In the Library
Barnaby Rudge
Charles Dickens, 1841
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 18 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 83
- Length
- Length 253k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
A mob is usually a creature of very mysterious existence, particularly in a large city.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities does the same thing, but sends the crowd through Paris instead of London, and lets the Revolution swallow a whole class rather than a week.
£1.99
The Betrothed
Alessandro Manzoni
Manzoni's historical novel puts its young lovers inside the Milan bread riots of 1628, the same frightening portrait of a crowd hardening into a mob.
£1.99
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Poe reviewed Barnaby Rudge and was taken with Grip, its talking raven, and The Raven, collected here among his tales and poems, turns that bird into a midnight omen.
£1.99
About the book
A raven rides on a young man's shoulder and announces at intervals that he is a devil, and for a long while you could mistake this for a comedy of locksmiths and cherry-coloured ribbons. Then a cry goes up in the streets, No Popery, and for a week London belongs to the crowd. Nobody has written a mob better: the way it gathers out of nothing, the way it swells and turns and opens Newgate and burns it to the sky, the way the people hanged for it afterwards are the poorest and the youngest while the gentlemen who whispered them into the fire walk home. At the head of the column, carrying the great banner, flushed with the ecstasy of the moment, goes the young man with the raven: the only light-hearted, undesigning creature in the whole assembly, and the only one who believes a word of it. Nothing else Charles Dickens wrote is this frightened of what people become together.