"[M]easuring from the Standard": Barnaby Rudge's Post-Enlightenment Reading Geography

"measuring from the Standard . . . or rather from the spot on or near to which the Standard used to be in days of yore."

-Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1841)

The opening of his Child's History of England (1851–53) finds Charles Dickens contemplating a map of Britain, devoting particular attention to Scotland: he writes, "The little neighbouring islands, which are so small upon the Map as to be mere dots, are chiefly little bits of Scotland,—broken off . . . in the course of a great length of time, by the power of the restless water" (129). In this paper, I discuss Barnaby Rudge (1841), a historical novel of London's anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, as Dickens's contribution to what I like to call a post-Enlightenment re-mapping of Britain's reading geography—as Scotland's Enlightenment-era status as the center of British intellectual and publishing work had, itself, broken off in the course of a great length of time.

Many have discussed Barnaby Rudge as Dickens's anxious engagement with Scotland's most famous and formidable author, historical novelist Sir Walter Scott. Thus, Kathryn Chittick writes, "to understand Dickens's ambitions in his early manhood is to come round inevitably to Scott" (18). In my essay, however, I read Barnaby Rudge as a larger expression of cultural insecurity. Devised in the 1830s, in the wake of what Chittick summarizes as the "collapse of the Edinburgh publishing scene" (41) and the uncertain, tentative shift of British publishing activities to London, 1841's Rudge is a late contribution to what I think of as a tradition of literary cartography charting England's cultural distance from the world of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The distinctiveness of 18th-century Scotland within Britain has long invited commentary. Thus, discussing Edinburgh of the 1700s, historian J. G. A. Pocock notes that in it one could readily find "all the essential elements of an Enlightenment," elements that simply "did not exist" in England at the same time (525). Pocock is arguing here that, unlike the English Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment was embodied in its various institutions: in the universities, debating clubs, and learned societies that so typified the Edinburgh metropolis. These signature material cultures made Scotland what Clifford Siskin has called "the Enlightenment home of philosophical inquiry"—"so much so that . . . [many] routinely followed the path north from England to the universities of Scotland" (80). Yet, Siskin goes on to note, "by the early nineteenth century, the path no longer seemed so inviting" (80). Thus, an anonymous commentator in Fraser's Magazine laments how "the vaunted Modern Athens [i.e., Edinburgh] is fast dwindling away into a mere spelling book and primer manufactory" (qtd in Chittick 41).

I am interested in the terms of the last quotation, which juxtaposes the decline of the Scottish Enlightenment's public sphere with the mass production and distribution of reading matter. The distinctive material cultures of 18th-century Scotland, where publishing and intellectual work had what Jon Klancher calls the quality of "face-to-face relations" (19), yielded ground to what Ina Ferris has called a "less institutionally defined, more stratified and unpredictable readership" (23). The shift, as Patrick Brantlinger notes, in significantly precise wording, raised "the spectre of . . . mass literacy producing the opposite of enlightenment" (2–3, emphasis added). I suggest here that Barnaby Rudge, a Gothic-tinged, London-based novel of urban terrorism and mob violence registers this cultural re-orientation, one I describe in my paper as a shift toward London and away from the onetime standard set by Scotland.

I. "Something Very Shocking . . . Will Soon Come Out in London"

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818) finds its heroine Catherine Morland telling Henry and Eleanor Tilney that "something very shocking indeed, will soon come out in London," and she "shall expect murder and every thing of the kind" (77). Henry explains to his confused sister, "Miss Morland has been talking of nothing more dreadful than a new publication which is shortly to come out, in three duo-decimo volumes, two hundred and seventy-six pages in...