have their foundation in Truth and not in the
Author's fancy. Any file of old Newspapers or odd volume of the
Annual Register will prove this with terrible ease.
Even the case of Mary Jones dwelt upon with so much pleasure by
the same character is no effort of invention. The facts were
stated exactly as they are stated here in the House of Commons.
Whether they afforded as much entertainment to the merry gentlemen
assembled there as some other most affecting circumstances of a
similar nature mentioned by Sir Samuel Romilly is not recorded.
That the case of Mary Jones may speak the more emphatically for
itself I subjoin it as related by SIR WILLIAM MEREDITH in a
speech in Parliament 'on Frequent Executions' made in 1777.
'Under this act' the Shop-lifting Act 'one Mary Jones was
executed whose case I shall just mention; it was at the time when
press warrants were issued on the alarm about Falkland Islands.
The woman's husband was pressed their goods seized for some debts
of his and she with two small children turned into the streets
a-begging. It is a circumstance not to be forgotten that she was
very young (under nineteen) and most remarkably handsome. She
went to a linen-draper's shop took some coarse linen off the
counter and slipped it under her cloak; the shopman saw her and
she laid it down: for this she was hanged. Her defence was (I have
the trial in my pocket) "that she had lived in credit and wanted
for nothing till a press-gang came and stole her husband from her;
but since then she had no bed to lie on; nothing to give her
children to eat; and they were almost naked; and perhaps she might
have done something wrong for she hardly knew what she did." The
parish officers testified the truth of this story; but it seems
there had been a good deal of shop-lifting about Ludgate; an
example was thought necessary; and this woman was hanged for the
comfort and satisfaction of shopkeepers in Ludgate Street. When
brought to receive sentence she behaved in such a frantic manner
as proved her mind to he in a distracted and desponding state; and
the child was sucking at her breast when she set out for Tyburn.'
Chapter 1
In the year 1775 there stood upon the borders of Epping Forest
at a distance of about twelve miles from London--measuring from the
Standard in Cornhill' or rather from the spot on or near to which
the Standard used to be in days of yore--a house of public
entertainment called the Maypole; which fact was demonstrated to
all such travellers as could neither read nor write (and at that
time a vast number both of travellers and stay-at-homes were in
this condition) by the emblem reared on the roadside over against
the house which if not of those goodly proportions that Maypoles
were wont to present in olden times was a fair young ash thirty
feet in height and straight as any arrow that ever English yeoman
drew.
The Maypole--by which term from henceforth is meant the house and
not its sign--the Maypole was an old building with more gable ends
than a lazy man would care to count on a sunny day; huge zig-zag
chimneys out of which it seemed as though even smoke could not
choose but come in more than naturally fantastic shapes imparted
to it in its tortuous progress; and vast stables gloomy ruinous
and empty. The place was said to have been built in the days of
King Henry the Eighth; and there was a legend not only that Queen
Elizabeth had slept there one night while upon a hunting excursion
to wit in a certain oak-panelled room with a deep bay window but
that next morning while standing on a mounting block before the
door with one foot in the stirrup the virgin monarch had then and
there boxed and cuffed an unlucky page for some neglect of duty.
The matter-of-fact and doubtful folks of whom there were a few
among the Maypole customers as unluckily there always are in every
little community were inclined to look upon this tradition as
rather apocryphal; but whenever the landlord of that ancient
hostelry appealed to the mounting block itself as evidence and
triumphantly pointed out that there it stood in the same place to
that very day the doubters never failed to be put down by a large
majority and all true believers exulted as in a victory.
Whether these and many other stories of the like nature were true
or untrue the Maypole was really an old house a very old house
perhaps as old as it claimed to be and perhaps older which will
sometimes happen with houses of an uncertain as with ladies of a
certain age. Its windows were old diamond-pane lattices its
floors were sunken and uneven its ceilings blackened by the hand
of time and heavy with massive beams. Over the doorway was an
ancient porch quaintly and grotesquely carved; and here on summer
evenings the more favoured customers smoked and drank--ay and
sang many a good song too sometimes--reposing on two grim-looking
high-backed settles which like the twin dragons of some fairy
tale guarded the entrance to the mansion.
In the chimneys of the disused rooms swallows had built their
nests for many a long year and from earliest spring to latest
autumn whole colonies of sparrows chirped and twittered in the
eaves. There were more pigeons about the dreary stable-yard and
out-buildings than anybody but the landlord could reckon up. The
wheeling and circling flights of runts fantails tumblers and
pouters were perhaps not quite consistent with the grave and sober
character of the building but the monotonous cooing which never
ceased to be raised by some among them all day long suited it
exactly and seemed to lull it to rest. With its overhanging
stories drowsy little panes of glass and front bulging out and
projecting over the pathway the old house looked as if it were
nodding in its sleep. Indeed it needed no very great stretch of
fancy to detect in it other resemblances to humanity. The bricks
of which it was built had originally been a deep dark red but had
grown yellow and discoloured like an old man's skin; the sturdy
timbers had decayed like teeth; and here and there the ivy like a
warm garment to comfort it in its age wrapt its green leaves
closely round the time-worn walls.
It was a hale and hearty age though still: and in the summer or
autumn evenings when the glow of the setting sun fell upon the oak
and chestnut trees of the adjacent forest the old house partaking
of its lustre seemed their fit companion and to have many good
years of life in him yet.
The evening with which we have to do was neither a summer nor an
autumn one but the twilight of a day in March when the wind
howled dismally among the bare branches of the trees and rumbling
in the wide chimneys and driving the rain against the windows of
the Maypole Inn gave such of its frequenters as chanced to be
there at the moment an undeniable reason for prolonging their stay
and caused the landlord to prophesy that the night would certainly
clear at eleven o'clock precisely--which by a remarkable
coincidence was the hour at which he always closed his house.
The name of him upon whom the spirit of prophecy thus descended was
John Willet a burly large-headed man with a fat face which
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